I really don’t follow golf that much. I’ll watch a major just to see who is leading, but I don’t care who wins. I would check-in a little more when Tiger Woods was playing. Of course I wanted to see if he’d win just like any other sports nut would.

If it was a major, I was paying even closer attention. I certainly was watching to see if Tiger would win, but not because I wanted him to pile up the victories at majors. I wanted him to NOT pile up the victories because being from Columbus, I want Jack Nicklaus to keep his major record intact.

With Tiger’s recent injuries and issues, I feel more confident than ever that Jack’s record will remain safe. Especially when I heard on Mike & Mike them joking about Tiger not playing in the PGA for awhile until he “gets his glutes activating properly and fixing his golf game.”

I’m not kidding that is what they said.

Now don’t tell Tiger this, but I know the two exercises he needs to do to get those glutes activating properly. They aren’t that hard to do and he could do them right before he tees off. But, like I said, don’t share this with him.

Here’s what you need to do:

  1. Get a small elastic band that can go around your knees. You can get these bands at local sporting goods store or someplace like a Walmart.
  2. Place the band around your knees just under them. The closer you place the band down your shins to around your ankles, the harder it will be.
  3. The first exercise you will do is just slowly walk forward 10M in an athletic stance then back.
  4. The second exercise will be to walk sideways down 10M then back.
  5. That’s it.  They should be ready to go now.

Both these exercises will start the glutes firing and then you can proceed into your activity. Track coaches use these two exercises as part of their warmup because sprinting especially requires those glutes to be blasting.

With some of our strength training workouts for our athletes, we might do these drills prior to the workout. If we noticed that there is some posterior strength issues, then we will use these two drills to hopefully get the glutes firing.

Usually, the athlete will say that the glutes are burning back there. Basically cause they are so weak, it is taking everything they got just to function right. Then we can proceed to doing some leg strengthening exercises such as squats and lunges. This will give us a better chance of now strengthening those glutes which will in turn get the athletes stronger and faster.

These are two simple drills, but effective drills to get those glutes activating. Sometimes, through strength or flexibility imbalances the muscles just shut down. Working on improving those imbalances hopefully will eliminate the need to use drills such as these to re-activate muscles.
But, correcting those imbalances is a topic for yet another day. Tiger, just do these two drills and I’m sure your glutes will be just fine.

Photo courtesy of Keith Allison on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/keithallison/