Q: What is the best type of cross training to help improve my game? What muscles need the most attention?

A: I'm going to take your question broadly, Collins, by assuming you mean the best thing to do for your disc golfing body in general.

HERE WE GO

First off, if you do nothing at all or very little, any exercise will be a welcome change. Plus more exercise will greatly enhance your sense of well-being, which could, conceivably, improve your golf game.

We're talking about getting in shape, right? Don't answer, that was rhetorical.

At 47 years old, and generally fluctuating in and out of shape at a fairly low level, in terms of what's best for the body, I have my nods, recommendations, and an absolute save-your-life-fix-your-body favorite.

Running, swimming and biking are all good, and certainly there are disc golf advantages to having a strong heart and lungs. So here's a little nod to all triathletes who have no problem climbing the hill to the next hole. It's good not to be breathing hard when you throw a disc. But cardio has but a small part in the training pyramid of your typical disc golf athlete.

Better is resistance training. One proven path for sculpting some gristle is the gym, which can range from the brickyard variety, with double-Y-Chromosome men on steroids yelling "You're huge!" at each other, to the more spandexy crowd, with the latest spray-and-wipe-between-sets-please machines with gearing smooth as silicon spray on a 160 Sky-styler.

THAT'S CALLED PRODUCT PLACEMENT, IN CASE YOU'RE WONDERING

What type of resistance training you do isn't as important as actually doing something. If you go to a gym and get some exercise without hurting yourself, and get into it, it will most likely help your golf game. It at least will make you feel better. Has anyone noticed that exercise is the cure for depression? YES, beer, too. But exercise has fewer calories. Of course you have to do real exercises, and effort is the key to success. By all means finish with cardio, but if you're reading a magazine while doing it, that is so lame.

THAT'S RIGHT, TOUGH LOVE BABY

Nautilus machines and their brethren, along with dumb bells, and pulleys are very effective in building strength. You get a nice comfortable burn in plenty of bodily areas. Course, if you have a set of dumbbells, a pull-up bar, a dip station, and a couple rubber bands for practically everything from recovery to the disc golf throwing motion, that's a lot of muscles, too. Plus it's impossible to go to the gym in the summer.

As always, just having stuff doesn't improve your fitness. You have to have a lot of enthusiasm (self-disgust works, too), a plan and a schedule. And make your workouts manageable. Don't do my other favorite, cause you'll start to hate all exercise in general.

WAIT, BEER REALLY HAS MORE CALORIES THAN EXERCISE?

My other recommendation is called plyometrics and is much too hard for most of us. I did it once on New Year's Day a couple years ago, and was sore for half the week. One year I coached high school girl's tennis and, along with yoga, we did plyometrics twice a week for about two months. Those girls were so drama queen funny about barely being able to walk for the first two or three weeks. I did it, too. A workout, for instance might start with 30 lateral jumps back and forth over the tennis line, followed by a minute of rest and 30 more jumps. Then a few sets of 10 standing long jumps in succession. Our favorite was hopping the length of the gym and back on one foot, then the other. Always resting between sets, with new exercises each time, and in a different order.

You probably would have to be rich enough to hire a sadistic personal trainer to make you do plyometrics regularly, though. Still, that entire tennis team including their coach, had a bounce in its step that year, once we all stopped limping.

FINALLY

My absolute transform your body workout has to be Bikram Yoga. It's more or less 26 postures each done twice in a row in a room heated to about 105 F in front of a wall that's a full-length mirror in your bathing suit with your fat gut hanging out. Do people faint? No, they lie down first. Actually you're supposed to first just stand there, warrior-like, then sit or kneel down, then finally, when you've completely given up and know you're going to faint, lie down flat on your back. I've lain down during a Bikram Yoga class. Sometimes you get dizzy and it's tough to get undizzy. Do you have serene thoughts? It depends whether fantasies about killing the teacher can be considered serene.

A Bikram class lasts 90 murderous minutes. There are classes all the time, three to five a day, every single day. I went last week to cleanse the body in compensation for the upcoming Vibram Open Five Days of Death. Death in a good way, of course, but still death.

The balancing poses require a lot of focus, and possibly could help putting. The range of motion, concentration and strength that so many of the poses work on could very easily lead to smoother, more powerful drives, and an overall game involving more mindfulness. Yoga, if you've never done it, teaches how to move the body new ways. A lot of it is squeezing the gunk out of the organs, but initially it's all about lengthening the muscles, which is essential for counteracting the flexibility we lose as we slowly emerge - at least physically - from our extended adolescence.

Sincerely,

Torque Novitski, Marshall Street

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