You use primarily the same muscles during golf backswings and forward swings, although you use them differently. During the backswing, you lengthen your muscles, creating more power. During the forward swing, you contract muscles, creating club speed using the power you generated during the backswing.
Muscle Contractions
When you move muscles, you lengthen or shorten them. Think of a golf swing as if you were shooting a rubber band. When you pull the rubber band back, you stretch it and make it longer, creating the power that's going to snap it forward. This is similar to a golf backswing. When you release the rubber band, it shortens and snaps back to its original position. This would be similar to a golf forward swing.
Kinetic Chain of Events
During the golf backswing, you do not use all of your muscles equally, at once. Although the golf swing may seem like one, continuous motion, it's actually made up of different links in a chain of events. Depending on your stroke, you first break your wrists back slightly to start the clubhead moving backward and release tension in your forearms. You then begin moving the club backward by turning your torso and shoulder, pushing your arms and the club backward. Some players incorrectly start the swing by moving the arms back, pulling the shoulders and torso. This uses the same muscles, but in different ways and to different degrees. During the backswing, you also push down on your legs, shift your weight and turn your hips backward.
Muscles Used
You use most of your muscles during the backswing, including the calves, quadriceps, hip flexors, glutes, abdominals, obliques, shoulders, biceps, deltoids, lats and trapezius. The lower body creates reactive power when you bend your knees and push downward on your lead leg during the backswing, then push up during the forward swing. Your core also creates reactive power during the pivot turn, which occurs as you turn backward, then forward. Your arms primarily go along for the ride during the backswing and the initial phase of the forward swing, with your arms and wrists working more independently as you turn over your forearms and hands to create the wrist snap that occurs just before contact with the ball.
Muscle Contributions
According to "Muscle Activity During the Golf Swing," published in the "British Journal of Sports Medicine" in 2005, the most active muscle during the backswing is the upper trapezius, along the neck, shoulders and back, on the right side of the body for a right-handed golfer. The middle trapezius is the next most active, followed by the subscapularis, near the front of the shoulders, and the upper serratus muscles, which run along the upper ribs, on the left side. In the lower body, the most active muscles, in order, are two hamstring muscles -- the semimembranosus and the long head of the biceps femoris -- on the right side; the erector spinae on the lower back; and the abdominal oblique on the left side.
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