Hallelujah! I have hit balls for the first time this golf season!

I headed out to a range near me on Friday afternoon, the temperature climbing into the 70s F or low 20s C - take your pick, it was a beautiful afternoon.

And the range was busy. People who should have been at work, weren't. Golf is the single greatest culprit at slowing world economic production on a nice day.

After some too-quick stretches propelled by anticipation, I plunked down the first ball, took a couple of practice swings with my 7 iron and let 'er rip. A dandy.

And so the bucket went. Sure, there were a few snap hooks here and there, a case of my upper body starting the downswing a hair sooner than my lower body and my grip pressure too firm, especially in my right hand.

But, by and large, the balls went where I wanted them to go and with some decent height and distance.

Where I live, the grass hasn't rid itself of the winter doldrums, so it meant hitting off mats.

I don't like doing that. I actually had the club head of my Callaway 4-iron come loose two seasons ago from pounding mats too often at too many ranges early in the year.

In fact, I read recently on Frank Thomas's excellent site, Frankly Golf.com, that he is not a big fan of mats at all. He believes mats are too hard on the equipment and I think I agree.

Bearing that in mind, I didn't hit more than 4 or 5 shots with any one iron. And I spent about 60% of my time hitting my driver. I don't think mats are hard on drivers with the ball teed up.

It was the next day when I felt the effects of that one large bucket of balls. I was sore.

Now, I'm a guy who tries to work out at least twice a week and I have done a lot of cycling in years gone by.

But it's too easy to grow fat and lazy over the winter months when the pace of life seems to slow to a crawl.

My back muscles were sore - the direct result of a full shoulder turn and high hands. My triceps were sore and my neck was sore.

Lesson: stretch more and stretch regularly. So now I will make an attempt to incorporate a lot of stretching into my uneven workout regimen.

Coincidentally, a flyer has arrived in our door offering a free introductory yoga class. I can do yoga at home but I think I'll try the free class and seen what an organized class can do for my flexibility.

Yoga and stretching in general are being extolled for golfers my age (a youthful 55) and older. And there's a lot of sense in that as I have indicated in a very early post at eagleparbirdie.com.

Human beings work best when they're motivated by a goal. Mine is to be able to make a full shoulder turn to really coil up the power and be able to do it for 18 holes without knotting up the next day.

But my real motivation is to play better golf. That's the best goal of all, I think.