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Lower
Your Golf Score Through Yoga
by
Sam Dworkis
founder of www.extensionyoga.com
I’ve
played a lot of sports through the years, but without a doubt, golf is the
most demanding. It’s not that it’s such a physically demanding sport,
such as basketball, tennis or racquetball, but it’s demanding in
significantly different ways. If you play golf, you’ll understand
exactly what I mean.
You’d
think that once you purchased your first set of clubs and taken some
lessons, you’re set for years of play. Wrong. Once you start playing, it
doesn’t take long to realize just how inadequate everything
is. For instance, no matter what you spent on your clubs, it doesn’t
take long to realize you didn’t spend enough. Then there are the
lessons. As soon as you think you’ve mastered one basic fundamental; you
realize that 1) you haven’t mastered it at all and 2) there’s so more
to learn.
And
let’s not forget all the thousands of dollars you can spend on clinics,
magazines, books, videotapes, and gadgets, all in the quest to improve
your game. Yet, most of us totally forget about the one most important
golfing apparatus; for when appropriately maintained, it will vastly
improve your game far better than anything else. Maintaining it is one of
the least expensive and best investments you will ever make. Of course, I
am talking about your body and maintaining it through yoga.
What makes golf (and life) so demanding is that it is as much mental as
physical and quite frankly, I don’t understand why more serious golfers
don’t take up yoga because both golf and yoga are about balance;
balance of body and mind. Have you ever had a good score when you’ve
been agitated or otherwise had a lot on your mind? You’ll obviously play
better when you can focus totally on fundamentals. Concentration is one of
the first things that improves with yoga.
If
you’ve ever played on a day when the air was heavy or smoky and you
couldn’t really “catch your breath,” can you remember how badly you
played? That’s another thing that improves with yoga: your breathing,
which is the gateway to your mind and affects virtually everything about
your life, not just golf. Through
yoga, you begin to control your emotions under pressure.
It
is a powerful tool. By learning to do appropriate yoga, you will increase
your range of motion; improve your flexibility, strength, and endurance both
emotionally as well as physically. You can focus on your golf mechanics
until the cows come in but learning how to control your emotional and
mental reactions usually has a much greater impact on your game. The
bottom line? By learning how to control and integrate body, breath and
mind, you will be able to transfer your focus and concentration into that
important putt or crucial drive when the stakes are high.
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