Low Back Pain In The Golfer
This week we are starting a 5 part series on golf. Now to preface this, I am not a golf pro or swing coach. I am a movement, strength and stability specialist. When I work with golfers, we focus on what you are asking your body to do in the swing and can your body do it. I wanted to cover some common injuries and how you can avoid them, a little bit about training for rotational power, and some mobility work on how you can stay fit the whole season.
The most common injury in golf is low back pain. Now that is a garbage diagnosis. There are hundreds of different reasons someone can have low back pain and the only way to find out why you do is an exam by a trained clinician. However, when we talk about low back pain in the golfer, we start to see some common trends.
The first is a poorly matched swing to a body. We all move differently. All of us have different abilities on what moves better than others. If you look at the swing of many high level golfers, you will notice that it will change over the course of their career. This is to help better match a swing to their abilities. Golf is about consistency and limiting variables or places a mistake can happen. If you are forcing your body through a swing that involves ranges of motion that you cannot control, you are going to end up with an injury. That injury often is the low back since he is stuck in the middle and is the central point that you drive force from (technically your core and abdominal wall but that's semantics). My point in all of this is to look at the ranges of motion you have available to you, and then make sure your swing does not require movement beyond that. Yes, if you consistently mobility train, you can open up new ranges and then can have a different swing path, but many aren't willing to dedicate the time to it.
The next trend we see is a poor understanding of where power comes from. Many people know that more club head speed leads to further drives, so they start torquing really hard trying to generate more speed and then their back starts to hurt. Rotational power really comes from how we translate weight between our two feet and our hips. Our low back should really just be a connection in the middle of a chain that the power gets transmitted through. Many people when trying to swing faster start snapping their upper body harder and then spin across their low back like a top, this creates an excessive amount of shear force in the lumbar spine and leads to more back pain. Work at transmitting force from your feet up to your hands and you will have less back issues.
The third common trend I wanted to cover is very tight hips and mid back. When we swing, we are asking our body to rotate (with other coupled motions). If we cannot rotate through our hips or mid back, we will use our low back. And we will use it a lot. As we accumulate more and more swings our back will start to fatigue from being overused and eventually the inflammation cascade will be kicked off and we have to take some time away from the game. If we have more mobility in our hips and thoracic spine, we can share that force across more structures and overuse doesn’t set in. In part 4 we will look at a couple simple tests and some of my favorite ways to fix some common limitations we see.
Next week, we will be going over a specific diagnosis and treatment, and that is golfer’s elbow.
