Chris Wilke is the Co-Owner of Stretch Affect in San Diego, California.
Here in San Diego, we have beautiful weather and a lifestyle desired by people across the country. However, golf fitness hasn’t yet taken a stronghold on the many golfers we have in our corner of the world. The Titleist Performance Institute is based less than 40 miles north of San Diego, which has helped bring awareness and education to the golfers who we’re striving to attract. Now it’s up to us to continue the trend.
When learning the ropes at TPI, I inquired about local resources who I could work with in growing the concepts of golf fitness. To my dismay, there weren’t many options, and with that I knew there was an opportunity to bring my education and expertise to the golfers of our area.
In concept, Stretch Affect has been around for four years, working primarily in corporate wellness centers. At the same time, I was working with a lot of different athletes independently, some of whom were golfers. My business partner, Kyle Valery, and I decided that we needed to have our own spot. The way that we see wellness, mobility, stability, strength and power is rather different from the way many of our contemporaries do. After all, we’ve been a part of at least a dozen facilities between us, and that wide range of experience helped shape our own outlook on golf fitness.
The biggest concept I’ve learned is having a holistic perspective, even if you don’t have the capacity to provide every component of the program. I consider TPI co-founder Greg Rose to be a mentor of mine, and we share a similar philosophy on the team approach. We may not be golf instructors at Stretch Affect, but we want to be able to speak the language. Without that, it’s more difficult to communicate with swing coaches, making it harder to connect the dots for our mutual clients and students. Everyone deserves to have a team that can manage all of their issues, from their nutrition to their mobility to their golf swing.
We put every new client through a full lifestyle and movement assessment, and conduct a TPI golf screen, a Selective Functional Movement Assessment (SFMA) and various other functional range system evaluations.We will refer anything that is outside our scope to trusted experts with whom we have networked and developed trusting relationships.
Over the years we’ve found that people simply cannot physically move the way they’re trying to with a golf club in their hands. Our programming, and the input of colleagues, help rectify those deficiencies in a planned and organized manner. Through the years, many of these individuals have tried to develop a better golf swing by beating balls on the range and taking lessons that just didn’t touch on the key issue – the body. We teach them about what their body needs, and how to start implementing self-care. This is often the first step to a healthier lifestyle, on and off the golf course.
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