Never Neglect Strength For Optimal Golf Fitness

What we neglect with strength is the fact that golf is a violent sport, and it sounds funny to say but if you actually look at the numbers, there’s 2000 pounds of force produced in a golf swing, and for a lot of us that falls on our spine and through our joints. If you also think about the speed that’s required, it’s not just 2000 pounds, but it’s 2000 pounds and the flap of a butterfly’s wing. It’s a violent sport, and the fact of the matter is you’re transferring energy from the ground through your body to the club and to the ball. Essentially the ground and our body start that energy transfer. Therefore, it would make sense that we would want our strength to be as optimal as possible to appropriately handle that transfer of energy and that force.

At Motus Rx Physical Therapy, we typically put a lot of our golfers through a 3D analysis. One of the things that a 3D analysis does is it shows us the sequence of energy through your body. At the top of your swing, there’s going to be a point in time when you start coming down to the ball. That golf swing where you actually will generate energy first should be through the ground and through your legs. That force then goes through your core, through your torso, your shoulder blades, to the arms, and into the club and ultimately the ball. That is the proper golf swing sequence of energy. That demand also should prioritize, or that order, should prioritize the aspects of our golf swing that we want to focus on. The number one thing that I see, or the most under-trained aspect that I see in the golfers I work with, is lack of leg strength and a lack of stability and balance in the lower body. Yet, really, this is the part, and the ground and the legs are the parts, that start that sequence of the golf swing. That piece of the golf swing must be trained first so that you can interact with the ground well. Additionally, you have to be able to transfer that energy from your lower body to your core, your trunk to your arms, your arms, and your hand to the club.

If we really want to look at what the golf swing is, we should be prioritizing:

1.     Leg strength

2.     Hip strength and core strength

3.     Shoulder blade and shoulder strength

4.     Grip strength

We want to prioritize the strength and building the capacity in these areas.

STRENGTH FOR GOLFERS

If you get stronger, you’re going to be able to increase your force production and create your speed potential. This is not just because you’re stronger. Just because you are stronger does not guarantee speed. Just because you have speed does not guarantee distance. Although, there is an order that these things go in. It’s hard to create speed and add distance without having strength and solid force production. If you don’t have some speed, it doesn’t guarantee distance…but it does make it difficult to have the distance you want. If you can’t generate speed, it makes it hard to obtain an efficient golf swing.

Another very underrated thing about strength is this is where a lot of golfers lose posture. Now, as you start moving your body, you go through this crazy dynamic of something supposed to be stable and something supposed to be moving. Technically, I’m supposed to be moving my body three dimensions. If you don’t have that strength or capacity to move your body in multiple dimensions, your body will automatically take the path of least resistance. In this case, you’re going to end up coming out of posture and move and change some of those original posture lines that you set up which leads to inconsistency.

So, there’s an element of overdoing things. Can you overdo your volume on the golf course, overdo it in the gym, overdo running and then end up with more problems? Yes. I think we’ve seen some examples of that already with some guys on PGA tour, but ultimately if you do it right, it’s programmed appropriately, works around your season, and takes into consideration the key times you want to play it can only benefit you.

Obvious one again, is that strength can take stress off of your back and other key joints. These other joints include but are not limited to, the back, knees, and shoulders. The more you can get key areas taking on strength or taking on stress and doing their job, the less likely the stress is to fall onto joints, which can cause breakdown or pain over time. Obtaining stronger ligaments can help prevent injury and build capacity to be on the course as long as you would desire.

Yet there is another underrated facet of strength training to improve your golf game, golf score, golf swing, and golf sequencing pattern. If you’re an individual who likes to play a lot, or when you do play, maybe it’s going to be heavy on the weekends and then you don’t do much during the week. We really can build a good capacity for volume with strength. If you want to golf 36 holes on the weekend, Motus Rx Physical Therapy can help build your stamina through strength training to allow you to do that regularly.

Long story short, the stronger you get, especially in the off season, the more capacity you have to play as much as you want, both in frequency and duration. I always look at strength training for golf or any other sport, when done right, it’s like building a cup. You have this cup and every time you play golf, the cup fills a little bit, the stronger you can get. The bigger capacity you can build is when the cup starts to get bigger and bigger. Every time you play golf, you’re filling in water, but you’re never really overflowing the cup. The golfers that don’t necessarily have the strength and they play a lot have a very small cup and they fill that cup quickly as their body only has so much capacity to handle the stresses that are being placed on it.

Best Path To Improvement With Strength For Golfers

There’s a right way to go about strength training for golf. Now, if you’re already kind of heavy hitter in the gym, or you are advanced on the strength side of things, this still matters. You still need a lot of the foundational things for golf that you do other sports. It’s not to say that golf is this incredibly unique, different sport, but when we’re introducing the strength aspect, we want to start with the things that we know are essential for the golf swing. As you progress, then we get into some of the foundational things that are going to add on to that.

When we start training for golf, we complete strength training strategies that help the body resist. When I say resist movement, or it’s also known as isometrics, all I mean is your muscles are working through a range of motion. It would be like me taking my fist and gently pushing into a wall, I’m not going to knock the wall over, and I’m not moving, but my muscles are going through a decent amount of work to kind of fight back against the wall. This is this anti-movement or resist movement type strategy that we always want to start with golfers. This is because isometric strength or anti-movement strength patterns, are the easiest and least threatening way to introduce some load to the body. In isometric strength patterns you’re not going through these big ranges of motion because there’s not a lot of speed involved. Instead, you’re going to work on the muscle development and start getting that muscle good at taking on stress, but it’s not overly risky. The other thing is, it’s very simple. A lot of these exercises you don’t need a lot of equipment for, or you don’t need to be going to the gym or anything crazy. If somebody is just looking to get started, it’s very, very low hanging fruit to work on some of this stuff. So, start working on anti-movement or isometric type exercises first.

The next phase of golf strength training would be resistance ranges of motion. This would be exercises such as the hinge, squat, push, pull, rotate, and carry. These exercises are the key elements of a program. When we start moving through a range of motion, we want to work on a hinge, which is more of a dead lift pattern that can have a bunch of different variations on it. We also want to work on a squat, which is exactly what it sounds like and that has a lot of different variations as well. Moreover, we want to work on more of a push, which can be straight forward or up and down, or more of a pull which can be forward and back or up and down. Rotating exercises obviously carry over to golf a little bit. These exercises are good for transferring that rotational force through the body. Lastly, carrying movement patterns are great for grip strength and hip stability.

These stages and movement patterns make for a simple to program. I can figure out where somebody is in their strength progression and how advanced they are. If they’re really starting from square one, we’re going to start basic. We would start working on double leg patterns or double arm patterns using a little bit more of your muscles to try to generate the movement pattern. Then we would get more challenging and dynamic by moving to a single arm or a single leg type exercise. With these exercises you start focusing on stability and the challenges that come with that.

And again, then a large portion of the program focuses on the rotational aspect of the golf swing. It is essential to work on separation of your upper and lower body. A lot of power for golfers is generated by being able to kind of whip your body, so move the pelvis separately from the upper body.

Strength For Golfers And Golf Fitness Is Necessary, But Not Enough

There is something called the “Rate of Force Development.” What that is, is how quickly somebody can tap into the strength that they have. In order to be able to improve that rate of force development, you have to have a prerequisite of strength. It’s very challenging for you to move fast, and go through an athletic movement like a golf swing if you do not have the strength. But again, just because you have the strength, doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to be able to move fast. What we’re really talking about here is power. What we’re looking for with the golf swing is power.

There’s two ways to think about this. I kind of prefer thinking of it as power is work produced, divided by time. So, you need to have strength to produce a high amount of work. But power is how quickly can that work take place? So, you divide that work by the amount by the time that it takes. If you have a high work production, but it takes you a while to do it, that still doesn’t give you a very high amount of power production. Opposite way, which we’ll talk about in layman’s terms in a second, but that is also to say, if you don’t have a lot of strength production, or you can’t produce a lot of work, then the time that you have to do something is so, so quick and almost nearly impossible that it makes that equation kind of a moot point if you don’t have that top end or that work production.

This concept is basically referring to our ability to create strength in the golf swing rapidly. You have to be able to develop power. You have to be able to tap into a decent amount of strength in a timely fashion or in a rapid fashion. Just for frame of reference, there are some studies that will show it takes the typical human 500 milliseconds to tap into their full-strength potential. The downswing of the golf swing and the transition takes place in less than 300 milliseconds. So, you can see where just having strength doesn’t always get us where we need to go because you need to be able to tap into that relatively quickly.