Golf exercise equipment, if chosen correctly can have an immediate and dramatic impact on your golf game. This equipment can be very inexpensive and purchased at your local Target store. There’s no excuse to not have some exercise for golf equipment.

You’d be surprised to find out it is not expensive; and is not necessarily in a gym or health club either.

Yes…there are golf “machines” for stretching and strength building that are well over one thousand dollars, but are definitely not needed.

When you think of the golf swing, it’s a dynamic movement completed in space with your ‘whole’ body. So any kind of training or golf exercise equipment should be able to accommodate this.

For starters, a pair of hand weights (dumbbells) are inexpensive, portable and can be used for dozens of golf-specific exercises. They don’t have to be heavy or cumbersome. You’d be surprised what a 5 to 8 pound pair of dumbbells can accomplish with the right golf exercises.

Next on the list of golf exercise equipment is tubing. You may have seen it in articles, on the television or in a catalog. Exercise tubing is extremely portable, very inexpensive and also can be used to mimic many phases of the golf swing, but with resistance.

I personally use exercise tubing in all of my programs, with all of my personal clients and in my own golf workouts. It can give you one heck of a workout if you have the right resistance. These bands come in varying tensions from light to extra heavy.

Another piece of golf exercise equipment is a stability ball. It’s the big ‘beach ball’ looking thing that is used in offices to sit on, in many exercise classes, at most health clubs and all of the physical therapy clinics.

Why? Because again it’s portable, inexpensive and very versatile. Doing golf exercises on the ball incorporate core stabilization, balance and stability. All important factors in a mechanically sound golf swing.

And the last piece of golf exercise equipment is the weighted medicine ball. You might remember them from several decades ago as the big leather balls that the old fitness fanatics used to improve strength and power.

Well now they’re back! They are used in every sport-specific strength program in existence. You can do so many sport-like movements with them and they weigh as much as 20 pounds, so you can imagine the benefit from a power standpoint.

I have a couple of my ‘bread-and-butter’ exercises I use in all my programs that incorporate the weighted medicine ball and they are very effective.

So there you have it! Three or four pieces of inexpensive and portable golf exercise equipment.

Golf is the most global sport. It is played in nearly every country in the world; its professional tournaments are contended in every continent and, unlike soccer, the Americans are pretty darn good at it. This makes for the highest profile intercontinental competition of all – the Ryder cup – whose power over the emotions of millions of transatlantic spectators is so great that it constitutes the only fortnight in a two-and-a-half year cycle that all Britons are happy to call themselves ‘European’. Its so linked to a global view, in fact, that holidays are often built around it and even travel insurance is available which gives you a cash payout for a hole-in-one.

Which is why it is a shame that the USA hosts three of the world’s four golf majors. Only the dear old Open Championship (won so memorably last month by Padraig Harrington in Carnoustie) lies outside of the States. The USPGA, won by Tiger Woods this week, is the fourth in the cycle, but of the three American tournaments, I think it should be the one to swap continents.

The Masters, of course, must remain forever at Augusta: the beautiful course, so well etched into the imaginations of any amateur golfer, with its history and traditions (such as the Green Jacket), must forever host the year’s first major. And the US Open – historically set-up to be the toughest on the calendar with winning scores often above par – can keep rotating around America to provide the toughest test in Golf. But the USPGA hasn’t got the same history or reputation. So why not move it to another continent – or rotate it round two or three – to give this global game a global dimension at the very highest level? Europe has some of the best courses on the planet, but has never hosted a major. Asia boasts the fastest-growing golf industry in the world. And lets not overlook Africa, Australia or South America either, whose great players (Els, Goosen, Norman, Ogilvy, Cabrera) have graced our screens for decades.

I watched the denouement of the USPGA last week on telly; but I’d rather it had had Table mountain or the Med in the background shots.