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Sometime around the 11th hole last weekend I realized I was old.
This shouldn’t have hit me just then. I recently celebrated a milestone birthday, for one. But last Saturday, struggling up the long par 5 at my course after overextending myself in an early morning workout, I sensed I was asking too much and working with too little.
The purpose of my call to Golf Digest Top 50 teacher Tony Ruggiero a few days later was not to ask him to reverse time (The guy is good, but not that good). Instead, it was for his advice for the common golfer problem of managing your game when your body isn’t willing to cooperate.
For starters, Ruggiero reminded me those days don’t need to be lost causes. And my problem wasn’t even really that I was sore and swinging slower. It was that I failed to recognize the parts that still didn’t need to suffer. Some of these things sound boring. No one has cited their posture or ball position after winning a major. But when you realize how vital your core setup fundamentals are to consistent ball-striking, you start to pay attention.
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“You can’t control how stiff you are. You can’t control how you’re gonna feel when you wake up in the morning,” said Ruggiero, who works with a number of tour pros and top amateurs. “But, you can make sure that the ball’s in the right place. You can make sure that you’re postured good, because the better you posture yourself, the easier it is to make the body move.”
The other part to know when you’re feeling crummy before a round is ways to feel less crummy.
Much of this is about prepping your body the right way. Like me, Ruggiero initially rolled his eyes when Tiger Woods first discussed “activating his glutes” years back. Then came the realization Woods was ahead of his time. Especially as we age, our bodies need some prompting before we start moving dynamically. Ruggiero has provided a demonstration of a series of quick movements we can do before playing that he believes are more important than hitting balls.
All of this supports the premise that the days we feel our age don’t need to be the days we play our worst. It just means we need to know what to look for before it’s too late.
“You know, there’s that old saying, ‘Beware of the wounded golfer,’ because sometimes when guys go out there and they’re not great, it lowers their expectations,” Ruggiero said. “So I think for a regular golfer, you need to understand just because you’re not 100 percent doesn’t mean you can’t play well.”
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
