What I Noticed Helping Brentwood Country Club Golfers Warm Up Before Their Club Championship
The 2025 BCC Club Championship — a tee-time flighted event — revealed a lot to me as a golf rehab and performance chiropractor. The early tee times, representing the top-flight players, showed clear differences compared to the later, higher-handicap groups. While observing their warm-ups on the range, a few key patterns stood out.
Better Players Turn More
The trend was unmistakable: the earlier players had a noticeably bigger, smoother, and more athletic turn. As the day went on, later flights appeared progressively stiffer in their backswings.
Now, exactly where these players were getting their turn varied — and not all motion is good motion. Ideally, rotation should be shared between the lower body, hips, and thoracic spine to create balanced torque without compensation. Even among the best players, there’s often fine-tuning to be done to ensure efficient and pain-free movement.
Still, the top-flight golfers displayed impressive and consistent coil and separation throughout their swings, while many of the later flights showed limited rotation — in some cases, severely so.
The good news? That can absolutely be trained. If you want to work on the physical components of your coil and rotation, check out this article:
The Deadly Compensation
The second most common pattern — often linked directly to poor rotation — was what I call the deadly compensation: throwing the hands and shoulders out in front.
For players who had some turn but not enough, this move was nearly universal. Instead of completing their backswing and generating force from the ground up, these golfers cut their turn short and tried to create power with their arms and shoulders.
In contrast, the top-flight players produced speed and torque from the ground, transferring energy efficiently up the chain — a textbook example of the kinematic sequence in action.
To learn more about how that sequence works (and how to test and train it), check out these articles:
[The Kinetic Chain: How Your Body Creates Power in Golf Part 1]
[The Kinetic Chain: How Your Body Creates Power in Golf Part 2]
Each includes drills, exercises, and movement screens to help identify deficiencies in your sequence and improve force and torque generation.
Conclusion
Watching players across different flights at BCC highlighted something I see every day in the clinic — the connection between movement quality and performance. The golfers with more efficient turn, better sequencing, and fewer compensations consistently produced smoother, more powerful swings.
These aren’t just “swing faults” — they’re physical limitations that can be assessed, trained, and improved. Whether you’re competing at a club championship or just trying to enjoy pain-free rounds, building physical capacity and movement efficiency is the foundation for both better performance and longevity in the game.
-Dr. Nick DC, MS, TPI, CSCS
If you would like to learn more about your body, pain, and performance, send Dr. Nick an email at contact@integratedrpc.com or call at (585)478-4379, or schedule a FREE discovery visit at Contact.
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