Common problems with lack of strength are pretty straightforward. I see upper body injuries fairly often. A common upper body injury I work with often is tennis elbow or golfer’s elbow.  I’ve gotten to the point now, thankfully, where if I saw an upper body injury with a golfer one of the first courses of action I’m taking is assessing their lower body strength and mobility. Typically, I’ll get a weird look from individuals that oozes, “This guy’s nuts. He’s one of those wack jobs who thinks that I got some energy force in my thumb pad that’s going to help my golf swing.”

The Root Cause Behind Upper Body Discomfort In Terms Of Lack Of Strength

If you think about the energy transfer, a lot of golfers, male amateurs especially, are so upper body dominant with their swing. In other words, they are trying to get all of their energy and force from their upper body, maybe their core, but it’s predominantly their core and arms. So, they end up kind of chopping at the ball like an axe, and with that there’s minimal lower body involvement. Over time, if you play enough golf, you probably never really had an elbow issue in the first place. Instead you had an issue with your swing pattern and how you transfer energy through your body. These two problems led you to overuse the elbow and lower body. Now all of a sudden, you have an elbow symptom, but the true problem was your lack of lower body strength. It is crucial to ensure that just because your shoulder hurts or your elbow hurts, because the golf swing is total body and it’s an energy transfer that’s supposed to happen, a lot of things can feel like a problem in one place, but are actually a problem stemming from something else.

My Lack of Strength In My Hips Can Cause Knee Pain?

Another common area coming from a lack of strength is knee pain. Especially on your lead leg, if you’re rotating into that knee and the hip is not doing its job strength-wise, that knee takes on more of the stress as a stable joint. If the knee’s not doing its job, then the knee all of a sudden takes on more stress than it has the capacity to handle. We’ll see people come in, with front knee pain or outer knee pain, and we will test their hips and their hips are garbage. Their quads and their thighs are actually relatively strong, but their hips aren’t really doing much for them. If you play enough golf, these problems build up over time. If you don’t play golf at all, and then you go and play your weekend warrior bash, they can really add up that way as well.

Lack Of Strength Causing Unwanted Back Pain

Back pain is easy. First of all, if we lose posture, if we’re coming out of posture, if we’re constantly changing posture within the swing, then your back is changing positions. With some of these movements there’s going to be some variation, that’s normal, but excessive variation of coming out of posture and losing posture, your back’s going to pay the price. But again, like I talked about in the upper body injury example, if your legs aren’t doing their job and you’re trying to start your swing from up top, or you’re starting to swing with your core, now you’re asking that core to do something where it was supposed to just be transferring energy from your legs to your body, now you’re actually trying to start the swing and initiate the swing with your back muscles or whatever it is. That usually doesn’t end up well for people. So if you haven’t gotten the hint yet, leg strength is uber, uber important for the golf swing.

Performance Affects Due To Lack Of Strength

Another underrated aspect, if you’re more of a walker and you like to play 18, play repeated rounds or multiple rounds a week, or you’ll play 36 in a day or whatever it is, there’s a different stress with the golf swing. It’s not cardio. It’s not walking on a treadmill for 30 minutes. You’re walking, but then you’re coming up to your ball, you’re analyzing, and then it’s that 2000 pounds of force in the flap of a butterfly’s wings. Over time, that power production and speed that is required is not matched with the strength to tolerate it. Without the strength to tolerate the appropriate amount of power and speed production, you’re going to become fatigued and lose energy. You’re probably going to feel a lot worse after your rounds. It obviously will affect your performance at some point if you’re not strong enough to handle that combination of a little bit of light cardio and a big power production in a flap of a butterfly’s wing. That takes its toll on you if you don’t have the strength to tolerate that type of conditioning.

Then obviously, playing multiple rounds in a day or in a week, your capacity is limited. When you play golf, it’s violent. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but if you have to make that powerful movement and it’s not being done correctly, or you don’t have the strength to do it, it’s going to be very tough to handle the repetitious nature of the swing.

Golf-Specific Training To Prevent Lack Of Strength

I don’t get too crazy about golf-specific training, meaning there’s a lot of different things that basketball players, football players, and some runners do. A majority of their workouts can help you and those types of workouts would help you for your golf game, but how you program those workouts and how you train for that is a little bit different. There’s a little bit of more specificity that needs to be done with golf-specific training.

In some instances, it’s all about resisting those movements and retaining isometric strength and tolerating some load without creating pain anywhere. But in other instances, it’s about how quickly and powerfully can you move through resistance and only do two, three, four reps at a time, and then rest. These are not really, really light 30 repetition type exercises. There is a little bit of specificity we look for when we do our golf-specific strength training.

How My Smash Factor Is Altered By Lack Of Strength

Losing club head speed results in loss of distance. I said at the beginning, club head speed does not guarantee distance. We have five or six actual, believe it or not, things that will affect distance, but one of the biggest ones is smash factor. Smash factor is ball speed divided by club head speed. You can be an efficient striker because of good technology and technique, but the ball can only go so fast if the club is not getting faster. Therefore, speed is a prerequisite for more distance.

Lack Of Strength’s Impact on Club Selection

Now, here’s an interesting one. If you don’t have the right kind of strength, you can actually be playing the wrong clubs. Not just club decisions while you’re on the course, but your actual technology, your actual equipment can be inappropriate for you. You might go in and somebody gives you the stock clubs for your age and may be what you should be swinging. You could also be playing with the wrong shafts. These are the wrong clubs because of a lack of strength. I would say that’s my little pitch for making sure you get fit or have somebody who understands the technology side to make sure that if your swing speed is a little bit slower and you’re not developing speed, then you might need a different set of clubs. Or if you were a little bit slower, but now you’re working on some of this stuff and you’re gaining speed, you also need to identify if you have the right technology as you gain speed as well.

What Now?

• If you found this information useful, be sure to check out our free e-book: 7 Golf Tips To Ease Pain & Swing Easier

• Listen to similar podcasts:

  • Episode 22: Transitioning to Speed & Power For Massive Distance

  • Episode 20: Strength: The Most Underrated Component Of The Golf Swing

  • Episode 17: The Real Way To Add Distance For Golf

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