How to Play Golf - Warm Up Exercises

Mike Pedersen
Golf Fitness Trainer
PerformBetterGolf.com

Hi I’m Mike Pedersen for Perform Better Golf.com. Warming up is so critical to shooting
lower scores you can’t skip it and when I talk about warming up I’m not talking about
hitting golf balls, I’m talking about getting your body warmed up first before you even
take a swing and hit a golf ball. If you don’t do that in my mind you’re not preparing your
body to perform. What happens then is you make a lot of bad golf swings on the range
hitting balls and you take that to the course and you’re going to probably double bogey
the first hole and by the time you’re finally warmed up physically it’s a third or fourth
hole and you’ve given up 3, 4, 5 additional strokes.

So you want to make sure you warm your body at first then hit balls, and I want to show
you 3 simple golf warm up exercises that you should do every time before you hit balls
before you’re around the golf, for this exercise we’re going to grab a club here. I’ve got a
5 iron I’m going to get a width about just outside my shoulders on the shaft here. What
I’m going to do is squat down and as squat down I’m going to raise the club up and I’m
going to squat and raise at the same time.

What this was doing is just getting the blood flowing throughout my whole entire body
all the major joints in my body are getting moved and slowly I’m going to raise up higher
and squat a little deeper, right as you can see this has a total body warm up on this one
here and I’m loosening up my shoulders, my hips, my legs, my lower back and what you
want to do on this one is about 15 repetitions, not too many but in the speech kind of
medium control and time where you squat down and lift the arms up.

Just keep going until you get 15 repetitions and once you get there just kind of give a
little bit of a shape. Catch your breath because you’re going to find out that might get you
even a little bit winded so catch your breathe and the second exercise we’re going to do is
a great exercise to loosen up your lower back and also your hamstrings and gluts. So
we’re going take the club in front of us here and we’re gong to slowly bend the waist and
then when we come back up and twist bend at the waist, twist the other way.

We’re going to do a couple of these so now you can see I’m having a twist into this,
down, back up and as you get looser take the club a little more and then back up, and then
a progression from this exercise her is coming down, raise the arm up and twist it aside.
Go down, shaft up, other side. That’s a progression from the first one and you can see
there’s a little bit of a combination sequence here. Down the toes, come up, raise and
twist.

Again you want to do about 15 of those and now you’re going to start loosening up your
core and your lower back and your hamstrings. The last exercise I want to do is almost
similar to your golf swing. We’re going to get a wide grip on this shaft here. We’re going
to get our golf posture and we’re going to turn on your backswing and your follow
through when we stay real stable just like our golf swing and you want to keep your
posture and slowly pick up the speed.

And as you can see this white grip is lending me a lot of grip in my golf swing from the
backswing to the follow through. I’m going to do about 15 of these and I’m probably
going to get a little bit quicker as I go along so I get a little faster and a little faster. Well
look at my lower body staying real still and I’m just stretching out my core from a
rotational standpoint and I’m going to do 15 and maybe 20 of those let me give a little
shake and then you ready to start hitting golf balls.

You’ve got little simple warm up a try and I guarantee you might even get a birdie on
your first hole.