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By Sandy Dunlop — Better Game Golf
Most golfers think about golf posture as something they fix on the range or correct mid-round. In my experience, that is far too late. The body you bring to the first tee is the body you have been using all week, sitting, standing, walking, bending, twisting. You cannot separate those two things. This is a systems thinking approach to posture, and it is the foundation of everything I have built with Alexander Golf. What I want to show you in this article is how to build resilient golf posture before competition through specific pre-round and pre-season conditioning practices, not theories. The work happens off the course, in your daily movement and your preparation routines, and it transfers directly to how you stand over the ball when it matters.
Here is the core insight that changes everything: how you use your body in daily life is the same body you bring to the first tee. You cannot separate the two. The 700-plus muscles in your body, the 200-plus bones, the 350-plus joints, they do not suddenly reorganise themselves because you have arrived at a golf course. They bring with them every habitual pattern you have reinforced through sitting at a desk, driving a car, scrolling a phone. These patterns are not neutral. They are either working with your golf posture or quietly dismantling it before you have even taken a club out of the bag.
This is why I use the phrase optimal geometry when I talk about posture in Alexander Golf. Optimal geometry is not a static snapshot of angles and positions. It is your body's relationship with gravity at any given moment, and that relationship is being shaped constantly, in every movement you make throughout your day. When I work with golfers who are frustrated that their posture breaks down under pressure, the first question I ask is: what does your body do for the other 23 hours? That is where the real conditioning work happens, or fails to happen.
The practical takeaway is simple but demanding. Begin noticing your non-golf movement this week. Notice how you sit, how you stand up from a chair, how you carry bags or pick things up off the floor. These are rehearsals, whether you intend them to be or not.
The approach I use with golfers draws on a specific lineage that is worth understanding because it explains why this method goes deeper than most posture advice. It runs from Delsarte, who explored the relationship between movement and expression in the nineteenth century, through to F.M. Alexander, the Australian actor who lost his voice and discovered through patient self-observation that even the thought of going on stage caused his head and neck to tense and shrink into his shoulders. His subsequent work on posture and what he called Conscious Guidance and Control (CG&C) is now used by professional actors, musicians, and singers across the world. From Alexander, the lineage runs through Jeando Damascello and Penelope Easton, and it is their version of the Initial Alexander Technique that forms the body of my Alexander Golf adaptation.
What makes this lineage distinctive is that it is entirely a systems thinking approach. It does not treat posture as a collection of positions to be corrected one at a time. It treats the human being as an integrated whole that can only be changed as a whole. That is a radical departure from how most golf instruction works, and it is precisely why it works where fault-by-fault, tip-by-tip approaches eventually fail.
(Try: Alexander Golf Posture Primer -- available in the Training section of the app)
Before a season begins, I always encourage golfers to spend time working on what I call positions of mechanical advantage. These are the structural alignments that allow force to transfer efficiently through the body during the swing, without compensatory tension tightening elsewhere. The key word is positions, plural, because the golf swing is not one position held. It is a sequence of positions that must flow from one to the next, and each position either gives you mechanical advantage or takes it away.
In pre-season work, we slow that sequence right down. We are not on a range hitting balls. We are standing in front of a mirror, or working with a practice partner, and we are inhabiting each key position long enough to feel what the Initial Alexander Technique calls alignment with gravity. This is the quality of standing or moving in which the skeletal structure is organised so that gravity assists rather than opposes you. When you find it, there is a sense of ease that is quite unmistakable, a feeling of weight dropping downward through the body rather than being held up by muscular effort.
The challenge is that faulty sensory perception makes this hard work at first. FM Alexander identified this clearly: what feels right is wrong, and what is wrong feels right. The familiar is comfortable, and the optimal is initially unfamiliar. Pre-season is exactly the right time to do this confronting work because the pressure of competition is absent and you have the bandwidth to notice, adjust, and repeat until the new pattern begins to feel natural.
(Try: Positions of Mechanical Advantage Sequence -- available in the Training section of the app)
Most golfers would not connect breath work with posture conditioning. I want to change that. In my work, the first skill I introduce to any golfer is three-compartment breathing: breathing first into the abdomen, then the chest, then up into the neck. This is not simply a relaxation tool, though it is that too. It is a postural tool because the quality of your breath determines the quality of your postural tone throughout the body.
When you breathe shallowly, as most people do most of the time, the muscles of the upper chest and neck are recruited to assist breathing. That recruitment creates chronic tension in precisely the areas that need to be free for a well-organised golf posture. The head-neck relationship, which Alexander identified as the primary control of overall body organisation, becomes compromised. The shoulders round forward. The spine shortens. All of this before you have swung a club.
Building a daily three-compartment breathing practice in the weeks before your season starts is one of the most direct investments you can make in your golf posture. Not on the range. Not with a pro watching. Sitting in a chair at home, morning and evening, building the habit of breathing in a way that frees rather than tightens the upper body. I have seen this single practice change a golfer's address position more profoundly than months of technical instruction.
(Try: Three-Compartment Breathing -- available in the Training section of the app)
One of the non-negotiables I give golfers for pre-round preparation is a structured relaxation sequence before they touch a club. This is the total body relaxation practice, and it works by progressively directing attention through the body from feet to scalp, tensing and releasing each muscle group in turn. What this achieves is not simply a pleasant feeling of calm. It achieves something specific and postural: it clears the residual tension patterns that your body has been carrying from the morning's activities, the drive to the club, the anxiety about your scorecard, the tightness you barely notice until you are shown how to release it.
In the language of Alexander Golf, this is clearing the slate. You are preparing the body to receive good direction rather than layering golf movement on top of accumulated tension. The golfer who skips this step and goes straight to the range to warm up is hitting balls through a filter of habitual tension. They will warm up their habits, not their optimal movement patterns.
The practical sequence takes around ten minutes. Seated or lying down, not standing. You work through toes and feet, calves, knees and thighs, hips, abdomen, chest, shoulders and neck, arms, hands and fingers, upper neck where it meets the skull, scalp and eyes. By the time you finish, you are tuning inward, what I call interoception, the internal sense of your body and how it is moving. That internal attentiveness is the same quality you need when you are standing over a six-foot putt.
(Try: Pre-Round Total Body Relaxation -- available in the Training section of the app)
After the relaxation sequence, the next step in my pre-round posture routine is what I call the flow of dynamic balance, which is stability in motion. Static posture is something you can set up in front of a mirror. Dynamic balance is what you maintain when the club is moving at speed, when your weight is shifting, when every system in your body is responding to the demands of the swing. Building this quality requires specific movement practice, not just stretching.
The exercises I use here draw on the movement disciplines of Tai Chi and yoga, which have never made the mistake of separating mind and body. These traditions understand that balance is not something you achieve and then keep. It is something you continuously participate in. The pre-round work I prescribe borrows this understanding: small, slow, attentive movements that rehearse the quality of being centred in motion. A slow weight shift from foot to foot. A gentle rotation of the torso while maintaining length in the spine. These are not warm-up drills. They are reminders to the nervous system of what integrated movement feels like.
If you want to understand how the mental and physical sides of this preparation work together in competition, my article on how to trigger flow state before a round goes deeper into the mental preparation side.
Inhibition, in the Initial Alexander Technique sense, does not mean suppression or willpower. It means pausing before the habitual response fires. When you address a golf ball, your nervous system runs a deeply familiar programme: it produces the head position, the shoulder set, the grip pressure, the spine angle that it knows. Not the optimal version. The familiar version. Inhibition is the practice of inserting a pause before that programme runs, so that you have the space to give Conscious Guidance and Control to what happens next.
This is genuinely difficult work, and it is one of the reasons I say that this journey means working against your human nature. The brain maps the movements you repeat most frequently and wheels them out automatically. Pre-season and pre-round, inhibition practice is about interrupting that automaticity in a low-stakes environment, so that when competition arrives, the better pattern has had enough rehearsal to be accessible. This connects directly to the problem I describe in the end gaining trap: when golfers focus only on the result, they bypass the process attention that inhibition requires, and the habitual posture patterns run unchecked.
(Try: Inhibition at Address -- available in the Training section of the app)
The goal of all this pre-round and pre-season work is to internalise the new posture patterns until they are natural, and natural under pressure. That phrase is important because many golfers manage to find good posture in low-pressure practice and then watch it dissolve when competition arrives. The reason is that competitive pressure activates the nervous system, and an activated nervous system defaults to the most deeply ingrained patterns. If the deeply ingrained pattern is the old, habitual posture, pressure will always find it.
The solution is repetition of the new pattern, specifically in the kinds of mental conditions that simulate pressure. The breathwork, the relaxation sequences, the inhibition practice, these are not just physical conditioning tools. They build the neural pathway between conscious postural direction and actual body organisation, and they build it in a calm, attentive state that gradually becomes accessible even when you are on the 18th hole with a score to protect.
I would encourage any golfer serious about this kind of transformation to read about the model-based approach to improvement described in Why Every Golfer Needs a Model, Not Just Tips, because the posture work I am describing here only makes full sense within a coherent model. Random drills do not build the integrated change we are after. You can also explore all mental game articles to see how this body work connects with the wider Better Game Golf programme.
Alignment with gravity is a phrase from Alexander Golf that describes the quality of body organisation in which the skeletal structure is arranged so that gravity supports rather than fights you. In practice, it means that your weight travels down through your joints cleanly, without the muscular bracing and compensatory tightening that most golfers carry without knowing it. When you find it, there is a distinct sense of ease, of length in the spine and freedom in the shoulders, that is quite different from consciously holding a position. For a golfer, this quality at address means the swing can initiate from a stable, free foundation rather than from a body that is already working hard just to hold its shape. It is built through the daily movement awareness and pre-round relaxation practices I describe in this article, not by holding positions on the range.
F.M. Alexander identified that our proprioception, the internal sense of where our body parts are and how they are moving, rewards the familiar, not the optimal. When you have spent years with a habitual posture pattern, that pattern feels right, even if it is mechanically disadvantageous. When you try to adopt a better position, it feels strange, even wrong. This is faulty sensory perception, and it is one of the most significant obstacles to genuine postural change in golf. The implication is that you cannot trust the feeling of what seems correct, especially in the early stages of change. This is why the pre-season and pre-round practices I recommend are done slowly, attentively, and with guidance rather than by feel alone. Over time, as the new patterns are repeated, the sensory feedback recalibrates and the better posture begins to feel natural.
Under pressure, the nervous system activates and defaults to its most deeply ingrained patterns, which is what the brain maps hold. If your most deeply ingrained postural pattern is the habitual, suboptimal one, pressure will reliably find it. This is not a mental weakness. It is how human neurology works. The only way around it is to repeat the new, better posture pattern enough times that it becomes as deeply mapped as the old one, and to repeat it in conditions of mental calm so that the nervous system associates it with a steady, available state. This is exactly what the pre-round relaxation sequence and breathwork practices build: not just better posture, but better posture that is accessible when it matters.
Three-compartment breathing, breathing into the abdomen first, then the chest, then the neck, directly affects postural tone because shallow breathing recruits the muscles of the upper chest and neck as secondary breathing muscles. That chronic recruitment creates tightness in the head-neck area, which Alexander identified as the primary control of overall body organisation. Tight there means compromised everywhere below. A daily practice of three-compartment breathing, built into your pre-season and pre-round routine, gradually releases this upper body tension and allows the spine to find its natural length. Golfers consistently tell me that this single practice changes how they feel at address more than any positional correction they have received from a teacher.
In the Initial Alexander Technique, inhibition does not mean willpower or suppression. It means deliberately pausing before the habitual pattern fires, so that you have space to give Conscious Guidance and Control to what happens next. Applied to golf posture, it means pausing at address before you settle into your familiar set-up, noticing the pull of old habits, and choosing to direct yourself into better alignment rather than defaulting. In pre-round practice, you build inhibition by setting up to the ball slowly and deliberately, specifically noticing and not following the urge to rush into your habitual position. Over weeks and months, this pause becomes available even under pressure because you have rehearsed it so many times in low-stakes conditions.
Pre-season is the ideal time because competitive pressure is absent and you have the bandwidth to do the slower, more attentive work that genuine postural change requires. I would suggest a minimum of six to eight weeks of consistent daily practice before your competitive season begins: morning breathwork, regular total body relaxation sequences, daily movement awareness in your non-golf activities, and inhibition practice at slow-speed address work. This is not a quick fix. The brain maps that hold your habitual posture took years to build, and the new patterns need consistent repetition to become available naturally under pressure. Starting the work in pre-season, rather than mid-season when results are on the line, gives those patterns the best chance of taking hold before they are tested.
You can make meaningful progress using the practices described in this article and available in the Better Game Golf app. The three-compartment breathwork, the total body relaxation sequence, the daily movement awareness, and the inhibition practice at address are all things you can do independently. That said, faulty sensory perception means that self-directed work has real limitations: you will not always be able to feel what is optimal because the familiar feels correct. Working with someone trained in Alexander Golf, even for a short period, gives you external feedback that recalibrates your internal sense. Think of the framework, the app, and the specialist as scaffolding. As I describe it, scaffolding needs to be there for something new to be built.
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