TENSION

[Bagger Lance]

Lagster,

The golf swing takes muscular effort from setup to follow through. I would venture that hundreds of muscles move from a relaxed state to a contracted state back to relaxed. It's been a long time since my college anatomy classes so I can't really venture on the number of muscles used. Suffice to say you engage the entire muscular system at some level. If you could see an animation of each muscle firing through the golf swing, the body would light up like a christmas tree.

I think your question may refer to the mis-use of certain muscles or groups of muscles in the swing. Muscles that are contracted unnecessarily, fired at the wrong time, or used with too much or not enough contraction. The golf swing is fantastically complex from that standpoint but fortunately we have a computer that handles firing the muscular nerve cells almost automatically. It is the programming of the computer that we should be concerned with IMHO. This is true in any athletic endevour and why practice is so vital to any sport. Muscular conditioning and training is as vital to Golf as any other sport. The weekend golfer that only practices before playing will never condition his system properly.

I think one of the biggest challenges for instructors is to discover the physical areas of unnecessary movement or muscular contraction, and to guide the student where the right-timing of a muscular movement is required based on a pre-selected swing pattern. This is one of the reasons video analysis is so important and another reason why Geometric golf is so vital.

It might be easier to answer your question with a question. What muscles are not used in the golf swing? I think Homer gave us a few clues.

Bagger

[hcw]

Many good golfers may FEEL that they are COILED, WOUND UP, or LOADED UP, or some similar thing, but I believe this is quite different than the DESTRUCTIVE TENSION described above.

What do you think?

i think that you are describing being at the top/end of the BS and the coiled/wound-up/loaded-up feeling is in the muscles that have gotten the club there and there is no "slack"...BUT in the DS these muscles must at some point relax and allow their opposing partners to athletically bring the clubhead back to the ball...

-hcw