If you happen to see any old footage of golf championships of twenty or thirty ago, you will be amazed at the shape of the golfers. They were overweight, often seen smoking on the course, and really had no aerobic fitness at all. At that time, there were no exercises for golf that players did on a regular basis, other than a little bit of stretching before they swung the club for the first time each day. Now, however, exercises for golf are taken seriously – by both professionals and amateurs.
When you think about golf, you don’t generally think of it as either a strength-based or an aerobic sport, but in many ways it is both. The strength that is required to swing a club several hundred times in a three or four hour period is incredible. Most people think that if you shoot 80, you only swing the club 50 times (30 or so are putts), but that is not correct. The average players takes two practice swings for every drive and one practice swing for every shot off the fairway, so that can add up to 200 or 300 swings per round. It takes a lot of strength to sustain a level of high performance.
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