The injury that walks through our door the most.

Low back pain is the most common injury in golf. The question is why, and the answer varies from person to person, but not nearly as much as you’d think.

There are common swing patterns that will nearly certainly lead to eventual low back pain or injury. So then the question becomes: is the swing pattern built around a body that’s flawed, or is the swing itself the actual problem?

If the body is more than capable of swinging correctly, then the issue is mechanical and needs to be addressed by a golf professional. However, more times than not, your swing pattern is developed around your body’s limitations. Removing those limitations allows you to work with your coach to continue to work on the mechanics of the swing itself, greatly reducing your injury chances.

A common misconception among golfers without a notable injury history is that they have adequate range of motion, so the problem must be in the mechanics. If only it were this simple. Just because your body can get to a certain range of motion doesn’t mean that it will get there.

If you can technically hit the acceptable limit of hip rotation required for a full backswing, but it takes some effort and feels tight or pinchy, then it’s probably not going to happen on the course. The speed and timing of a golf swing doesn’t wait around for that hip to grab the last 20 percent of rotation. The rest of the body has already moved on and is going to compensate further along the chain to get that club to the ball. More times than not, that chain runs directly through the low back.

In our hip example above, a hip that just loses its last twenty percent of rotation doesn’t just produce a little less speed through the golf ball. It can cause a host of compensatory swing patterns, but even worse, it usually puts the onus on the low back to rotate for it.

Without getting too deep into the biomechanics, the low back isn’t built to do that, but being the nice guy, it’ll give you everything it’s got for as long as it can. And that’s how we can end up with the inevitable low back pain from golfing. But just because it walks in the door as low back pain doesn’t mean you got there because of a faulty back. You got there from a faulty hip and a low back that bent over backwards to help your golf swing.

It’s a lot easier to get the body moving properly and train your swing around it moving freely. We can fix your low back pain in the office, but more importantly, we can help identify why that low back pain started in the first place so it doesn’t return.