Worked Your Abductors Lately?

If your like me and have limited exercise time you might have ignored your hip abductor muscles. If you have, you might be making a big mistake. This blurb was taken from a recent article, "Golf's Muscle Man," in Golf Digest by Max Alder.

The report comes from Dr. Scott Lepart, who is Director of the Neuromuscular Research Lab at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Center for Sports Medicine and also operates two human-performance and injury-prevention labs for the U.S. Army and U.S. Navel Special Operations.

From the article:

Says Lephart, "Identifying and strengthening specific muscles not only improves performance, it pre-empts injury"

After plowing through data collected from 700 golfers, including 35 PGA Tour pros, the time had come to reap the discoveries.

As expected, strength and flexibility of the shoulders and torso were important in golf, but Lephart also indentified a specific pair of muscles, the hip abductors, which engage when you move your legs apart, as a key discriminator in power.

Immediately before impact, stress equal to 2 to 3 times the golfer's body weight is placed on the hips. On average, Lepahart found elite players to be 30 percent stronger in the hip abductors.

"The balance and trunk stability provided by the hips is often overlooked in golf," says Lephart. "Golfers with weak hips are predispoded to committ swing errors taht hinder theirgame game and make them prone to injury over time."

Maybe it's time to start incorporating some hip flexibility/strength conditioning exercises into your routine.