Effect of a Tight Neck on the Golf Swing

Video Transcript

Do you work at a computer, sitting behind a desk or sit behind the wheel of a car for most of the day? Then you are a candidate for a tight neck, and a tight neck manifest itself as a swing fault. If I can illustrate here: Once the muscles in the neck get tight, and again, once rotation is lost through the vertebrate in the neck, we will tend to get a similar fault to what we had before with an over-rotation. Typically we will end up getting the head to rotate quite an amount, and generally off of the ball a little bit as we lose that range. And that can cause a number of problems in the backswing and downswing as we compensate for that with an excessive amount of lateral body shift and weight shift. As Denis stated, a lot of us are in that flex posture putting a lot of stiffness through our neck. But the neck just doesn’t get stiff, we actually bring the neck forward and the neck drops, and we lose a lot of the stability muscles. We lose control through those muscles and we are left in this sort of flex posture. That will put a lot of sheering force through your neck when you are swinging a golf club. So your neck is in the wrong position, you are swinging, and this is going to put a lot more whiplash through the neck itself. Here are two exercises I would recommend, once again in sequence, to make sure that you have good rotation, good flexibility through the neck but also good stability through the neck itself.

Ramsay McMaster
The Melbourne Golf Injury Clinic
1100 Dandenong Road
Carnegie, VIC 3163
Melbourne, Australia

Ramsay McMaster is Director of the Melbourne Golf Injury Clinic and serves as a fitness consultant to PGA Tour Pros around the world. He is also the author of Get Fit for Golf and Training for Golf.

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