Improve your Golf Swing with the Exercise of the Week!

Exercise of the Week: Gain Rotational Power with Quadruped Extension Rotation

Today we are going to show you an exercise that will help you gain rotational power and will help improve your golf swing!

I just got back from visiting Anthony Renna of Five Iron Fitness in White Plains today and we talked a lot of how we can improve rotational power in our athletes. If you do not know Anthony he is a prominent trainer who works with high end golfers and also is the host of Mike Boyle’s  Strength Coach Podcast. If you want to improve your fitness or your golf game I highly recommend you check both of these resources out!

During my visit we spoke about how mobility and flexibility is a highly important component to our strength and power program. We can improve rotational power simply by gaining mobility and the ability to rotate through a greater range of motion. The problem is many golfers tend to gain their range of motion from the wrong places. Some joints are designed for mobility and other are designed for stability. Many people tend to rotate with their lumbar spine(low back) instead of rotating from their thoracic spine(upper-middle back).  Many golfers tend to have back pain because they are rotating from the wrong place. Here is a diagram so you can see the difference.

By learning to rotate from the right places we can eliminate back pain when we play rotational sports as well as improve our performance.  Once we understand where we need to rotate from we can then work to gain mobility in that area. A great exercise for increasing mobility in the thoracic spine is the Quadruped Extension Rotation. Here is a video below.

Quadruped simply means that we are setting up on all four limbs and the extension rotation is what we are doing to our upper back.  When performing this exercise think about pulling the shoulder blades down and back and arch the middle back(extension) then start to rotate toward the ceiling(rotation). A good cue here is to follow your elbow with your eyes.

The quadruped extension rotation is a great way to gain mobility in order to improve rotational power for various sports such as golf, baseball, tennis and even throws in combat sports such as judo and greco roman wrestling.

Any questions about this exercise? Feel free to leave a comment below