Zach Gould: Activate your shoulders for the golf swing with this move

The most common reasons people come to me is for injury prevention and to hit the ball further. I can help you do both with this shoulder move.

The best part is, it’s easy to do, you only need a golf club, and you can do it at home.

This is great for improving spine mobility, or in the context of the golf swing, it improves shoulder turn in your backswing and follow-through.

If you can create a large separation, we can create a lot of internal torque and that will help you to hit the ball further. This exercise comes under my mobility umbrella, but it’s also great for gaining distance.

• Dr Golf: Use a medicine ball for more power in your swing

In the golf swing, you don’t want to be side-bending either way, or moving back and feeling like you’re standing up, so we want the rotation to be nice and level here. If you can incorporate this into your daily routine, it’s really going to help your spine mobility.

As you can see from Rory McIlroy below, rotating your shoulders in the backswing is a big asset to increase your power.

This is a great exercise to incorporate into your daily workout, but also your warm-up, too, as you’re going to get a better shoulder rotation from the start of your round.

How to activate your shoulders for the golf swing

Firstly, you want to make sure you get into a good golf posture before doing this. If we’re in too much of a rounded or too much of a flexed position, this will limit our ability to rotate our shoulders, which is the whole point of the exercise.  

Then, what I’m looking for is you to rotate into the backswing with shoulder turn, but to keep your hips as stable as possible. I know there’s a lot of hip rotation in the golf swing, but if we can keep that to a minimum in this exercise, it will be beneficial. 

• Do this the next time you play with a scratch golfer 

It’s really important that in this exercise, you can create the separation between your hips and your shoulders. If you do this right, you should feel this exercise right in the centre of your back. You’ll feel the centre portion of your back rotating and that’s a good thing. 

For more from Dr Zach Gould, head to his website zachgouldgolf.com.