Mobility or lack thereof can have an effect on all human movement. Mobility typically refers to your basic ability to be mobile in the joints and soft tissues in relation to movement. The joints in the body are arranged in a clever way to either produce mobility or stability and thus establish efficient functional movement (i.e. walking, squatting, running, twisting, pulling).
There are different ranges of movement and capability based on your fitness. For example you could be very stiff in the muscles but have mobile joints, or you could be very stiff in the joints but very mobile in the muscles. The ideal level of tone in the body is to be supple and adaptable to movement with a balance of mobility and stability.
Can you perform the basic movements necessary to swing the golf club effectively? Everyone knows that being able to hit the ball farther and with more specificity is going to elevate your game. How that happens is by having an efficient golf swing. There is an efficient swing for every player which will vary depending on what they can physically do.
The golf swing is a fairly complex movement. It’s what we would call an “open chain” movement, as the arms are free to move in space, and the joints of the upper limb can move freely in sequence to generate power. This also requires stability through the trunk as the feet are used to generate stable swing patterns in the upper body. Each joint movement in the “open chain” is in a sequential order to create an efficient swing pattern. Essentially if there is a jammed up link in the chain then it can’t move properly and the movement pattern is altered and you end up sending the ball in an unwanted direction.
The kinematic chain is the linking parts of the movement that the muscles and joints use to create power in the golf swing. There needs to be appropriate mobility, stability, and nerve firing to create appropriate force to have effective specificity and power.
Mobility is essential for the efficient golf swing. It allows the kinematic chain to be activated in the appropriate way to generate power and specificity with a player’s technique training. For example, an inability to rotate through the leading hip could possibly be very detrimental to playing golf long term and may result in injury to the lower back over time.
In a nutshell, if you can’t move efficiently, you can’t swing a golf club efficiently. Efficient movement requires mobility of your joints and suppleness of muscle. If you are keen to improve your ball speed and distance or get pain-free with golf, I would highly recommend getting assessed by a TPI certified chiropractor.
When trying to figure out how a players mobility effects their golf swing I put people through a golf specific assessment which was developed by the Titleist Performance Institute (TPI). TPI has studied hundreds of players on the PGA tour to find out what the baseline mobility for an elite level player is. We use those years of researched baseline requirements for an efficient swing to establish which sort of exercises, drills, and chiropractic care will be appropriate for the player.
In order to help a player improve their swing they need to be assessed and treated, and then re-assessed over time to find out how they respond to whatever intervention was required, whether its exercise or manual therapy or chiropractic adjustments. This is the fastest way to see where your limitations are and how to move past them towards a more efficient swing.
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