So where does strength training come into the golf world?

Now as stated in the first blog post, and by way of the name of this blog, golf is going to be a portion of my posts. Golf is a sport that requires immense strength and explosiveness combined with sensitive coordination and an innate ability to time all of these elements correctly. For the golfers reading this who aren’t largely involved in the strength community lets first define this explosiveness. Power or “explosiveness” can be broken down into a formula of (Power=force x distance) furthermore force can be broken down to more easily understand strength, which in turn helps us identify power, (The sum of forces=Mass x acceleration). So in an effort to simplify all of this scientific jumble it basically means your power or explosiveness equals the amount of force you put into the golf club multiplied by the length of your downswing. The force is broken down into the mass of the club multiplied by the acceleration your body applies to it from the top of your backswing up until impact.

I know that this may seem confusing and people are thinking “why do I care about this?”or “why does it matter?” Well one thing I’ve picked up on in most classes or books is you have to be able to define what you’re trying to teach in order to have somewhere to go back and say “again this is what we are trying to prove or improve.” In this case it’s what we are trying to improve, we are trying to increase the power of the golf swing. We all know with more club head speed (acceleration) comes more distance the golf ball will travel, you need to be able to control that speed and the club face at impact but that’s what a golf teaching professional is for, i.e not me.

As we can see in the above scientific formula that strength lies within power. It’s the same in the real world application. INCREASING your strength will INCREASE your power. For the fitness people still reading this means the easiest way to increase your power clean/hang clean/snatch/clean and jerk is to increase your strength. Yes you can increase these movements be advancing in the technical proficiency of it, and yes that must be practiced as well because it is a skilled movement. But the best way to increase the amount of weight lifted in these movements is to increase strength. Most of you involved in Olympic lifting know this, or should know this.

What’s the best way to increase your strength then? Which is what most golfers should be asking themselves right now. Well my most simple and what most, if not all, (well probably not all there are always two sides to an opinion) strength coaches will tell you is to start by linearly progressing in the BASIC COMPOUND BARBELL MOVEMENTS (that’s capitalized because they’re important fyi). The next logical question would be well what are those movements and this is the secret, very classified stuff here guys. THE SQUAT, DEADLIFT, BENCH PRESS, AND OVERHEAD PRESS. That’s it. That’s all. I could stop right here and tell 99.9% of general public golfers to start here. Don’t worry about all the other BS out there, the weight loss gimmicks/HIIT(you’ll come to find I hate that acronym)/circuit training/box jumps/everything else. Now circuit training and sprints (HIIT) have their place in fitness, but the point of this article was to define power or “explosiveness” and how to increase it, and the answer is through increasing your overall strength. At the very basis of power lies strength you NEED it, not just in golf but in life in everything you do no matter who you are.You increase strength by getting in the gym and doing 3 sets of 5 reps (we will get into sets and rep ranges another time) of each lift, then next time (here comes the linear progression part which is NECESSARY), increase the weight of the squat and deadlift by 5-10 pounds and each of the pressing movements by 5 pounds at most. Start with the bar for all I care.

Now some of you reading (if you’ve gotten to this point) will be screaming you can’t just do that you need correct form, some may even say you have to have x degrees of ankle dorsiflexion before you can deadlift (that’s BS). The form part is critical yes but there are THOUSANDS of videos out there on how to correctly execute these movements, if your reading this you can google them. My favorite teacher and someone who also has a FANTASTIC program for beginners that’s FREE is Mark Rippetoe, the author of starting strength. Google him watch his youtube videos on how to perform these movements. Read his articles he’s a very smart guy and you can learn a lot from him.

Even if you don’t golf, or play any sports at all, strength is something EVERYONE needs in their life, men and women. You owe it to yourself to put an hour of your day investing in your health and your body, ask anyone who’s older and came from being out of shape and got involved in strength training, each and every one of them will tell you they wish they had started sooner.

I saw a quote once I don’t remember who said it, but it said “we spend our whole lives wasting our health to gain money, and in our later years we use all our money to try to regain our health”

My current strength program

Now that I’ve written about and explained why I started this blog I guess the first thing is to try to explain my current program, my goals, and my training history.

Let’s first go through my training history and “training age.” I started lifting back in high school because it was required if you wanted to play football. I never took it too seriously in high school, even though we ran a good program, but as any beginner I had decent results over the years (I could have done 30 seconds of the shake weight and gotten results as could any beginner, thats why that kind of stuff sells). I instead chose to screw around with friends like any high school kid and not really pay attention to the importance of what I was doing.

Once I got to college things didn’t get too much better even though I was in a sports medicine field I was extremely inconsistent in the weight room going maybe once a week (you’ll find out that CONSISTENCY and DISCIPLINE are the two biggest factors in the strength and fitness world). That is until my last year of college I really picked up on lifting 3-4 times per week and 5 times a week in the summer of that year. I saw my best results yet, and began to realize that this is what I really like doing, having a background in anatomy by this time, I knew I could eventually do something in this field as far as training others. Thing was during that time I hopped from program to program of essentially all the same stuff 3-4 sets of 8-12 reps and I hit a plateau HARD. For the next few years I did the same thing over and over expecting different results (pretty sure that’s the definition of insanity… and looking back now I don’t know what led me to think I would get something different doing the same things).

For the last yearish (that should be a word) I have finally found and stuck to a program that legitimately WORKS, and it’s all thanks to a guy named Jim Wendler. His 5/3/1 program and all of it’s variants were the answer for me and showed me that training for strength is what I’ve really been looking for. Since then I have not only gotten stronger and gotten to watch my numbers on the 4 major lifts skyrocket I’ve found an even greater passion for learning about strength and fitness. I’ve learned more from his books, articles, and programs than I ever did in any strength class or book (including the one they make you use for the Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist test).

So as of now I am currently running one of his many variants of the 5/3/1 program. I’m more than capable of creating my own program and have before but as with all the other programs I could never stick to it. I’ve even created programs for my friends and family and have seen them get great results (granted they’re based on the 5/3/1 principles). I needed something made by someone else for whatever reason. You can type in Jim Wendler 5/3/1 into google and find thousands of results that will explain the vanilla 5/3/1 program that he came out with years ago (09 I think?..). Since then he has expanded exponentially on it and improved it in the same regard. Everything in the program is percentage based around your training max or which is 85-90% of your true one rep max (depending on what program you’re running). Again if anyone is really interested in it I suggest you search for it and learn, once you understand and apply it you will see progress without a doubt.

My current goals with this program are to compete in a powerlifting meet later this year (it’ll be my first one and I’ll finally have an official number for my squat, bench, and deadlift). I know this isn’t a true powerlifting program, but I’m not looking to become a powerlifter, I just want an official total number. I’m going to stick with his formatting of program for the time being because it’s based on the LONG term. If I decide to do another meet at some point then I will try a specialized program like sheiko.

For anyone that wants numbers my current 1RM’s at 173lb are

Parallel Squat-325           Deadlift- 375           Bench Press- 245

Why I started a Strength and Golf Blog

There are a few reasons I’ve decided to start this blog, the first being I feel I have enough experience in the fitness industry to make a notable contribution to it in the way of writing. I studied Athletic Training in college passed my boards to become an ATC (sports medicine for those unaware) and decided I wanted more. I studied for and passed the test to become a certified strength and conditioning specialist,  and have read extensively over the years since then on everything fitness related that I can find. I want to put my input out there whether anyone actually sees it or not. I have experience of testing strength programs not only on myself but on others as well. I have workout logs from programs that I’ve used on friends to increase their strength and overall fitness that objectively show incredible progress over weeks and months of consistent training, along with the countless hours of rehab I’ve done with student athletes at my current job.

I feel like I know enough to finally write about it and show what I can do to help others.

Second reason being my passion for golf. The intricacy’s of how the body has to move in order to make clean contact with the ball fascinates me. It’s so smooth yet powerful at the same time. Everything has to be done almost flawlessly, and in such a short amount of time it truly is amazing the level of control, and power required to be good at this sport. I want to examine how strength, mobility, and overall fitness tie into this sport, and how people can improve their level of fitness to improve their golf game and overall well being.  I’ve played several sports in my life, I absolutely love football and wish I could still play to this day, but since I no longer have that option golf has taken its place. I was taught at a young age of roughly 10 and never took it very seriously, playing occasionally over the years just for fun, until I graduated from college which is when I really started concentrating on it. I think I really enjoy it because it’s some what like strength training, I can work at it and objectively see my scores/number get better. Granted there are occasional bad days or weeks but just like in fitness if you are consistent in your approach to improving you will be able to look back on years and see your improvement.

Overall I hope to reach someone with this blog that will genuinely enjoy reading the content and hopefully learn something from it. If not then I guess I’ll have somewhere to go to look back on all of my thoughts.