by Andre Sanchez

Have you ever considered how you could get fit for golf free of charge with some easy golf exercises that don’t need fancy equipment? Have you ever been jealous of your neighbors with all their fancy golf training equipment? They might be solicitors, doctors and dentists with all the money in the world to throw at fitness equipment for a game that you love, and the equipment they are using is far too expensive for you to be able to buy. Sickening!

Heck, you have enough paying for the kids’ clothes and birthday presents, not to mention the school trips, without bothering about all these plane trainers and special laser equipment that they have. How about their fitness trainers: just like you get down the gym – all these weights they are showing off with and the stuff they have their garage – well, you could never afford it all!

But just think about what they are doing. Have you ever wondered what good it did them? OK, a plane trainer helps them to drive straight, but all you need do is go down the range, and they might have one there. In any case, it’s not the driving straight that’s important, it’s knowing the wind, where the traps are and how to cut or fade the ball to miss them and still get length. Lifting weights doesn't give you that! Plane trainers have their uses but do nothing that a few buddies with a video camera can’t help each other out with on the range.

It’s not the fitness that’s the problem is it? Are they fitter than you with all their fancy weights? Actually, they are not. They might be able to lift a couple of hundredweight, but how heavy is their heaviest golf club? Certainly not a couple of hundredweight. It’s not lifting strength that matters in golf, it’s flexibility and rotational strength.

If you use rotational strength exercises regularly, and keep your joints ad muscles flexible, then you can be fitter for golf than they can be – with no special equipment at all. When you hammer a golf ball three or four hundred yards down the fairway (I wish!) what is you body doing? You are lifting the (light) club and winding it up back round your neck, and then you are unleashing a very powerful twisting movement that ends up with your golf club back round the other side of your neck and the golf ball down the fairway.

Where’s the strength in lifting weights anyway? It’s not a factious question, because the strength you need for distance in golf is in the potential energy you wind up in the backswing, and that is then unleashed with your powerful swing straight through the ball, which, if done with full power, forces you to follow your swing right through till it finishes almost where it started, but on the other side of your body! How do you train for that? No by lifting fancy weights, that’s for sure. To get fit for golf you have to train using rotational movement, and you can do that free of charge with some easy golf exercises.

The golf swing is an unnatural twisting motion involving many muscles in your body, from your toes to your neck! In order to strengthen your swing you have to strengthen each of these individual muscles in the way that they are used in your golf swing. So how do you do that? You have to swing against a resistance, just as bodybuilders build their biceps by using them against the resistance of the weights they lift. You could use a weighted golf club to do that, but that costs money, and this is about how you can do it without spending any money.

Get a large stone or heavy piece of metal you can hold in two hands that is heavier than your golf club and start swinging. Swing against weight, starting light but getting heavier and heavier, and then you will notice a difference in the speed of your swing when you use your regular golf club. The pros use weighted clubs and dumbbells – you can use a heavy hammer then try it with a light sledgehammer of you want. People do that and have great rotational strength.

When you swing a golf club you are using a large number of muscles from your neck down to your legs, and you can’t strengthen them all with just weights. You have to swing as in golf with a heavy weight in your hands to do that. And then onto the flexibility exercise.

Hold a can of beans in each hand, put your arms straight out and then twist from side to side as far as you can go .Keep your head up and back straight. Hold it for a few seconds at each extremity. You will find that after a time you can reach farther and farther to each side. Try it standing up now and again for a change. In fact this is something you can to loosen up just before each round, but without the beans!

What you are doing is increasing your flexibility, so that when you wind up your swing on the backswing, you can get farther and farther round, and unleash all that energy stored up like a spring in a very powerful golf swing, with a follow through farther back than when you started just like the pros can do.

So, there you are. A heavy rock or iron bar and two cans of beans. Far better equipment to get yourself fit for golf than any gym full of nothing but lifting equipment. Fitness for golf is very important, but you can achieve that without any equipment at all – at least none that will cost you money.

Get Fit for Golf Free of Charge: Easy Golf Exercises was originally published at http://www.golfplayernow.com