Put your a$$ into it!

Last week I talked about the shoulders in golf, today it's the hips...better yet, that ass of yours.  Golf is no different from many other sports in that your hips are everything.  If you
can get your hip flexors and glutes strong, you will have a strong game (that is if you can deal with the wind, heat/cold, or everyone staring as you make the shot).

As with everything else in your body, you move as a unit, not individual parts.  So strengthening your glutes, while improving your golf game, will also make the rest of you much stronger and more resilient.

An easy way to strengthen your glutes is to just flex your glutes as you stand there.  You can target it much more, but that's something that you can do any day, anywhere, and without looking too weird while you do it.   Some of the other things that you can do look a little awkward and thus are unlikely to be performed in a much more public setting, unless you just don't care.

I've also alluded to the glutes being your "core" in a previous post, and thus I won't be saying much more about it here.  Just know this, your core is everything in the game of golf.  Weak core = weak game, strong core = strong game.

So put your ass into it, your game will thank you and you can probably get some $$ or whatever from your friends when you do it.  

Push from the heels and keep that chest up

Last week, I posted on the deadlift as it's one of the largest builders of awesomeness that there is.  It builds muscle, strength, explosiveness, and all around bad-assery.  With all of this awesomeness comes a price, the nervous system takes an epic beating over time.

Enter, the squat.  The squat is another one of the greatest exercises known to man.  The beauty in the squat is that it can literally be done anywhere and with anything.  While you're reading this, you can bust out some body-weight, or "air" squats; or you can load up a barbell and work everything in the process.  

Squats are traditionally held on "Leg Day," of which you guessed it, you work your legs.  But the squat is much more than that, it's one of the best mass builder, strength builder, and fat burner that you can possibly perform.  It's right up there with the deadlift as one of the largest builders of awesomeness.  

Performing this lift isn't all that complicated, but perfecting it is.  The carryover into every day activities is also unmatched, as long as you're walking.  With very few exceptions should anyone not perform this lift.  Every sport known to the human race benefits from this lift.  Every activity known to the human face benefits from this lift.  

Summary is, everybody can benefit from a simple yet somehow brutally demanding exercise.  Even with no weight, you can improve your life, legs, and lungs; with weight, so much more.  Now that you're done reading this, go ahead and try a few.  

Pick it up & Put it down

The deadlift, the king of lifts.  It's the one thing that can tell you whether or not you're able to do it.  It doesn't lie to you, it doesn't sugarcoat things for you, it just says whether or not you can do it.

It is easily one of the easiest or hardest lifts to learn and to perform.  You can gain a tremendous amount of strength by using this one lift alone or you can gain a tremendous amount of muscle mass with it.

Every part of your body becomes active when you deadlift.  Rather than isolate by muscles, we create a symphony of activation of your muscles when you deadlift.  This is all related to your Central Nervous System activating the muscles that are required to simply pick the bar up.

Athletically, every sport may benefit from this lift.  You go from literally no tension on your muscles to maximal tension on your muscles coordinated to fire simultaneously.  There are few other exercises that accomplish this task.

The deadlift can be broken down into simple parts.  There's the setup, where you position yourself with the bar.  Next is "pulling the slack out" of the bar, which is really just an extension of the setup.  This stage involves the tightening of your joints and the beginning of tension to your muscles (I didn't use the word "flex" as it implies a direction of movement).  Next is the massive buildup of tension which precedes the lift, from there it's a systematic firing of muscles to lift the bar off of the ground.

Simple right?  Go ahead and take a shot at it and you'll see how "simple" it is.