Four exercises you're probably not doing that you should (if you don't want to have to move up a tee box)
Ekaterina_Molchanova
If you're over 50 and admittedly not exercising like you used to, doing things such as box jumps, single-leg bounds and depth jumps are probably not on your daily checklist. That's OK.
For starters, you might not realize it, but you probably have lost your ability to leave the ground beyond a few inches. Your brain has this brilliant mechanism that often prevents you from doing things that might get you hurt. When you try to jump (go ahead, try), you might find your brain telling you to keep your feet on the ground.
"I've started many people simply jumping over a line on the floor while I was holding their hands. You'd think they were jumping off a building. The brain is amazing," says Dan Swinscoe, a Golf Digest Certified Fitness Trainer. "If you haven't jumped for a long time, the brain knows that so it is trying to make you think twice or at least be careful."
Unfortunately, muscles are very much a use-it-or-lose-it thing, and jumping skills are essential to maintaining or gaining distance in golf. You have to use your legs to leverage the ground. If lower-body muscles weaken with age or inactivity, the amount of power and swing speed you can generate will diminish, Swinscoe says.
"Jumping requires elasticity of tissue that we wont have if we've been sedentary," says Swinscoe, who works with golfers at Train2Win in Scottsdale. "It also requires a significant ability to decelerate, which is where injuries happen."
Think of "deceleration" training as how well you land after leaving the ground. Karen Palacios-Jansen, another Golf Digest Certified Fitness Trainer who trains golfers at her CardioGolf Studio in Moooresville, N.C., says she works with senior golfers and has them do an exercise called step-ups with soft landings. All you have to do is find a sturdy elevated platform at a height that is reasonable for you to manage, step onto it, and then jump off trying to land softly. The platform can be as short as necessary, and you can always advance to higher steps once the exercise becomes easier.
Swinscoe also likes basic, unintimadating exercises for the body and brain to relearn how to jump and tap into lower-body power. In fact, he has a four-move routine he demonstrates (below). If you haven't trained in a while, these might seem challenging. And if you have, you can make them more difficult or advance to other lower-body exercises such as box jumps, etc.
The key with these is to move fast and foreceful, he says.