Golf is bad for your health

With Powerful Swings Causing Significant Stress, Golf Can Be a Painful Pursuit

By Leonard Shapiro
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 3, 2008

Tiger Woods will be conspicuous in his absence from this week's field and from the remainder of this season's PGA Tour schedule, but Woods's health issues have substantiated an often snidely dismissed truth: Swinging a golf club can be dangerous.

With powerful swings generating significant stress and torque on various body parts, many elite golfers often suffer from a wide variety of ailments -- from sore hands and feet to achy wrists and tender elbows, wounded knees to balky backs. Everyone who plays the game knows how to spell ibuprofen, and they all have personal trainers, therapists, chiropractors and orthopedic specialists listed on speed dial.

"We just beat up our bodies," Jack Nicklaus said recently. "It's why I gave up golf."

Woods, whose most recent surgery was the fourth of his career, is certainly the highest-profile golfer to have coped with significant injury, but he's far from alone. Phil Mickelson incurred a wrist injury last year while practicing for the 2007 U.S. Open at Oakmont and needed most of the second half of the season to recover. Michelle Wie hurt her wrist in a fall while jogging last year and only now seems to be getting back to full strength.

Davis Love III and Fred Couples have been nursing sore backs for years that have limited their schedules. And recent U.S. Open runner-up Rocco Mediate said he nearly gave up the game last year because of a surgically repaired back that wouldn't allow him to swing properly until he finally found a therapist who figured out a way to get him back on the course.

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