Golf Medicine: How Sports Medicine Approaches the Golf Swing

Golf doesn't look like a contact sport, but the golf swing is one of the more demanding repetitive motions in athletics — a whip-like rotation through the trunk, hips, and arms performed dozens or hundreds of times per practice session. That repetition, more than any single collision, is what drives most golf-related injuries, and it's why golf medicine has become its own area of interest within sports medicine.

The Low Back Takes the Brunt

A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis of musculoskeletal injury across professional and amateur golfers – covering 20 studies and more than 9,000 golfers – found lifetime injury prevalence of 73.5% among professionals and 56.6% among amateurs, with the lower back the single most commonly affected area in both groups.¹ Research on the biomechanics behind this points to the forceful trunk rotation and lateral bending of the modern swing, along with hip strength and mobility deficits, as key contributing factors.²

Wrist and Elbow: The Overuse Half of the Swing

Repetitive wrist flexion and forearm pronation through the backswing and impact, especially with a steep angle of attack or a grip that concentrates force on the lead wrist, predispose golfers to medial epicondylitis — golfer's elbow — and tendinopathy affecting the wrist flexors.³ Despite the name, golfer's elbow is also common in tennis, throwing sports, and any repetitive gripping activity, but golf's high swing volume during a normal round or practice session makes it one of the more frequently seen sources.

Non-Operative Care Is the Default

For nearly all of these overuse-pattern injuries, the first-line approach in sports medicine is non-operative: activity modification, targeted strengthening of the trunk, hips, and forearm musculature, and swing mechanics review, often in coordination with a golf professional or physical therapist trained in the golf swing. The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons notes that adequate warm-up and gradual return to full swing volume after time off are both associated with lower injury rates — a detail that matters as much for the recreational golfer picking the game back up in the fall as for the competitive player.⁴

The Takeaway

Golf injuries are overwhelmingly overuse injuries of the low back, wrist, and elbow, and the evidence supports addressing them the way most overuse injuries are addressed: modify load, build strength and mobility in the areas driving the mechanical stress, and involve a swing evaluation when symptoms keep recurring. Surgery is rarely the first step for these conditions. For golfers in the Chicago suburbs looking to extend their season into fall, that evaluation is often a reasonable starting point before pain becomes a reason to stop playing altogether.