Attn: Good golfers. Where does it hurt??

I don't really get sore after playing. maybe my feet after 36 holes, but other than that not really at all..

You shouldnt be sore after playing golf unless you are walking 18 holes 2 or 3 times per week.

I'm not really sore anywhere. Feet as some others have said if you walk a lot, but otherwise, I'm fine.

 

PGA Tour players hit a lot more balls than others and are, generally, fairly healthy.

I general soreness is a sign that your muscles have been overworked. It is a sign from your body to slow down a bit until they recover. So if you hardly ever run and you go running one day you will be sore. But if you keep running your body adjusts and you no longer get that soreness.

 

So in golf where you essentially repeat a similar action over and over again, soreness really should not be an issue. It is also a fairly natural motin unlike in baseball where the pitching motion is ver unnatural and arms soreness is a fact of life, in golf soreness in the muscles or joints after ever round over a prolonged period should not really be an issue.

I'm not a low HC, but I may have something to contribute.      I was athletic once, but it's been 20 years since I've done anything really athletic, so when I took up golf last fall, I was SORE after playing (wrist, back, fingers, tricep, knee, you name it).     I've played 46 times so far this year (OK, my wife says I have golf OCD), and up until last month, was still sore after playing & had to take ibuprofen to get around afterwards.      Last month or so, I'm feeling great after playing ... might be a little tight, but don't have nearly as much of the nagging soreness ... maybe there is something to this exercise stuff after all !!      

When my swing was a dog pile, I was sore everywhere, mainly in my lower back, left shoulder and right wrist.  Half of it was mechanics, half of it was overswinging, 100% of it was overswinging with bad mechanics.  Now that's it's a smaller dog pile, the only part that gets sore is my right foot/ankle from driving to start the downswing.  That's probably from an old ankle sprain though.

Throwing is more natural than hitting something about with a stick? That sounds like baseball to me.

I find that I get sore anytime I've played more than 18 holes or hit more than 75-100 balls at the range. I'm far from being in good shape but I kind of like the soreness I feel. It's almost all in my core, the muscles between my ribcage and hips. My left hip (righty swing) can get achy too. I've definitely got a "violent" move through the ball and I always aim to smooth out my tempo.

But if you get sore you're not the only one.

I never really feel pain, if its a hilly course, i will feel more exhausted in the legs than any pain.

I was going to make a similar post, so I'm curious on what I'll see.  I'm more curious what people who are better felt as they were progressing.  Good golfers will most likely have hit enough balls to get their body used to the motion or have better swings in general to not have as much pain if any.  A good friend of mine can play all day every day and I'm hurting after 27.

 

For me (just hit the year mark and am 33), my pains after a lesson were tight shoulders (close to the traps) and lower back especially after working on firing hips.  I believe part of my hell is that I have an SI joint that flares up time to time and I'm not nearly as flexible or in shape as I was 10 years ago.  I'm going to play less actual golf and try to continue to work on my hip turn to see if these muscles start to react better.  During this I'll be working on my core to help with this. 

 

I know a lot of it is overswinging, but when I work on my hip turn, I think it's too fast causing my arms to think they need to come fast.  When I try to slow down, it's like a yoyo lost it's tempo and just jacks all up.  There has to be a happy medium somewhere!

 

Any exercises that anyone uses for their low back/core to assist in this?

 

 

 

For starters, check out the hip slide thread:  http://thesandtrap.com/t/29616/the-biggest-secret-slide-your-hips

 

Over-rotation is a major cause of lumbar injury.  When you combine bad posture, weak core, over-rotation, and overswinging, it's no wonder such a large percentage of amateurs struggle with back pain.  Your lumbar region isn't designed to rotate a whole lot.  A max of 6% of your body rotation comes from that area in the golf swing.  The majority is internal/external rotation of the hips and thoracic rotation.  Your body is designed to keep some parts stable while other parts move.  This shouldn't come as a surprise to you.  Unless, of course, you ever tried to push a car while standing on ice and expected anything but falling on your ass.  Because this is the function of the lumbar/core in sports (isometric stability, not explosive power), your workout should be tailored to that.  I highly recommend against explosive, plyometric style lower back work like aggressively paced good-mornings, etc.  Instead, the best research shows a correlation between high levels of isometric endurance and low frequency of injury.  Ever wonder why so few tour pros complain of lower back pain even though they swing the club 112mph?  A huge part is mechanics, but an often overlooked part is that they spend so much time bent over putting.  Putting is pretty much nothing but isometric lower back endurance.  This is the ideal exercise for developing lumbar stability, and it just so happens it's a great way to lower your scores.  If you are going to put this knowledge to use, do some research on golf posture, specifically S-posture and C-posture faults.  You want to learn how to keep your core "relaxed yet engaged".  Far too few people know how to do that.  Every good golfer knows exactly what I mean when I say that.  If you can train that as you go about your daily routine, it doesn't take much time.  The core recovers really quickly.
 

 

My swing mainly results in giving me a headache. Or are my scores the cause of that?

My biceps often hurt from too many fist pumps.