Golf Injuries & What You Can Do About Them

Injuries are a common fixture in all sports and physical activities. Golf is no exception. In areas of the country (such as North Carolina) where the weather is better year-round, people are playing more rounds of golf and taxing their bodies more than someone that can only play during the summer. You won’t find a better place to help keep you on the top of your game than the professionals at Coastal Integrative Health.

Located here in The Villages Town Center at Brunswick Forest, Coastal Integrative Health has an incredible team that will help you to keep an active lifestyle. One of their most valuable services is their golf performance test. As a beloved part of the culture here, golf injuries can be common. Did you know that according to the Titleist Performance Institute, up to 41% of amateur or non-professional golfers report injuries every year with almost 36% of those injuries being to the lower back alone? The most common cause of these injuries is overuse. Playing 18-36 holes five or seven days a week with very little rest puts a lot of strain on the body, particularly the lower back. This isn’t a problem if the body can tolerate these stressors, but injuries occur when the body can no longer take the stress.

The typical response people have to injuries is to rest and stop the activity that caused them pain, take pain medication, and just wait for it to get better. Next thing you know they go out, start playing again and end up with a similar or worse injury. This can result in a never-ending cycle of repeat or nagging injuries.

You avoid this cycle by actively recovering from your injury. This may mean only playing nine holes for a while and taking one to two rest days between rounds for example. This also means performing proper therapeutic exercises to strengthen the area that is injured. Avoiding using the injured area is only going to make it weaker, and therefore you re-injure it. Actively recovering provides strength and allows the body to tolerate the loads that you placed on it that lead to the injury in the first place. Identifying the cause and correcting it is what is going to lead to long-term results and keep you out of the injury cycle.

This process can be very difficult to perform on your own. Many people will online search stretches or try to just push through the pain and end up with unsatisfactory results. The best thing to do is seek out a qualified professional (chiropractor, physical therapist, etc.) to help identify the underlying cause of your injury and get an individualized plan for how to correct this issue and build your body back up so it doesn’t happen again.

Coastal Integrative Health is here for all your golf, therapeutic, and medical needs with staying in shape and enjoying the amenities we have at Brunswick Forest.