Golf Stretch - Hamstring

My name is Patrick McGuire, Assistant Director of Instruction at the Chuck Will Golf Academy. Now, I will be showing you how to stretch your hamstrings and your low back and some of these stretches will be done together. The first one I am going to how to do is basically a toe touch where you are sitting trying to keep your back straight, toes up and you are reaching to reach your toes. Dont bounce and dont try to go too far. The key is to just try to reach as far as you can and hold it from back. You should feel that in the back of the legs. Main part, and you feel some in your low back, dont round your back, try to keep it nice and straight and just reach, if you are going to go forward, go forward from your hip. This gives you the, the hamstrings give you a greater range of motion in your follow-through which is basically the power portion the golf swing. Also this stretching will help balance your legs and what I mean by balance is, balancing the muscles so where one side is not tighter than the other. Its not so much a balance as in falling down or losing balance. These exercises need to be performed for longer duration, so this would be something you would want to do for at least three to five minutes every morning, four, five days a week if possible, and again its not really time consuming, but it is the quality of the stretch you get. You can also do this exercise by holding the side of your leg and going down, holding your ankle, coming back trying to go a little further. The key important thing is keeping your stomach engaged, keep your back straight and try to reach with your arms, not rounding your back. Really try to keep your form when you are doing stretching and again no balancing. The key importance is that you spend the quality of the time stretching, not in so much of repetitive fashion, but a length of stretch. So, I would rather see you hold this for a good minute to two minutes then trying to do 50 or 60 repetitions of the same thing. This is a big muscle, generally if you are setting at your desk or sitting all day long, this is a muscle that tends to get really tight as well as your hip flexure.