Yoga and Game

Want to improve your golf game and play better when traveling, all without taking a lesson, putting or hitting any balls?

That’s a tall order, but it might be possible if you visit www.yogaforgolfers.com. I’m not going to feed you a bunch of New Age hogwash: Yoga is no miracle cure, and while I have been practicing yoga for several years, I always dismissed the various golf yoga programs I have seen at resorts around the country. Why? Because the big myth of yoga for golf is that it improves your flexibility, and since everyone wants to hit it longer, many people look at it as a ticket to a better shoulder turn and more distance. If this is your goal, forget it. You are better off with a few good stretches in your bedroom each morning. Yes, regular yoga practice over time can increase your flexibility, but for many people it does not, because yoga was not invented to make people flexible.

What I’ve come to appreciate is that yoga can improve your golf game simply because the two have a lot in common. Here’s the deal: real yoga positions require you to do a million things at once, like pressing down the outside of one foot and the inside of the other while externally rotating one hip and internally rotating one thigh while focusing on your ankles and your rib cage while stretching your neck, that sort of thing. If you think about it, the issues sounds a lot like the golf swing, teaching yourself to do a lot of independent yet related motions all at the same time without short-circuiting the brain. All this builds muscle control and balance. It also focuses on stabilizing the lower body in most postures. That’s why doing yoga on a regular basis is good for golf.

But there are some shortcuts. Katherine Roberts, the founder of Yoga For Golfers, which she has been teaching for more than a decade, is a fixture on the Golf Channel as a hostess on several shows including The Big Break. Because Roberts travels all the time, teaching yoga clinics and shooting TV shows and playing golf, she often flies into town late and tees off early and has developed her own ten minute routine for adjusting the body to the abrupt shift from tarmac to tee. She shares her quick tips, as well as 8-minute pre and post round routines, in her latest DVD, “Lower Your Score,” her tenth in the yoga golf series, I had the good fortune to take one of Katherine’s yoga classes and then to play eighteen with her at the Sagamore, a resort with a classic Donald Ross course in upstate New York, and I can attest that her methods not only make you feel better while playing, in her case they make you look better to.