The 4 Moves Golf Coaches Swear By for Instantly Improving Your Game

When outsiders look in on a game of golf, they often picture a relaxing way to spend a Saturday afternoon. What they don’t realize is that golf demands strength and stability, just like any other sport. A strong core helps you rotate properly and maintain balance throughout your swing. And a powerful, controlled swing doesn’t just come down to technique; it also requires strength in your hips, glutes, and shoulders. But before you even step onto the green, it’s crucial to warm up properly—not just to prevent injury, but to maximize performance.

"A warm-up is ideal for any sport prior to the actual activity," says Bret Hoffer, D.C., a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist and trainer at Golf Fit. "The reason for that, specifically with golf, is because it's such a dynamic sport with multiple movements and multiple planes of the body. It primes those muscle systems and skeletal systems for movement and gets your heart rate up, gets blood flowing, gets the muscles loosened up, gets tissues, all the surrounding tissues, ligaments, tendons, everything gets loosened up from a proper warm-up."

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Pre-Round Golf Warmup

Below, Hoffer breaks down the four warmup moves he swears by before stepping onto the green. One of the best parts? All you need is a resistance band—lightweight, portable, and easy to stash in your golf bag.

"Resistance bands are good because they're convenient, and they also provide resistance in both directions," he explains. "With a band, as you stretch that band away from you or wherever the anchor point is, you're getting tension. And as you're coming back, the opposite side of your body is resisting the tension coming back.  So it's constant tension that helps elongate and add elasticity to the tissue. It's dynamic."

Squat to Toes Overhead Reach

"The squat-to-toes overhead reach will work the bigger muscles of the body, so the glutes, the legs, the hamstrings, the calves, the shoulders, back muscles," he says. "A squat movement is used widely in golf. It's not very noticeable, but when you're swinging into the backswing, you're actually squatting down into one side. And then when their arms swing around, that's pretty much arms overhead, rotating the back." 

Figure 8s

The figure eights are used to loosen up the shoulder blades, shoulder girdle, and internal-external rotation of the shoulders, all of which are used in the golf swing.

Reverse Lunge Load and Rotate

The side lunge is a dynamic lunge with a rotation. Similar to the figure eight, you rotate to the opposite side of the core like you would when you're swinging, but the step back also works your lower body. This mimics both the upper and lower planes used in a golf swing.

Half Kneeling Rotation

"The half-kneeling aspect is still dynamic because the upper body is rotating, but the lower body is static, which separates the upper and the lower body and is ideal for golf. So it's incorporating all the movements necessary just to get ready to swing the club."