By Tyler Ferrell
Titleist Performance Institute

I'd like to share some general guidelines to help you customize your golf workout. As I see it, we all have "seven primary traits" that produce our golf swing.

Balance - foot function and ability to stay stable on your feet
Stability - ability to control one part of your body while moving another
Mobility - flexibility that is specifically related to joints
Speed/Power - ability to recruit your muscles quickly
Strength - ability to recruit your muscles forcefully
Flexibility - the ability to lengthen your muscles
Coordination - muscle memory related to the golf swing
Some of us are better than others at each, but we can all work at getting better at each. Luckily, golf fitness can help with each.

These traits vary as the PRIMARY concern for the average man and woman but in order of importance I would list it this way (with No. 1 being the most important).

For now, let's focus on guidelines for the two that EVERYONE can work on.

Stability

There are two primary concerns that I have with stability: posture stability and joint stability. Posture stability refers to your ability to stay within a fairly neutral spine during a movement.

Your spine is best equipped to EITHER bend or rotate, but something has to be compromised when you try to do both. So if you start off with your spine in C or S spinee, you are compromising your ability to rotate.

Joint stability is a special case of postural mobility. There are times when you have to move your chest without moving your pelvis, pelvis without your hips, and arms without anything else.

All of these motions require significant joint stability. The two primary areas to focus on for joint mobility are the shoulders and hips. The shoulders revolve around the lower trap, lats and rhomboids as well as the rotator cuff. For the hips, go after the glutes, both maximus and medius.

To train your stability, focus on exercises where you are statically holding a challenging position, things like planks, both forwards and sideways, and bridges make great posture challengers.

Second, instead of doing exercises like bench presses or shoulder presses with a bench, either stand in your golf posture, or use something like a Swiss Ball to make the environment more instable.

These exercises are best done with cable machines or rubber bands, but will have a bigger impact on your stability than typical circuit machines. The third primary area of stability would be the rotator cuff, light weights/high reps are best designed for this area. If you want some more great rotator cuff exercises, Google "throwers 10."

Mobility/Flexibility

Since mobility is just a special case of flexibility, I'll group them together. Plain and simple, in order to play golf effectively, you gotta move!

Flexibility things like chest stretches, calf stretches and hamstring stretches involve maximum range or stretch for a single muscle or muscle group. Mobility includes things like open books, cats and dogs, and hip drops. These exercises range of motion for a joint and all the muscles supporting the joint.

All of these exercises were previously mentioned in fitness articles. But the areas you really want to focus on are spinal mobility, but forward and backward and side-to-side.

For more information on golf fitness and to view exercises to help you improve your game, please visit mytpi.com.