Golf is a repetitive, physical sport that puts a lot of strain on the body. Like in any sport, golf injuries are common.

While a golfer may not have to worry about breaking their leg as much as, say, a footballer might, there are still a range of common golf injuries for golfers to consider and try to avoid.

In this blog, golf fitness instructor Jamie Greaves explains some of the most common golf injuries, why you might be getting them, and how best to avoid them in the future.

The most common golf injuries

Jamie said:

Around 80% of golf injuries stem from what we call overuse.  Regardless of which part of the body gets injured, the root cause is always very similar. Golfers make the same motion over and over again, which places stress on the body. 

It’s almost like an equation. On one side, you’ve got the demands on your body, such as how many swings you’re making and how many rounds you’re playing. On the other side, you’ve got your capacity—i.e., what your body can handle.

Overuse injuries normally occur when this equation becomes out of whack, where demands on the body exceed your body’s capacity.

Whenever I’m looking at an injury—whether it be back, shoulder, wrist, or so on—that’s my first line of thinking. So, it’s often a case of managing and balancing that equation.  

Common golf injuries: demands on the body

Let’s use running as an example. Your workload might be the number of miles you run each week. If you’re a runner, you wouldn’t want to run, say, 10 miles in week one, 10 miles in week two, and then 60 miles in week three. I view golf very similarly in that you don’t want to spike your workload too rapidly or suddenly. 

In the first Covid lockdown in 2020, many golfers bought nets for practising at home. But by the final lockdown, I suspect a lot of those golfers had become fed up with the situation and perhaps weren’t out in the garden practising as much. So, you then had your typical golfer, who had made probably zero swings for 10-12 weeks before courses reopened, and everyone went mad again. There were probably a lot of niggles and golf injuries during this period as a result.

That’s why, with my tour and elite players, I try to track how many swings they’re making. At the end of the day, you need to appreciate that golf is a stress on the body. 

Common golf injuries: Body capacity

On the other side of the equation, you’ve got to consider what your body can handle—in other words, its capacity.

If your body is strong and moves well, we know that strength training reduces overuse injuries by around half. Factors like your general health, fitness, and sleep pattern can also influence how well your body can cope with certain things. The stronger and more robust your body, the less likely you are to get injured.  

Another thing to consider is your swing mechanic, which can also impact injuries. The most recent example of this is Will Zalatoris, who had to take months off with a back injury. He had an excessive amount of side bend and lateral flexion in his swing, which was exerting more stress and overuse in a particular area. He’s since modified his swing with less side bend and more rotation since returning from injury.

The biomechanics are always tricky, because you can have swings that look unproblematic—say, Fred Couples, who has got a nice long, fluid swing, but he’s had back injuries throughout his whole career. You can’t just look at a swing and say, ‘That golfer is going to get injured,’ or the other way around. Golf injuries are a lot more complicated than that. 

The most common golf injuries

The lead wrist

One of the most common areas for a golf injury is the wrists, particularly the lead wrist. These injuries can occur when a golfer tries to change the structure of their backswing or tries to get more compression on the ball.

They might be trying to get more laid off at the top and more bow in the left wrist, but the wrist isn’t used to being in that position. Then they start hitting balls, applying force, and it’s a case of capacity and demand again.

The capacity of the wrist in that position is quite low, but the demand on it has increased. That’s why swing changes can sometimes make injuries more likely, as we’re asking the body to do something it’s not necessarily used to.

The lower back

This is arguably the most common golf injury, as the lower back takes on a lot of stress in a golf swing. Our backs are designed to side bend to the left and right but the lower vertebrae don’t have much rotation. So, even if someone is highly mobile, we don’t really want to be asking the lower back to do any kind of rotation during a swing.  

Modern life can be rather static. We spend a lot of time sitting down, and so many people, golfers included, are somewhat restricted in their thoracic or ribcage area and may not have a huge amount of motion through their hips. So, if you’re playing a sport that involves a lot of rotation, where are you going to get that rotation from?  

I’m a big fan of getting my golfers to move their spine daily through all kinds of motion—forward folds, backwards bends, rotation side-to-side, and so on. The stronger your lower back area is, the better.  

Unfortunately, you can’t completely prevent injuries. They will happen at some point, especially given the high levels of speed and intensity on tour. However, there are things you can do to limit the amount of injuries you get and their severity. A strong, fit, mobile body will recover from injury much faster than a body that’s in a worse state.  

Golfer’s elbow

You’ve probably heard of ‘tennis elbow’, but golfer’s elbow is also a thing. In fact, many golfers suffer from it.

Many cases of golfer’s elbow (or medial epicondylitis, as it’s known medically) are through the lead side. When we strike the ball, we swing with quite a lot of speed and then strike the ground. Slow-mo replays allow us to see the reverberations up the club, shaft, and lead arm, and we can see there’s quite a lot of stress on that part of the body.  

We need to strengthen the wrist-forearm area to combat this by ensuring the area can move well and has a good range of motion. Again, generally speaking, the stronger and more robust these areas are, the more likely they are to cope with stress and potential injury. It’s a similar philosophy across all the common golf injuries and parts of the body.

Aim to be as strong as possible in each area and be aware of your swing volume. The key is to try to build up slowly. The body is very adaptable—and it will adapt—but not overnight. 

Related: Causes and symptoms of golfer’s elbow

The shoulders and neck

The neck takes a lot of force in a golf swing, mainly because the body rotates around it. Obviously, our heads don’t move a huge amount themselves, but because everything else moves around them, including the hips and trunk, it creates a rotation around the head.

I always encourage golfers to do a 5-10-minute warm-up before playing to get the body moving. I do a lot of shoulder work with golfers, too.

The main thing to be aware of is how many swings you’re making, especially if you’re making changes or putting yourself in different positions to what your body is used to. You want to get your body moving as much as possible and as strong as it can be so it can cope with more.

About Jamie Greaves

Jamie is a strength and conditioning coach and keen golfer, having reached a handicap of scratch at 16. He has worked with a number of tour golfers, including Charley Hull, and has his own app to ‘help golfers move better, get stronger, and swing faster’. Visit www.jggolffitness.co.uk for more.

The article below was written by Steve Carroll of National Club Golfer.

There’s the clubhouse, the food and beverage, even the driving range. But for most of us, the main reason we join a golf club is for the course.

It’s by far the biggest asset and it won’t surprise you to learn it’s also the biggest cost. But what do the numbers look like? How much of a club’s income, and how much of its turnover, goes into making sure those precious fairways and greens are the best they can be?

In The Price of Club Golf series, industry consultant Kevin Fish revealed almost 50 pence in every pound generated by a club is spent on the course – with the vast majority of that on salaries.

“It’s pretty labour intensive out there!” he said.

But let’s try and break down those numbers even further. Richard Penley-Martin, general manager of private members’ club Denham, said it cost the Buckinghamshire facility a basic £1.3 million to open the doors – to prepare the golf course and get the clubhouse open.

That’s before considering staffing, maintenance, and other costs. How do those figures break down for the golf course?

“The cost of materials for the golf course is about 10 per cent of our turnover and that’s without doing any special projects,” he explained.

“That’s just the day-to-day stuff – keeping the machinery going, putting new chemicals on the course, buying new course furniture and all those intangibles that you’ve got.

“Salaries are probably about 15 per cent, so 25 per cent of your cost is just providing the golf course.

“That’s without buying any machinery. Our 10-year rolling replacement programme for course machinery is £1.5 million. Effectively, you’ve got £150,000 worth of capital you are having to put aside, or spend, each year, just to keep your top-notch machinery fleet going.

“You can do it cheaper and, in the past, we did. You’d buy a machine and run it until it finally broke or became non-economic to run.

Golf course cost: ‘If they’re paying top dollar for a green fee they want the course the best it can possibly be’

“But [with] member expectation and visitor expectation, if they’re paying top dollar for a green fee they want the course the best it can possibly be. You can’t do that if you’re not getting a clean cut from your machines or you’re not cutting frequently enough because one is broken and you’ve not got a replacement.”

Denham carry out their own grinding, but don’t have a specialist mechanic – shelling out anything up to £70 to £80 an hour when they are required. Penley-Martin estimates the cost of maintaining the fleet is around £30,000 a year.

With aggregates such as bunker sand, and sand for topdressing, surging in price in recent years, the club have also spent close on £1 million on a project to re-bunker the course and to line those traps.

“We’ve lined the bunkers because we’re on a gravel soil. So to stop the gravel coming into the bunkers, causing inconsistency and contamination, we’ve lined the bunkers – which is why it’s cost us nigh on a million pounds.

“But a great advantage for lining the bunkers is that we won’t need to replace the sand as frequently as we were before when it was getting contaminated.

“Hopefully we will see in the long term a cost benefit because we’re not having to pay a lot of money for aggregates.”

A further course cost which must be accounted for, Penley-Martin explained, is depreciation.

He said: “If you’re running along like we do, you’ve probably got somewhere between £150,000 and £250,000 of depreciation that you have to allow for each year.

“That’s reinvesting back I the club and it’s where a lot of clubs sometimes let themselves down because they’ve tried to save money by not doing that.

“Part of it can be on machinery but, equally, it could be the fabric of your buildings. You don’t reinvest in the buildings and then, suddenly further down the line, you have to invest a whole bunch of cash to get the fabric back to decent condition.

“You’ve got to spend a lot more than you would do if you’d just been drip feeding your maintenance in as you’ve gone along.”

According to the USGA, the word ‘fore’ originated in Scotland and is an abbreviated version of ‘before’ or ‘afore’. But ‘why do golfers shout fore?’ you might ask.

The USGA website goes on to state: “The old Scottish warning, essentially meaning ‘look out ahead’ most probably originated in military circles, where it was used by artillery men as a warning to troops in forward positions. Golfers as early as the 18^th century simply adopted this military warning cry for use on the links.”

Why do golfers shout fore?

A likely derivation is related to the term ‘forecaddie’.

In years gone by, a forecaddie was employed to stand where the ball might land to avoid losing them. Given that golf balls were originally handmade and custom ordered, they represented a large expense, so forecaddies held a key role in holding on to your prized golf balls.

Records dating back to the 17^th century support this link, and ‘forecaddie’ was subsequently shortened to ‘fore’, presumably because it was quicker to shout ahead of an incoming golf ball. 

Why do golfers shout fore? The Rules

The more modern-day Rules of Golf cover the need to shout ‘fore’ as early as Section 1.2a: Conduct Expected of All Players. This states that players are expected to play in the spirit of the game by “showing consideration to others.”

For example, by playing at a prompt pace, looking out for the safety of others, and not distracting the play of another player. If a player plays a ball in a direction where there might be a danger of hitting someone, they should immediately shout a warning, such as the traditional warning of “fore”.

However, it also states that “there is no penalty under the Rules for failing to act in this way, except that the Committee may disqualify a player for acting contrary to the spirit of the game if it finds that the player has committed serious misconduct.”

And herein lies a problem, you could say. Golfers are expected to shout ‘fore’ if there’s even the remotest chance of hitting someone, but the lack of a set penalty can lead to a multitude of excuses—for amateurs, at least.

Golfers will plead that they lost sight of the ball, didn’t realise they could reach a certain distance, weren’t aware there was another group on another hole, or were maybe just too embarrassed by their poor shot—all of which would be fairly irritating if you’re the person on the wrong end of a Pro V1 that hits you mid-flight.

There’s absolutely no excuse for the professionals, though, particularly at the very top of the game where you’ve got caddies and marshals.

We do sometimes have the occasional example where a pro might not shout in the hope it’ll stop their ball from running into more trouble, or where they might even aim to hit one into the grandstand, knowing it’ll give them a free drop from a more preferable position.

Some players, like Justin Thomas and Rickie Fowler, for example, are able to pull off an amusing point of the arm to signal a wide shot, and generally, there seems to be less public shaming of players who can’t open their mouths in time.

Fore controversy at the 2019 Open Championship

However, one of the more public fall-outs came at the 2019 Open when Bob MacIntyre did the unthinkable and called out his playing partner, Kyle Stanley, at Royal Portrush.

The Scot was playing in his first Open when Stanley hit a wide one off the 17^th tee during the second round, and the ball hit and bruised the hand of his caddy’s mother. According to MacIntyre, there was no shout of ‘fore’. 

He told the press at the time: “We’re shouting as it’s coming into the crowd, and he’s just standing watching it. People don’t have enough time to react after we shout. It hits my caddy’s mom. And so I told them how it was. I said I wasn’t happy and I didn’t really like the response. He’s the only one I’ve seen. Straight in the crowd. It was in the crowd from the word go. And we expect them to shout ‘fore’.

“He didn’t take it well at all. Just shout, simple as that. People are diving out of the way of things when they should have more time.”

However, Stanley claimed that there had been plenty of warning that the tee shot was coming their way.

He responded: “Several people on the tee box yelled fore. My two playing partners, my caddy, a couple of the volunteers or the marshals, even had them signalling it was going right. I mean, everyone to the right of that ball, they knew it was coming.”

MacIntyre argued that since Stanley had hit the ball first, he should have also been the one to shout ‘fore’ first.

Stanley added: “If his issue was with me not being the first person to say fore, does he have a point? Does he not have a point? That’s up to him. All I know is after I hit the ball it wasn’t but a couple of seconds when several people on the tee box started shouting fore. I thought that was enough. My intention was to never do anything negative or put anybody in the gallery in harm’s way.”

The rule, it seems, is pretty simple—if in any doubt, shout ‘fore’. Loudly.