There is still hope for playing pain free golf if you have arthritis or degenerative joint pain! You CAN PLAY golf with arthritis pain. Have you been told that you have arthritis, degenerative joint disease (DJD), or degenerative disc disease (DDD)? These terms basically mean the same thing. Doctors commonly use these terms to describe what are mostly natural changes that occur in the joints and spine.  The two major categories of arthritis are osteoarthritis and inflammatory arthritis. By far, the most common type is osteoarthritis, which is typically what we mean when we say “arthritis.” When osteoarthritis is in...

Learn how strengthening your upper back can relieve and prevent nagging lower back pain. The golf swing is the major cause for lower back pain. On the downswing, a golfer exerts up 20x their own body weight in force! Before the start of any rotational movement in the golf swing, a golfer needs to get positioned into their setup stance over the ball. To get into that proper setup position, you need to hinge your waist. This requires flexibility in your hips and flexibility in your hamstrings. Exercises like the Single-Leg Romanian Deadlift (SLRD), work to develop that flexibility. It...

Learn to relieve golf elbow pain and adopt proactive steps to prevent golf-related injury in the future We have all heard of it: the dreaded Golfer’s Elbow. In the medical community golf elbow is known as medial epicondylitis. Whatever you want to call it, it’s a common pain that interferes with your golf game and life. At times, it can even become so severe that it can make gripping the club extremely difficult and swinging a club nearly impossible. What is golf elbow? Golfer's elbow is a condition in which the forearm tendons that attach on the bony bump on...

Exercise plays a key role with your age. Recently, I was stopped in my tracks by an article in the national news with the headline: “Average person feels too OLD to workout at 41”. Surprising? Disturbing? In this survey of 2,000 adults, most pegged 41 years old as the age when one becomes too old to work out regularly. I read this article with fascination. I had just been thinking about this subject, but in an entirely different way. After a recent trip to Australia, I got knocked down by an unusually severe cold-like virus. Though my illness lasted about...

Here’s a scenario you may find all too familiar: You start a round of golf feeling physically great and excited about the day ahead. Then, a few holes in, it happens. Your lower back starts acting up and it becomes increasingly more difficult to make a swing, place the ball on the tee and pick it up after you’ve made a putt. Fact is, lower back pain is the most common complaint and injury in the game of golf. Of course, there’s been no shortage of attention with the likes of Tiger Woods, Jason Day, Fred Couples and many others...

Golf is an advanced skill which requires timing and rhythm to execute a good swing. It requires a lot of ground-up and rotational force, from the foot, transferring to the ankle, then to the knee, into the hip through the spine and into the shoulder, eventually to the wrist then out to the club. It’s not very different from other high-speed rotational sports, such as a baseball swing or a tennis swing. In all of these high-speed rotational sports, it’s critical to drive force through the body and control it. It’s not just about accelerating, it’s about decelerating too. That’s...