This past week I had the pleasure of attending a continuing education program on golf and how to help players excel at the game. For those who have used our services, I am surrounded by golf courses in Scotch Plains, Plainfield, Clark, and Westfield yet I do not play the game. On the other hand, I have an engineering background and understand and instruct players how to move and feel better, while improving their golf swing. Most golfers are unaware of the money Titlelist has spent on improving the game, the balls, the clubs, and the performance of professional players as well as amateurs which are the majority of the players we help. The unique needs of golfers and the team approach. Better body movement will improve your golf scores and keep you injury-free. The Titleist Golf Performance Institute (TPI) is reaching out to healthcare providers, golf pros and trainers, and therapists to teach them a common language and approach to improve their game best. The program was started in 2003 by a chiropractor, Dr. Greg Rose and Dave Phillips with an advisory staff of 52. The program has an actual performance facility to test many of the ideas out and to use the best technology to understand what makes a golf swing work. The main person needed is the sports chiropractor due to their unique understanding of movement and how they, working together as a team can take a golfer to the next level of play while reducing injuries. I am planning to take this course as a way to develop relationships with both golf pros and trainers to help golfers in the many surrounding courses play and function better. This helps the game grow while golfers’ satisfaction with their own game improves. What makes golf complicated is not only the way the ball is hit, but picking the right driver too. As I found out with Tennis years ago, a custom-fitted racket makes all the difference and the same goes for golf clubs. We are all different, we have different body styles and different body mechanics. Unlike the one-size-fits-all approach I see often failing in healthcare, their approach is about maximizing the efficiency of any golfer keeping in mind their unique body characteristics. Many golf pros on the tour have swings that are not ideal but are ideal for them which power the ball at the moment the club hits it. As with runners, something I have a lot of experience with over my years in practice, you improve their bad habits into good ones and improve their efficiency and symmetry which reduces times and injuries. With golfers, chiropractors who understand the sport are ideal for improving the most important aspect of the golf swing; movement. How this approach works In most sports, chiropractors are a part of the team of experts helping players both on the field and off. In golf, often this begins with the instructor who shows someone how to hold a club, swing a club, choose a driver, etc. It is a game requiring instruction. What commonly occurs is the person gets a lesson, then goes to the driving or putting range and practices what they were taught. What often happens is that their body mechanics will determine how they swing. Their follow-up lessons are often further instruction and correction of what they are doing wrong. In the Titlelist program, a TPI-certified instructor will understand this and instead recommend a TPI-certified chiropractor to evaluate their movement and work with them to improve how they move. They will also give them exercises and refer them to other TPI-certified people to instruct them on how to move better for the golf swing to improve. Many of these improvements will be felt in other sports that require similar movements such as tennis, basketball, and softball that require rotational movements. The key person is the chiropractor and using common language from TPI, the golf pro can communicate with the chiropractor who will do an evaluation and determine how to improve their movement. Some people may have a bad knee, degenerated hip, prosthetic joint, or bad ankle from an old injury but again, by thinking outside the box, the chiropractor can help the player move and function better in the sport while eliminating injuries that occur again and again because the cause of the problem was never addressed. Golfers often visit our office for back, knee, or shoulder problems and once I find out their problem is related to golf, I will take some time to show them why their problems are happening and how it relates to their form. The secret to all of this is movement and how that movement in the golf swing and other sports affects their adaptation. Often, poor mechanics lead to poor performance and eventually, pain. The typical stretch and warm up methods do little to help them play better and reduce injury risk. Chiropractors are body mechanics and the TPI program helps golfers while increasing the awareness of how they can help golfers, the sport, and the players. Everyone wins. I work with many athletes in many sports and do not use any one-size-fits-all approaches which often fail. Care must be personalized especially with golf. From the instructor to the chiropractor to the exercises and those who teach and build on them, we develop better golfers. Those improvements also improve the performance in other sports. Becoming TPI certified will help me help others.