My name is Adrian Friar and I have been the Captain of the Seniors Section at Marston Lakes in Sutton Coldfield this year. My top priority for the year was to get members out on the course.
Golf to some may be all about the competitions, team matches and handicaps, but for the most of us it means something much more important. It’s about maintaining both our mental and physical health and it’s about getting out onto the course and meeting up with friends.
Short 9-hole courses like Marston Lakes and Darnford Moors give seniors the opportunity to play multiple time in a week. How? Because at just 2023 yards long the stresses and strains placed on the body are not such that it gets too fatigued and can’t recover quickly enough. It can and does. And the benefits to playing several times a week are many.
Apart from getting out and socialising and keeping isolation at bay, a person’s muscular strength, power and endurance can be maintained and even increased. It can also help movement, co-ordination and circulation and certainly lower your stress levels! What other sport can you play well into your 80s?
And if you have never heard of ‘Microdosing’; it simply means:
Being subjected to repeated small doses of training and it is the new training method for elite sportsmen and women of many sports.
This is simply about finding a persons minimal effective dose for maintaining their fitness, core strength and stamina – and where there is no element of fatigue or stress on the body. And this is what small courses like Marston Lakes provide – microdosing of a kind – the perfect minimal effective dose.
At Marston Lakes even our senior seniors (over 75) get out several times a week. They are able to play 9 or 18 holes on the main course or 9 or 18 holes on the par 3 Pitch and Putt course. A good captain looks after the men in his section and encourages them to play what suits their level of fitness.
