Description
www.LongGolf.com Long's Swing System See our countryside B&B , located adjacent the beautiful Golf Club Issum in Germany. Fitness and Strength by Steve Long Long Golf Note: All Long Golf web pages are living documents--they are continually updated. Unlike a finished book, they won't go out of date. Contents 1. Strength training for longer hitting 2. Sleep 3. Diet 4. Time of day to perform a sport better. 1. Strength training for longer hitting I have used weight training type machines to regain some of my strength which was lost to old age. You get stronger and longer if you exercise the golf muscles that animate your wrists, arms, shoulders during the downswing. I even made a machine to do this at home. The problem with strength training machines is that you have to go to them, and they don't exactly simulate the moves or resistance you need for the golf swing. But you don't need a machine to strengthen your golf muscles. I prefer doing exercises without a device or machine while sitting at my desk. How convenient is that? At most you will need a golf club for the wrist work. The muscles that animate your hands, arms, shoulders, and torso on the downswing are the weak links in the array of muscles that make the downswing go. If you only develop those muscles you will most likely already have enough strength in your legs and feet to handle the extra forces. To do the power exercise that strengthens the arms, shoulders, and torso, you just press your hands against your legs while turning your torso back and forth. The left hand goes against the left leg and the right hand goes against the right leg. The hands are pushing toward target while the legs resist this. The leading arm stays straight. The trailing elbow bends and straightens as the torso turns. When the torso turns in the downswing direction, the trailing elbow bends. When the torso turns in the backswing direction, the trailing elbow becomes straight. The torso turns about as far as it can in both directions. You treat this as a resistance exercise with positive and negative resistance and you use standard weight training procedures of repetitions and sets. For example, use lighter force on the first few repetitions when starting out cold. Use enough force to get the muscles tired after one set, which is 5 to 10 repetitions. Do this three times in a day, and then wait a day to see if any of the muscles involved in the exercise get a bit sore. If they don't, do the exercise again with greater force or more sets, or every day instead of every other day. If they do get sore, wait until the soreness disappears after a warmup before beginning again. The reason for going in both directions between the two positions is to keep tension on the muscles while they lengthen and while they shorten. This is a key principle of dynamic resistance training (weight training). Another benefit besides strength is that in the backswing direction the torso can get some stretching which can lengthen or preserve your shoulder turn in your golf swing. There will be a video to show this when I get time to make it.