by Andre Sanchez

If you want to know how to improve your golf drive, it is probably because you want a bit more length.  People generally refer to their swing as their ‘drive’ when they are referring to length and ‘swing’ when they are referring to technique or accuracy.

The way to add 20 or 30 yards to your drive is basically to get stronger and more flexible to play golf.  That will involve golf specific strength and stretching exercises, either with the help of a professional golf trainer or one or more of the many golf training aids on the market, depending on how much your budget will stand.

You won’t put any distance on your drive pumping iron in a gym.  You have to train the muscles you use when you play golf, and that involves swinging.  Muscles get stronger when they are exercised and you get the blood pumping through them.  As they add fiber, they speed up their contraction rate and so add strength and speed to your swing. 

Stretching exercises enable them to extend farther to store up potential energy.  It is when you rapidly contract well stretched muscles that you get real strength.  The kind of strength and flexibility that allows you to get a full backswing, with good muscle extension, and then whipping down with rapid muscle contraction and driving strongly through the ball into a full follow-through.  That is where real golfing strength and speed comes from that will make a big difference to the length of your drive.

So how to you achieve that?  First of all you have to train your muscles as you go through the rotational movements that make up your swing.  You have to do this against a resistance to improve your strength, such as driving on the range with a weighted club.  The extra weight is sufficient, and you can get different grades of weighted club, according to your current level of strength.

You can also use exercise tubing attached to a door.  If you swing with this in your hands, that too will give you the resistance required.  Anything will do that makes you work those muscles more than you do during your normal drive.  The important point here is that, because you are actually swinging or driving when you are exercising, then you are working every muscle you use during your drive.  This cannot fail to give you more driving power, and hence extra length.

Strength alone is not enough, however, and you also need to improve your flexibility.  The flexibility of your joints, and the stretching capacity of your muscles, are both important factors in a long, accurate drive.  There are a number of simple stretching exercises that you can carry out, most of them involving body twists of one kind or another.  Remember what your swing is:  it is a complex and unnatural twisting and rotational movement of your body that you cannot just get up and do naturally.  You have to train for it if you are not to break down with minor injury after injury.

A simple twist is to sit down on a chair, chest out and head high, and hold a weighted medicine ball out in front of you.  Twist round to the right as far as you can, hold it for two seconds then come back again.  Now do the same to the left and back to the start.  Carry out six repetitions, and if you do this twice a day you will soon see a difference in your flexibility and your backswing.

Before you do this you should warm up with a few arm twists, rotating your arms from the shoulders.  You will soon be able to get that club right back in a full backswing, with all that power stores like an elastic band ready to unleash in a powerful downswing with rapid muscle contraction, and a full follow through.  That is bound to improve your distance.

Walking treadmills in a gym will not get you an extra inch of distance, but golf-specific strength and flexibility exercises will.  Once you have found the extra strength and flexibility, keep it by properly warming up before every round. A few twists like the above, some arm rotations and perhaps two or three knee bends and toe touches.  Don’t strain yourself, and if you find any of the flexibility or warm-ups a strain, then work on these joints and muscles slowly until they are working free and flexibly.  Never strain a muscle to achieve what you want, rather exercise and stretch it a little at a time until it eventually stretches the way you want it to.

That is how to improve your golf drive:  not by lifting heavy weights and pounding the streets, but by gentle stretching and swinging against a resistance.  Golf-specific exercises work every time. 

 How to Improve Your Golf Drive was originally published at http://www.golfplayernow.com