Why your golf set-up limits your swing, and what physiotherapy can change

Watch any group teeing off and you can usually guess what the swing will look like before anyone moves. How a golfer stands over the ball tells you a great deal about what happens next, because the set-up is the position everything else has to work around.

Four things decide whether you can deliver the clubhead back to the ball square, time after time. Your grip, your alignment, your posture and how your weight is distributed. Get all four right and the moving parts of the swing at least have a chance of working together. Get one wrong and you will spend the round compensating for it.

A teaching professional is the right person for three of those, and for the technical detail of the swing itself. What they cannot always fix is the reason your body will not hold the position they are asking for.

When it is not a technique problem

If you cannot rotate through your middle back, you will not make a full turn, and your weight will not transfer properly through the swing. If your hips are stiff, you will stand up out of your posture to get the club round. If your balance is poor, you will be somewhere slightly different at impact every time. None of that is a coaching fault. It is a movement restriction, and no amount of instruction will talk your thoracic spine into rotating further than it currently does.

Those restrictions usually have a history. An old injury, a previous operation, years spent at a desk, or ordinary wear and tear in the spine and hips. Most golfers past their fifties have some of it, and most have adapted around it so gradually that they no longer notice.

What an assessment involves

It starts with watching you move rather than watching you swing. We look at how far your hips and middle back rotate, whether one side is noticeably stiffer than the other, how well you control a position once you are in it, and what your balance is like on each leg on its own.

From there the work splits in two. Mobilising the joints that are restricted, usually the thoracic spine and hips, through hands-on treatment and specific exercise. Then building the strength to hold the new position, because range of movement you cannot control is not much use to you at address. Lower limb strength matters more than most golfers expect, since it is what keeps your posture stable through the downswing and contributes a good deal of the power in it.

Balance belongs in the same conversation. Staying in position at impact is a balance task as much as a technical one, and it is trainable at any age.

If pain is part of the picture rather than stiffness alone, that is worth treating in its own right first. Lower back pain is the most common complaint we see in golfers, and playing through it tends to make it worse rather than better.

A realistic expectation

Improving how you move will not hand you someone else's swing. What it does is remove the physical reasons you cannot do what your coach is asking, which makes the coaching work better. Golfers usually notice it first as a fuller turn and a more comfortable finish position, and only later as better consistency. Longer drives, if they come at all, come last.

It is also worth saying that the best players in the world do not all look textbook at address. What they have in common is not a pretty position, it is control and balance at impact. That is the part worth training.

Martin Dyer, one of our physiotherapists and a keen golfer himself, runs golf assessments at our Haslemere clinic and has worked alongside local golf professionals on how physical change shows up in the swing. If you would rather start at home, there are five exercises for golfers covering the movements we find restricted most often.

Musculoskeletal physiotherapy and strength and conditioning programmes are both part of this work, as is back and neck physiotherapy where spinal stiffness is the limiting factor. Our fees are listed in full, and you do not need a referral from your GP to be seen.