Yoga and Golf Are Linked in a Class at the Body Shop
 Durell Godfrey
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(7/02/2008) Patia Cunningham, who teaches yoga at the Body Shop in East Hampton Village, said that a golfer had come to her one day, and, somewhat grudgingly, as if he were a kid swallowing some awful-tasting medicine, muttered that he’d heard yoga was good for golfers.
No, Cunningham said, he did not return, “but he might well have had he been at the class yesterday.”
That yoga-for-golfers class, given Saturday at the Body Shop by Pamela Warshay, a golf fitness specialist who has a studio in Manhattan’s East Village, so stretched this writer’s mind that he was willing to admit, after years of yoga avoidance, that yoga’s poses could well be of benefit to any athlete involved in what Warshay described as “ ‘self-induced repetitive stress syndrome.’ . . . You need to even it out.”
Cunningham, who has taught yoga for more than 30 years, and who took the hourlong class, was impressed. She said she thought Warshay’s selection of a score of yoga poses that could be of use to golfers was “a good idea. . . . There are so many golfers out here. If she added a clinic for tennis players, we’d have everyone out here doing yoga.”
As for Warshay, she said afterward that he had been certified as a golf fitness specialist recently after having studied with Katherine Roberts in Cave Creek, Ariz. Roberts, “a golfer from a golfing family,” was, she said, a yogini, “a female yoga expert,” who had been alerted to the yoga-golf connection “years ago when she was playing golf with another woman who was amazingly good.” Roberts asked her what her secret was, and was told, “Yoga.”
Her “hybridization” of traditional yoga poses, such as “the cat,” “the downward dog,” standing side bends, the seated twist, and so forth, “makes yoga approachable to golfers, who ordinarily wouldn’t walk into a yoga studio.”
A beginning golfer herself, Warshay said that her class, which can, with practice, be telescoped into an effective 15-minute warm-up and warm-down, is designed to eliminate golfers’ common plaints such as “lower back pain, knee and hip pain, and tightness in the shoulders.”
She was able to work on these ailments, she said, by “stretching the muscles three-dimensionally — front, back, and both sides.”
Yoga’s concentration on properly aligning the spine would lead naturally to better form, she said, and thus to the elimination of such errors as “sway,” “coming over the top,” and “chicken wings.”
It was also effective in improving “spinal rotation on the upswing and downswing and follow-through.”
When Tiger Woods’s name came up, she said that while he was mum when it came to his training regimen, she thought yoga could well be part of it, as well, perhaps, as core-strengthening Pilates and the arching and curling Gyrotonic Expansion System, which she also teaches.
“Spinal rotation,” she added, “starts with the intrinsic muscles around the spinal column that assist you in rotating, and the abdominals, which are also worked into the dance. You need your obliques, the cross muscles of the stomach, to rotate if you don’t want to strain your back.”
When this writer said that one movement in particular, the seated twist, seemed to be an especially good one for golf, Warshay said, “It not only stretches the hamstring of your straight leg, but stretches the obliques and the shoulder as you twist.”
During the session, this writer was at times told not to hunch, but rather to keep the chest out, a key element in addressing the ball. “Otherwise,” she said, “your vertebrae can’t twist.”
A one-legged ankle-on-knee crouch with butts out and arms spread had us all looking a bit like storks, but clearly improved our sense of balance.
Asked if she’d gotten any feedback from golfers she’d taught, Warshay said, “The feedback’s been good. One man said he no longer had any knee or hip pain in his left leg after he played a round, which is very good. Another, who used to hunch, told me that with the increase in his shoulder turn, he was getting more power with less effort. . . .”
One of Saturday’s clinic-takers, Callie Aadland, the pro at the Poxabogue course in Sagaponack, although a late arrival because she’d been giving a lesson herself, said the 20 minutes she spent with Warshay had convinced her that “there’s a lot that could be gained, not only by golfers, but by anyone, when it comes to core stability and balance.”
During the clinic, we were asked to concentrate on our breathing as we went into and out of the poses. “I doubt that most golfers breathe — they just hold their breath,” Warshay said. “You should inhale on your backswing and exhale as you swing through the ball. It’s the exhalation that gives you the energy.”
Focusing on breathing not only lowered one’s blood pressure, she said, “but it calms the mind and helps you focus on the movement. Breathing’s valuable for golfers.”
“Yoga gets everything loosened up, hitting on all the muscle groups in all different directions,” she said in reply to another question. “Once you go, you say, ‘There’s something to this — I feel better.’ After a while, you’re thirsting for it. You feel rejuvenated. You need to stretch, and breathe, and gently fine-tune yourself. It’s really priceless.”
Warshay will give other classes at Body Tech at the Playhouse in Montauk on Aug. 9, and at Sangha Yoga at 12 South Etna Avenue, Montauk, on Aug. 10. Her Web site is sagefitness. com.