Greg Johnson, owner of a Sacramento, Calif. fitness club and a Titleist Performance Institute-certified strength-and-conditioning specialist, has helped one 54-year-old player drop his handicap from 4.3 to 0.1. At Ancil Hoffman GC in Carmichael, Calif., trainer Charles Burton has helped a 73-year-old with a degenerative back condition consistently break 100 through an emphasis on “extensibility.”
Sometime around age 50, skill, natural athletic ability, general fitness and all the tofu in the world stop being enough to keep even the best golfers competitive with players half their age, The Sacramento Bee reported.
In addition to death and taxes, golfers of a certain age can add a decline in flexibility and its negative impact on their swing to the list of certainties in life, The Bee noted. It’s a physiological fact.
Brian Vail, 54, is an example of a golfer who hit that inevitable wall this year, The Bee reported. It revealed itself in an involuntarily modified swing that masked his physical shortcomings and produced the worst golf he had played in years.
Wanting to stay relevant with the best players of all ages at his club, the Sacramento, Calif. real estate developer had to admit his repetitive gym routine wasn’t working and that he needed help in the form of individualized golf-specific fitness training that focused on flexibility, extensibility and rotation over strength.
“Everything I was doing on my own was hurting my game, in theory,” Vail told The Bee. “I came to the conclusion I had to do something else.”
An increasing number of older golfers, and men in particular, are concluding the same, The Bee reported.
Three months ago, Vail started working with Greg Johnson, the owner of Varimax Fitness in Sacramento and a strength-and-conditioning specialist who is also certified by the Titleist Performance Institute.
Johnson does a full-body assessment of every new client, The Bee reported. Among his initial measurements, he found that Vail had 55 degrees of thoracic (upper) spine rotation to his right in his backswing and 50 degrees to his left during follow through. The ideal is 75 degrees.
“With Brian and guys like Brian, if they’re tight in their thoracic spine, they end up getting their quote unquote shoulder turn from someplace else,” Johnson told The Bee. “Either they stand up or sway or slide or close their hips to the target. That leads to inconsistent ball striking and a lot of extra work for the body.”
Vail has diligently worked with Johnson to improve to 68 degrees in both directions, along with improved spine extension, The Bee reported.
While his pectoral muscles may not be as large because of his changed workout routine, Vail’s handicap index has gone from a 4.3 to a 0.1 since he started working with Johnson twice a week. He’s not necessarily hitting the ball farther, he told The Bee, but he is striking it solidly with more consistency.
“I’m turning again, instead of swaying,” he said.
“I have guys in their 70s who prove this can be done,” Johnson told The Bee. “A lot of people who used to give up golf at 40 because they had a bad back realize that if they do the right things off the course maybe they’re able to play the game they love longer.”
A person who can’t do a basic toe touch is 83 percent more likely to suffer a back injury, Johnson told The Bee. He, like other trainers, is in favor of anything that promotes stretching, such as yoga, because there is no downside to increased flexibility, regardless of the motivation.
“As long as you start to work on your mobility, there’s pretty much a 100 percent chance you’re going to improve it,” Johnson said. “We may not be able to turn someone into their 20-year-old self, but you can gain a lot of degrees of range of motion as long as you’re doing the right things.
“It’s a lifelong journey,” he added. “It’s not something that after three months, you’re done. As soon as you stop working on your flexibility, you will start to lose it again.”
And while increased flexibility won’t necessarily help someone hit the ball farther, because that has more to do with the kinematic sequence of a swing, fitness experts told The Bee, it can’t hurt in that regard, either.
The Bee also reported on the case of Phil Shaver, 73, who spent much of his career as a Professor of Psychology at the University of California-Davis, hunched over at his desk. Shaver also suffers from ankylosing spondylitis, a degenerative condition that has naturally fused four of his vertebrae and restricts his ability to twist and rotate, which is not optimal for swinging a golf club.
Shaver’s average golf score was 110 when he resumed playing after a 55-year break in 2015, the year he retired, The Bee reported. But two years after hooking up with Charles Burton, a golf-specific personal trainer who has created a loyal following over the past seven years at Ancil Hoffman Golf Course in Carmichael, Calif., Shaver now carries an 18.6 handicap index and has broken 100 in 19 of his past 20 rounds.
“He knows muscles like I know the mind,” Shaver said of his trainer.
A loss of “extensibility” is a bigger problem for older golfers than a decline in flexibility, Burton told The Bee, and as such many of the exercises he advocates involve extension.
Working at Ancil Hoffman GC allows Burton a luxury that many other trainers don’t have, The Bee noted: the ability to observe his clients in action and plot exercise regimens to address specific swing flaws. A scratch golfer, Burton regularly tees it up with many of his clients, including Shaver after most of their twice-a-week sessions.
“I put up on the screen and say this is what you are doing and put them next to [a video of] Tiger Woods or whoever,” Burton told The Bee. “I show them this is what Tiger is doing and this is what you are doing [and] these are the exercises we are going to do to fix what you are doing.
“What we end up doing [are] golf-specific exercises that mimic parts of the golf swing,” he adds. “Each part has its own exercise.”
Working out in a building with a wall of windows that provide an inspiring view of Ancil Hoffman’s 18th green, Shaver said he appreciates Burton’s willingness to explain why they’re doing what they’re doing.
“I’m putting the same fanaticism into this as I did my career,” Shaver said.
That’s a good thing, The Bee noted, because trainers say it takes a commitment to maintain strength, mobility, stability and balance past 50. Ideally, that commitment should involve at least two days a week in the gym, they said, and a daily stretching regimen at home.
“[Decline] can be mitigated,” Burton said. “You can turn the clock back five years. Maybe 10 if you’re really willing to work.”
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