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Do You Play or do You Survive Golf?
By Marlon
Familton, CSCS
C.H.E.K.
Certified Golf Biomechanic
You might
have caught news articles about a recent study arguing that
stretching doesn't prevent injuries. In a report published in
the March 2004 issue of the "American College of Sports Medicine
Journal, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise,"
researchers looked at studies that compared stretching along
with other strategies to prevent training injuries.
“We could not find a benefit,” said Stephen B. Thacker,
director of the epidemiology program office at the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention said in a recent interview.
"Athletes who stretch might feel more limber, but they shouldn’t
count on stretching to keep them healthy." He said.
I think these researchers
must have been in the forest looking at the individual trees.
The fact is that you need adequate flexibility to balance your
body and
move into correct postures, particularly those required by golf. If you have
a tight lumbar region, you'll be unable to fully rotate during
the back swing forcing your shoulders and often your arms to
overcompensate. Building and maintaining adequate rotational
flexibility through stretching would directly avoid this injury.
As an athlete, you need to
consider your body as a system, not individual parts.
Let's look at what happens in the body and why stretching is
important.
Joint Motion Inside the Body
Arthrokinematics is a basic term in kinesiology that describes
how the motion occurs on the articulating surfaces of joints.
In short, your bones need to move around in their sockets in a
certain way. In figure one, joint A
has poor dynamic stability. When the upper bone moves, it
merely rolls across the surface of the joint and winds up at an
extreme end range.
Joint B
shows good
dynamic stability. As the upper bone moves, muscles around the
joint pull and cause it to slide across the bottom part as it rotates. This sliding movement maintains
optimum alignment by keeping the bones in the center of the
joint. Keep in mind that something like your
shoulder or hips allow 360°
of movement, meaning that all around the joint there are muscles
and other connective tissues that aid in this control.
This is
one reason it is important to train in more than one plane
of movement. Most injuries happen to people in the frontal
(side to side) or transverse (rotation) plane. Yet, how do
most people train? In the sagittal plane (forward).
Muscle Length and Tension Relationships
If during a
normal static posture moment the muscles of one side of a joint
are shorter and tighter than what should be their normal range,
there has most likely been compensation on the other side of the
joint. This means that the joint is continuously being pulled
out of its normal range and muscles are not working in their
optimal range.
An example of
this is the common posture you see in people who
do a lot of bench press without antagonistic scapular adduction
work (such as bent over rows) is having shoulders rounded
forward. The pectoral (chest) muscles are actually pulling the
shoulders forward and tugging the shoulder girdle out of place.
During movements, it also means one side of the joint is
stronger than the other. Muscle imbalances such as this easily lead to injury when
during sports you move into the
weak range with force or power.
Tonic &
Phasic Muscles and Posture
In your body
you have muscles primarily designed to fight gravity (posture)
and muscles to help you move; respectively called tonic and phasic. Tonic muscles
respond to faulty loading (over-use, under-use, disuse and
abuse) by getting short and tight. On the other hand, phasic
muscles respond to faulty loading by tending toward getting long
and weak (actually they're still strong, just strong in the
wrong place).
Tonic muscles also have a lower
threshold for stimulation than phasic muscles. Meaning
they'll do work for their opposing synergistic (stabilizing) muscles
because they actually steal the neural signal before it arrives at the
correct muscles. This is why many people have a
dysfunctional abdominal wall and instead overuse their lumbar
extensor muscles making them short and tight.
So you see, to answer the question
"does flexibility enhance performance?" The answer is yes, if
that flexibility is required to maintain correct posture for both static (addressing
the ball) and dynamic (moving) postures. However, stretching
a muscle beyond a normal range of motion can reduce
stability. So, you need to know what to stretch and what
not to stretch and sometimes how much.
How do you Fix all this?
If you have one tight
hamstring and one loose one and you merely stretch both,
this will only maintain
the existing muscle length tension imbalance. The first step would be to
do a proper range of motion assessment. Paul Chek's
"Golf Biomechanic's Manual" has an excellent chapter that
you can follow yourself. You might check with your gym and see
if the trainers there can do perform this assessment for you.
C.H.E.K. Practioners and Certified Golf Biomechanics are
highly qualified to do this.
Figuring out
which muscles are short and tight and which are loose will
direct you toward the next step; stretch the muscles that are
tight. Applying corrective stretching to these areas only will
begin to restore the imbalances and work to realign the body
(often done along with corrective exercises).
This stretching is best done at night after a warm bath. Your body goes
through a repair cycle from about 10PM to 2AM, so lengthening
tight muscles just prior to bed will greatly aid in the
correction.
Once you've
managed to restore normal ranges, you should switch to
maintenance stretching. This is stretching that focuses on the
muscles in your body that typically get tight often from the
heavy use in your activities. Golfers frequently battle
low back muscles, but everyone is different. Your stretching
program needs to be customized.
In
conclusion, stretching the whole body with long holds will not
prepare you for correcting muscle length tension imbalances or
prepare you for an event or workout. Stretches, like exercises,
need to be applied with precision. Take time to assess your
body, apply corrective stretches to the muscles that are tight and you'll be improving your
posture, increasing your efficiency and reducing your chance of
injury.
Marlon Familton is a Certified Golf Biomechanic through the
C.H.E.K. Institute in San Diego and is a Strength and Conditioning
Specialist (CSCS) certified through the NSCA. He runs
Dynamic
Sports Training out of Bellevue Washington.
Additional
Reading:
1.
"Intelligent Stretching for Pain Reduction, Improved Performance
and Posture." By Paul Chek. Mercola.com online.
2.
"How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy" by Paul Chek, A C.H.E.K.
Institute Publication, 2004.
3.
"Stretching Doesn't Prevent Injuries." Associated
Press. Online at MSNBC.
4.
"The Golf Biomechanic's Manual" by Paul Chek, A C.H.E.K.
Institute Publication, 2001
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