Skipping Your Warm Up Is Hurting Your Scores

The key to breaking 90 or beating your pals could be found in just 10min prior to teeing off.

Warming up before a round of golf is an often overlooked and undervalued piece of performance. Whether it’s a perceived time constraint, or lack of understanding the full potential that a warm up can bring, most recreational golfers do not partake in any substantial prep before they play a round of golf. And this is costing them strokes.

For the average golfer (which for men is approx 18 hcp, women 25hcp), you could save an average 2 to 2.5 strokes per round by performing a proper warm up prior to taking the 1st tee. For some, this could mean the difference in shooting a new low score, breaking 90 for the first time, or winning bets with their buddies.

A good warm up does a few things to help you play the best golf possible. First and foremost, it prepares your body physically to perform at its peak potential. By loosening the joints and priming your muscles, you unlock the ability to access your body’s full capabilities. This means generating peak club head speed, which has a very strong correlation to lower scoring. It also means being primed to score well from the first hole and not having to use holes 1-3 to “get loose”. It could potentially mean reducing the chance you injure yourself or that tightness/fatigue negatively impact your scoring down he home stretch.

There are even some benefits you may not be aware of… Golf specific research has evidenced that engaging in a warm up can lead to improved centeredness of strike, straighter swing paths, increased ball speed, and increased drive distance. Taken collectively these improved impact conditions and ball flight characteristics will almost certainly lead to lower scores.

As it stands now, researchers have found through several studies that most golfers either don’t warm up or they do a sub 10min routine that is painfully lacking. These often focus on a few static stretches and even less dynamic movements. They target the waist up (shoulders, back, torso) and completely neglect the lower body. This is a big mistake to skip the ankles and lower legs considering the power of the golf swing starts from the ground up. Others who quickly warm up do so by doing air swings and other golf swing type movements. While a thorough pre-round warm up would include hitting golf balls, simply swinging a club at the air a few times does not constitute a physical warm up.

By now you can see that taking the time to properly prepare your body for your round of golf can have huge benefits. In the next post I’ll highlight a few examples of warm ups so you can possess the knowledge to play your best golf. I’ll also cover the common obstacle of location and access to warm up gear prior to your round, this way you’ll be able to do something no matter what the circumstances.

This is part 1 of a 2-3 part series. Next I’ll cover topics such as “Sample warm ups, what constitutes a good/thorough warm up, overcoming location obstacles (no gym, limited equipment, etc)”.