It’s great to get outdoors, see friends, tee off and hit a good score, but not when back pain strikes!

Golf is a great way to keep fit and active, but it sometimes causes back pain despite your best efforts. Hitting the ball too hard, striking objects by mistake, fatigue setting in by the end of a round are all reasons that back pain can spoil your day.

What should you do for some back pain relief after a round?

That dirty word…

It’s a word that some people hate hearing, but rest is a great way to relieve back pain. We’re not talking about spending a fortnight in bed, just having perhaps a day or two without swinging a club.

Golf involves rotation from the top of your neck, all the way down your spine, and through your hips, knees and ankles. While rotation is a great way of keeping you back mobilised, too much rotation can easily cause irritation.

Following up rotation with more rotation isn’t likely to help!

Graeme and Toby often advise patients who are returning to golf to play only on alternate days for a while until they’re confident that their back pain has settled. That way the body can have a rest, and experience relief from any small areas of back pain.

• Ice can help if painful areas feel hot and angry
• Heat (hot bath, hot water bottle, an extra layer) can help when areas ache
• You may also want to take a few anti-inflammatories such as ibuprofen, but only if you know it’s safe
• There’s plenty more about these strategies in our online therapy programmes

Let’s twist again

When patients have spent a while away from the golf course, it’s a good idea to start with a few visits to the driving range.

This way, you can start with some easy shots - chipping, wedging, short irons - to check that they feel healthy and don’t cause any flare-up of pain. Then, you can work up to longer irons and even some woods.

In contrast, setting off for a round is really the reverse of this!

Too many patients head back to the course with their friends, have a heave at the first tee, and then struggle for the rest of the round. A few buckets of balls the week before would have prevented this…

A word on technique

A golf swing is a beautiful example of the spine working correctly, and being supported by strong legs.

If you consider our spine to be an axis, the key to a good swing is to keep that axis tall and straight as your shoulders and arms rotate around it.

If the axis bends, normally just before striking the ball, it causes the spine to buckle. This compresses one side of the spine and stretches the other. Not only can this cause back pain, it normally sprays your shot - often slicing them away.

A great way to think about this is with the sitting posture we get all our users to practice. Learning to sit with a neutral pelvis and having the skill to tip it in every direction is key, as these are the corrections your body needs to make as you swing.

Our Pelvic Clock exercise teaches this as well and is included in everyone’s programme when they join mySMARTtherapy. It takes some practice, but is massively valuable!

Some maintenance

One last tip.

Many people get given a rotation exercise to do for their spines, lying on their back and pulling knees over to one side and the other.

This can be useful when your spine is healthy, and rotating nicely in both directions.

However, as soon as people have an injury, especially a rotation-induced injury as golf is likely to cause, this kind of rotation can actually antagonise and even perpetuate the problem at hand!

As an alternative, we teach our users to do an Open Book exercise and warn them to wait until it is largely pain-free before using it with any desire to increase the amount of rotation.

It’s a very different movement to rotate the body from the top down than from the bottom-up! Our chest often needs help to maintain rotation, whereas the lumbar spine is often pretty good at rotation already!

Definitely one to check out.

Preparation: So you won’t need relief from back pain after golf

Let’s get you back out there.

But perhaps a little time to get prepared will help prevent more episodes of back pain.