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”
Strength and Golf 