I am not a stretching person. I want to say that first, so you understand the nature of what I’m describing. For the first thirty years of my adult life, a warm-up was walking from the parking lot to the first tee while draining the last of the coffee. That was it. That was the whole program.
I played football in ninth grade. I hunted, fished, carried a golf bag, and walked several thousand miles of rough country without ever once sitting down to touch my toes before or after any of it. My body obliged. It was not grateful, I now understand. It was merely young.
The shift came at fifty-eight, and not in any dramatic way. No catastrophic injury. No moment of reckoning on a surgeon’s table. It happened slowly enough that I could have ignored it for another few years if I’d wanted to, and I almost did. But at fifty-eight the back started talking to me on the back nine. Not shouting. Talking. A low, persistent voice around the seventh or eighth hole that said: we are not finished out here but we want you to know there are conditions.
The conditions were mostly in my lower back. The left side, specifically, below the kidney. A tightness that arrived somewhere between the fifth and seventh holes and then sat there for the rest of the round. Not pain, exactly. Not the kind you tell anyone about. The kind you manage quietly, adjusting your stance a degree or two, taking an extra practice swing to try to loosen whatever had cinched up. Terry noticed before I said anything. He didn’t say anything either, for weeks, which is why I’ve kept playing with him for more than twenty years.
I finally mentioned it to my daughter Elise, who is a physical therapist in Asheville. She visited in August of that year and we hiked some of the property, and at dinner she asked me how my back was, because she had seen how I stood up from the porch chair. I told her it was fine. She gave me the look that physical therapists give their fathers when they say things that aren’t true.
She asked me what my pre-round routine looked like. I described it. She was quiet for a moment.
“Dad,” she said, “that’s not a routine.”
She was right.
What Elise told me wasn’t complicated. The hip flexors tighten from sitting. The thoracic spine loses rotation from years of the same movement patterns. The hamstrings pull on the pelvis, which pulls on the lower back, which pulls on everything above it like a slack chain someone has started to wind. None of this was news, medically speaking. All of it was news to me personally, because I had spent thirty years being surprised when these things happened and then promptly forgetting about it between incidents.
She walked me through a routine that takes about fifteen minutes. I resisted for reasons I am not proud of. Fifteen minutes in a parking lot doing stretches felt, in some way I can’t quite articulate, like an admission. Of what, I’m still not sure. Maybe of the simple fact that my body had become a thing that required management.
I got over it. I got over it because the alternative was three hours of managed discomfort on a course I love, with a back that tightened incrementally from hole to hole until the eighteenth was an exercise in abbreviated follow-through. That was worse than the parking lot.
The routine I settled into, which I’ve adjusted over the last eight years to what my body actually needs, starts before I touch a club.
The first thing I do is a hip flexor stretch, kneeling on my right knee with my left foot forward and my weight shifted into the front hip. The right side opens. I hold it for thirty seconds and feel the front of my right hip do something between releasing and complaining, a sensation somewhere between stretch and heat. Then I switch sides. The left is tighter, always. Has been since I had a knee issue in 2015 that changed how I walked for six months. The body remembers things the mind lets go.
From there I do what Elise calls a thoracic rotation. Sitting on my heels with my knees on the ground, I reach one arm across my body and rotate from the mid-back. Not from the shoulders. Not from the hips. From the part of the spine between the shoulder blades, which is the part that swings a golf club and the part I had apparently stopped asking to move independently of everything attached to it. The first time I did this stretch I could feel every vertebra in my thoracic spine like beads on a stuck string. Eight years later it still makes a sound on cold mornings that isn’t exactly alarming but is definitely something.
Then hamstrings. Standing, I cross one foot over the other and hinge at the hips, keeping the back long. Not rounded. Long. This is the distinction Elise made three times before it stuck: the stretch is in the hip hinge, not in the rounding of the back. Rounding the back is just compressing the lumbar spine, which is what I was already doing. The goal is the opposite of that.
I do a piriformis stretch because my piriformis is a problem. Left side. I sit on the tailgate of the truck and cross my left ankle over my right knee and let gravity do most of it. The piriformis is a small muscle deep in the glute that no one thinks about until it compresses the sciatic nerve, at which point everyone thinks about it constantly. I think about mine approximately twice a week. This keeps it from thinking about me.
The last piece is a standing lat stretch. I grab the side mirror of the truck, step back until my arm is straight overhead, and lean away from the car. The side of my rib cage opens. There is a sound like someone shifting furniture in the room above you. Then it stops and the stretch settles.
That is the whole thing. Hip flexors, thoracic rotation, hamstrings, piriformis, lats. Fifteen minutes if I’m moving slowly. Ten if I’m not. I do it in the parking lot without self-consciousness, which took two or three rounds to achieve. The first time, I was aware of every person who drove past. Now I don’t notice.
What changed wasn’t dramatic. I want to be honest about that, because I distrust stories where a single intervention produces a transformation. What changed was that the back stopped talking to me on the back nine. The conversation that used to begin at seven or eight moved to twelve or thirteen, and then mostly stopped. Not completely. On cold mornings in early May when the temperature sits at forty-two and the air off the bay has a particular dampness in it, there’s still a stiffness in the left lower back around the tenth that I have to manage. But manage is different from endure. The conversation is briefer. The terms are better.
My swing changed too. I hadn’t realized how much the tightness had been affecting my rotation until it started to loosen and I had access to range I’d written off as simply gone. You adjust gradually to limitation and stop registering what you’ve lost. I was standing slightly open at address and finishing with a truncated follow-through and I had convinced myself this was the right shape for where my game was. It wasn’t. It was the shape of a man protecting his back without knowing he was doing it.
I wrote a while ago about switching to the push cart, and the language I used then still applies here. I called it a recalculation, not a defeat. The stretches are the same. This isn’t me conceding something to my body. This is me paying it the attention it required all along and was too busy or too stubborn to give it. Whether that distinction is meaningful or just a story I tell myself, I genuinely don’t know. It may be both.
A few things I’ve learned along the way that the standard advice doesn’t mention.
The order matters. Hip flexors first, because they’re the tightest after the drive and the worst offenders on the lower back. Thoracic next, because the rotation loosens everything above the hips and primes the swing. Hamstrings third, because they’re not as urgent and you need the hip work done before you can really feel where the hamstring stretch ends and the lower back begins. Piriformis fourth, because by then the glute is warmed up enough to actually respond. Lats last, because it’s a long lever stretch and your body needs to be somewhat mobile before it makes sense.
The other thing: don’t rush it. I know the foursome in front of you is taking forever and the starter is giving you the look and you only have twelve minutes before your tee time. Still don’t rush it. A rushed stretch is theater. You go through the motions, feel approximately nothing, and walk to the first tee in exactly the same condition you arrived in. Slow it down until you feel the tissue respond. That is the only signal that matters.
Terry started stretching two years after I did. He wouldn’t admit that he started because of me, but he started at the same time I mentioned the routine to him directly, and I have drawn my conclusions. He does a version that is heavier on the hip rotations and lighter on the thoracic work because his back complaint is different from mine. He plays to a twelve handicap and would play to a nine if he stopped rushing his putts, but that is a different conversation.
I now own a pair of golf shoes that actually fit, and play with clubs that match where my swing is rather than where it was in 2004. The stretches fit in the same category. Equipment for the body you have. None of these things brought back what I had at thirty-five. That isn’t the goal and was never a realistic goal. The goal is to play the game you love for as long as the game will have you, without spending the back nine bargaining with your lower back for an additional two clubs of rotation.
I’m sixty-six now. I still play twice a week from May through October. Tuesday mornings, usually, with Terry and sometimes Phil Becker, who has been playing push cart for years and was therefore blameless in my eventually coming to it. I walk. I carry nothing. I stretch in the parking lot while Terry is still trying to remember where he put his glove.
The back is quiet by hole nine. That’s the whole story.
The routine, for anyone who wants it plainly: hip flexor kneeling lunge, 30 seconds each side. Seated thoracic rotation, 10 reps each direction. Standing hamstring hinge with crossed feet, 30 seconds each side. Seated piriformis stretch, 30 seconds each side. Standing lat stretch using the car, 30 seconds each side. Total time: 12 to 15 minutes. Do it before you hit any balls. The driving range bucket can wait.
