Chapter 2: Key Components of Golf Fitness
Time spent on improving your golf specific fitness levels is time very well spent if your goals are to shoot lower scores, rocket your drives and lose some pounds. In order to achieve better physical performance on the golf course, we must begin by developing programs that focus on the qualities that are needed to develop a powerful, balanced and efficient golf swing:
- Speed
- Strength
- Suppleness/Flexibility
- Balance/Stability
- Endurance
- Eye Hand Coordination
- Proprioception
- Nutrition
Many of these qualities are reliant on each other during the execution of the golf swing. Knowing this, it is of the utmost importance that when we condition ourselves for increased golf power, we challenge as many of these qualities as possible when selecting and executing our golf-specific exercises.
Golf-Specific Training Produces Golf-Specific Power
I was very lucky during my time running track at the University of Oregon to be exposed to some of the best speed and strength coaches the United States has to offer. I learned hands-on techniques that drastically improved my power, strength, flexibility and speed. I also learned many very valuable training lessons from my coach, Tony Veney.
It is my goal to pass onto you as many of these training secrets as I can so that you too can realize amazing increases in golf specific power and overall golf performance.
I remember one particular conversation with Coach Veney during my freshman year of college. I was asking him why we didn’t spend more of our time in the weight room doing heavy squats and other “traditional” conditioning exercises. His response was:
- Why would we spend 50% of our time training movements that we might use for only 1% of your race? We are going to focus our efforts on the things that will make you a better and faster sprinter.
- They don’t hand out medals for bench and squat at the finish line of the 100 meters. They hand medals to the fastest runners. The clock doesn’t care how much you lift.
This lesson sticks with me to this day and speaks a world of truth. Certain exercises work much better than others when it comes to running fast and the same is true when it comes to swinging fast. For example, it is useless to do ANY exercise on a machine (unless you are injured or returning from an injury) because the lever that you press to move the weight can typically only move in one direction.
Typically a machine activates just your prime movers, which are the main muscles that produce force. Your pectoralis major and minor (chest muscles) are a great example of prime movers. Activating just your prime movers is great if you are a bodybuilder and do not worry about functional strength, but it is bad news if you are a golfer looking to improve performance.
Functional vs Non-Functional Strength
For instance, a shoulder press machine will only let you move the lever (the part that you grip) for the weight basically straight up and down. Because the machine puts the weight on a specific track, all you have to do is push up and down.
This is not a very functional motion because in the real world your shoulder operates in three dimensions, which are frontal (front to back slices), sagittal (left to right slices), and transverse (up to down slices) planes. A machine will typically only work on one, maybe two planes of motion. If life and golf happen in three dimensions, why would you want to train in one dimension?
Compare using a machine for a shoulder press to using dumbbells for the exact same exercise. The dumbbells are not very stable on their own, so your body is forced to stabilize them. You are forced to raise and lower the weight while at the same time prevent it from traveling either in front of or behind your body and must also keep the weight from rotating in your hands.
Stabilizers Are Key for Improved Golf Power
Part of the reason that free weight exercises are so much more effective than machines at increasing golf specific strength is because free weight exercises strongly activate a group of muscles called stabilizers. You can think of them as the transmission of your muscles.
In the golf swing your prime movers are the engines that produce the rotational force and the stabilizers efficiently transfer that force from your hands to the club and eventually the ball. Your engine is your abs and back or “core”. It is the source of all athletic power. Your stabilizers are like the transmission and transfer the force generated by your core to the tires (your hands) which make the car go faster (makes you swing faster). Poorly trained stabilizers mean that power is lost as force flows throughout the body. This results in a weaker swing with less club head speed and less distance
Using our previous shoulder press example, during the movement the stabilizers in the shoulder complex become extremely active to help the shoulder both produce and deliver power while at the same time help it distribute and transfer forces evenly throughout the shoulder complex. This prevents one portion of the shoulder from receiving all the energy at once which could possibly stretch, tear or in some other way injure the muscles, ligaments and tendons around your shoulder.
By putting a pair of dumbbells in your hands you activate and train prime movers and stabilizers together. This is absolutely critical for injury prevention and performance enhancement. It also tremendously increases the overall golf specific benefit of the exercise.
Speed is King
Another very important part of enhancing golf performance and increasing golf specific power levels is training with loads that will let you move at or near the speeds that you normally move in a golf swing. It has been proven time and time again that individuals looking to enhance power levels should train with loads and speeds as close as possible to those of the actual sport (5,11,12,13,14).
This means that you do not want to spend most of your time doing heavy benches or similar movements that don’t, in some manner, replicate the movements of the golf swing. Some of the questions you have to think about when creating a golf-specific training program are:
- Why am I making this individual do this exercise? Will this help their golf game?
- Are we spending this person’s time on the things that will make him/her a better golfer? For most golfers, this means spending less time on the range and starting to participate in a golf-specific training program.
When I designed the Pure Power Program, I had a very specific purpose in mind: to make you the best golfer you can possibly be in as short of a time span as possible. Every exercise and every workout was meticulously thought out and organized so that you could realize performance enhancement and health benefits with a very reasonable time commitment.
The content mentioned in this chapter (machines vs free weights, the importance of training stabilizers and speed of movement) are just small samples of the considerations that went into making the Pure Power Program. Remember, for most golfers, your golf specific fitness is your weakest link in the performance chain, and your chain is only as strong as your weakest link.
Chapter 2-Key Components of Golf Fitness Summary:
- Spend your training time and energy performing the exercises that will produce the greatest gains in golf-specific power, flexibility and injury prevention in the shortest amount of time. Some exercises are definitely better than others in achieving this goal.
- When training, try to challenge as many of the qualities involved in golf performance as possible. No single quality (strength, speed, balance, etc) functions by itself in the swing, so there is little benefit in training each individual quality by itself in the gym.
- Your muscles function together in the golf swing so you must train them together. No single muscle group operates on its own at any time in the golf swing, so you should not spend a great deal of time isolating specific muscles.
- The Pure Power Program will show you what exercises are the most effective for your given golf specific fitness level. This eliminates the guesswork in selecting exercises and lets you know that you are doing the correct movements to improve your game, meaning you will get amazing results with a minimum time investment.
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