This text-based course is a transcript of the live seminar, “Common Golf Injuries and the Associated Components,” presented by Maurie Steinley, PT, DSC, SCS. This was the final segment of a 3 part series. Recommend viewing prior 2 segments for optimal learning and printing handout to follow along.
>>Maurie Steinley: Today we are going to talk more specifically about golf injuries, as well as some components of those, especially the swing faults, and some reasons the golf swing does create such injury. We will discuss the common injuries as well their prevalence, identify the common swing faults and some of the injuries they can create, and then we will briefly discuss some interventions and ideas about how to approach them.
Golf Statistics
Right now there are about 26 million golfers in the U.S. This is probably a generous number as they define it as anyone over the age of 18 that played at least one round in the past 12 months. Obviously if they are playing that little, golf would not create injuries. As you think about integrating more of a golf program into your practice, seniors (ages 50 or over)comprise about 33% or 8.6 million of those golfers. As we can imagine in the next few years and the years to come that percentage will climb, and they will be a population that will be looking to not only stay healthy on the golf course, but to get better at golf.
Prevalence
During any given season, injury will occur to about 60% of professional golfers and about 40% of amateur golfers. Most of these injuries would be due to overuse. This is generally thought of a benign activity. There is a fairly high prevalence percentage of golfers, based on statistics in football, basketball, or different “higher level” activities, who are getting injured.
Common Golf Injuries
Some common injury complaints from Golf Digest are seen in Figure 1. Low back pain dominates the injury complaint list. Over 50% of those complaining of injuries had low back injuries. The other numbers we will look at are percentages of golfers overall who had injuries. Left elbow, left shoulder and left wrist finish out this list. The rest of the injury complaints were below 5%. As we look at this “left-sided” issue, remember the predominance of golfers is right-handed. This left elbow, shoulder, and wrist is going to be what we call the lead arm or lead side. That is going to be the side that would be injured more predominantly. We will discuss some of those reasons in a little bit.
Common Golf Injuries and the Associated Components [Video Course]
