Chris Finn and Par 4 Success

Claude welcomes Chris Finn, the founder of Par 4 Success, to discuss ways in which he gives golfers longevity in the game.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
You'd see some of a which podcast I heard was
Claude Harmon. My guest is Chris f Chris the golf
fitness space. You know, twenty years ago, we just didn't
see a lot of people doing what you do. You've
created a business and a company, and I think there
are a lot of people around the country and around
the world kind of doing what you're doing. But the

(00:25):
idea behind golf fitness, the idea behind are for success.
What was the reason why you wanted to get into
the kind of golf fitness space and what are some
things that you think the average golfer can learn from
golf fitness? But why also do you think the average
golfer is kind of afraid of golf fitness as well?

Speaker 2 (00:47):
Yeah, I think a couple as I think the first one,
Why did I get into it? I think, you know,
back in I don't know, probably twenty nine, twenty ten. Yeah,
it was still relatively new, right, I mean, Tiger was
out early two thousands. He was kind of the guy
that started making it popular on tour, you know, you know,
Greg and Dave a TPI, they were kind of starting
to become more popular throughout the fitness and medical space,
and I was an avid golfer at that point and

(01:09):
just decided I wanted to work with people who actually
wanted to get better, and who better to work with
than golf nuts, right, who will literally do anything. It's
been interesting. I think when I started it was it
was funny you talk about like building a business around it.
I joke with the guys. Now when I started, people
look at me. I'd be, hey, man, you want to
you know, I do golf fitness and they'd be like,
what the heck's that? They're like, you know, to your point,

(01:31):
they were like afraid of it. They're like I don't
need that, like I gotta take lessons or I need
joint And nowadays it's become much more mainstream with you know,
just all the guys work and the girls working out,
and it's just kind of it's become accepted. I think
the reason I got into it and at that point was,
you know, my limitation was they'd be like, hey, I
swing one hundred miles an hour as a you know,
as a forty five or sixty five year old guy,

(01:53):
Like is that good? And I'd be like, I don't know,
Tiger swings one twenty like this is what he looks like.
And so that was kind of the genesis Parker success
was trying to, you know, at this point, we built
the database for fifteen thousand golfers of amateurs, right, and
so we can tell somebody, Hey, if you're fifty five
and you have these physical restrictions, like this is how
fast you can safely swing, or this is how you
compare to other people your age. And I think people

(02:17):
inherently are afraid of golf fitness in a way because
they just don't know. It's an unknown. It's like anything
else in human nature. People are afraid of things that
they don't know. And I think that was kind of
the impetus for me was I want to make sure
that that fifty five year old guy like knows if
swinging ninety five miles an hour is good or not.
A is it good in terms of relative to other
fifty five year olds, but b like if he wants

(02:39):
to swing one hundred physically, can he do it? And
what are the exact things that I can tell him
to do that. I think back in twenty ten it
was kind of you. I wouldn't say it's very at
this point, still a little bit wild West. But back
then it was like holy cow, like no idea. Let's
try all this stuff and we'll see what shakes out.
And we've just been tracking data for fifteen years, I
guess at this point and to where it is not

(03:01):
so much that.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
So, Chris, for you, what is golf fitness to you?
When we you know that's a term, it's it's a
broad term. And like I said, there are a lot
of people in the golf fitness space now, but when
you're thinking about golf fitness and what it is, how
do you define golf fitness?

Speaker 2 (03:19):
That's a great question. A lot I'm glad you asked that.
So for me, fitness is like what you see on
social right you go on Instagram, It's the latest coolest exercise.
There's no rhyme or reason to it. It's just kind
of like, that's that's fitness right to me. What we
do is I like to call it golf performance or
you know, sport performance, where there's there's more of it,
there's science to it. We literally we assess every single

(03:41):
person that comes in. I'm not guessing on anything, and
I know that based on where you are now, And
you tell me how many miles an hour you want
to get to. I can pull from the database and say, hey,
this is what people who are swinging that fast or
doing whatever it is that you're talking about wanting to do.
This is exactly what they do. This is where you are,
So we need to do you know, X Y to
get you to that exact point. So, to me, that's

(04:03):
the biggest difference. You know, I think you said golf
fitness is kind of everywhere, right, you want the amount
of social accounts and the amount of stupid stuff that
you I mean, you see the swing instruction too, like
stupid drills, and it's just like there's no rhyme or
reason to it. And unfortunately, there's a lot of golfers
who now are seeing people working out and they see
that and they're like, oh, I'm gonna try that, But

(04:25):
you know, they may not need that, they may need
something totally different, And unfortunately, in a lot of cases,
people get hurt just trying random stuff and then kind
of the stuff that could help them ends up getting
a bad rap. So I think that to me, the
big difference is golf performance is there's science to it,
there's data, there's and golf fitness is very much just hey,
try the latest coolest thing that you saw somebody else

(04:47):
doing to get get faster, and ultimately the goal of
it is to help people play the game as long
as possible, at as high of a level as possible,
or the highest level of enjoyment as possible. Right. And
whether that's the junior trying to playing college, the collegiate
person player trying to play professionally, or the sixty five
year old guy trying to play until he's ninety, right,

(05:09):
those definitions will vary. But to me, that's the value
of it is it supports everything that guys like you
do on the instructional side and allows the student to
do what someone like yourself's asking them to do.

Speaker 1 (05:20):
Yeah, and I think the other thing that you know,
we don't have to guess now we can We can
measure with launch monitor technology to see what the golf
club and the golf ball are doing. We can look
at three D technology to look at what your body's doing,
we can look at force plate. All that stuff has
become very much mainstream now. But the database that you

(05:44):
have the over a decade of getting all this data
and this information for everyone listening, Chris, what are some
monalities that we see in golfers from a physical standpoint. Obviously,
the guys at the title is performance since the dude
Greg Rose and Dave Phillips they kind of came up

(06:04):
with their big twelve swing faults, you know, about twenty
years ago, and we're kind of at the forefront for that.
But in twenty twenty four, now, who is the person
that is coming in to see you guys, and what
are some generalizations or commonalities in the physical screens that

(06:25):
you were seeing in golfers.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
Yeah, I think for us, you know, in Greg and Dave,
I mean Greg in particular was a massive influence for
me and good friend at this point. And for me
it was always how do I make it simpler? Right?
You know my whole I started out out of a
shed on a driving range and people don't know what
the he guy was doing. It was like, how do
I just make this as simple and boil it down
as possible? And that's always been the goal with the database,
and so well, we have guys. We have guys, got

(06:49):
guy Al actually he's out there now, he's ninety two.
And then we had last week we had Kyle Berkshire,
who's ninety two who the world long hit has swings
one hundred and sixty five miles an hour, like right,
so like, and then we have all the guys on
tour LPG. But you know then really the big kind
of meat of it is the average golfer, right this
the single handicap you know, it's you know, fifteen or

(07:10):
less handicap, who's trying to get better at the gam
golf you know place a couple times a week, you know.
And the cool thing that I've always found boiling it
down is there's there's very common principles and as I
always use the analogy of like the the old food pyramid,
and really at the bottom there's a mobility element that required,
particularly in the rotary areas. So to me, there's four
roadary centers. There's hip internal rotation, which is your ability

(07:31):
to rotate into your trail hip and your tech takeaway
and your your lead hip on your follow through. There's
your shoulder rotation, particularly like what's called external rotation. So
think of a baseball pitcher throwing a ball, like how
far their arm goes back. Right. Obviously that's the most
important on your trail side. You need it on both
but if you had to pick one shoulder to not
be good at, pick it on your lead shoulder. And

(07:52):
then you have your trunk rotation, which is technically called
thoracic spine. You know on TV we called shoulder turn
right how much the shoulders moved, then neck right. So
those are the big four rotary centers that if you
don't have the ability to rotate enough in those areas,
you're gonna have issues in terms of introducing you know,
forward and back movement too much side to side. If
you can't rotate, you're gonna introduce in one of the

(08:13):
other you know, two planes of motion. So to me,
that's that's the first commonality is that no matter what level,
if you don't have the ability to rotate, you're gonna
have to compensate. You're gonna suffer from swing. This is
where you know Dave and Greg came up. Hey, your
hip doesn't do this, you may early extend or you
may come over the time. You know, it's going to
influence what your body can or cannot do and what

(08:36):
your swing ends up looking like. So that's for every
golfer listening, that's that's where I always start off. We
have we have a home assessment that we give everybody
that's like, literally, just do those four things. The crazy thing,
Claud is like ninety five percent of guys over the
age of fifty can't pass all for like and and
particularly the hips. And when you can't pass all for
or this is the you know, you look at it

(08:57):
on like three D. The cool thing that we've seen
is like, literally, if they take ten swings that their
body moves ten different ways each of the swings, it's
a different sequence. And then as you improve those mobility centers,
then maybe they're not hitting the ball like remarkably better,
but at least their body starts moving more consistently, and
now all of a sudden what they're trying to do
and the instructionally has a chance. So that would be

(09:19):
that bottom layer of the pyramid that I would say,
it doesn't matter if you're al ninety two swing in
eighty miles an hour Kyle Berkshire twenty six thing and
swinging one hundred and sixty five miles an hour like now,
the degree of rotation Kyle needs versus the degree of
rotation that ninety two year old I'll need obviously different,
but the principle fundamentally what they need that doesn't change.
I think that's a pretty cool thing across the board.

Speaker 1 (09:40):
One of the things I know that you're really big
on is longevity on this game of golf. Everybody knows that.
You know, one of the different erentiators about golf is
you can play, you know, from a junior to like
you said, you've got someone that's trying to get better
in his nineties. But longevity. I think a lot of golfers,

(10:01):
certainly on the lesson side of things, Chris, They've been
playing golf twenty thirty years. They've been taking golf lessons
off and on sporadically for a big portion of their
golfing career. But rarely do we see in golf lessons
you know that mid handicap range that you're talking about,

(10:23):
you know that's fifteen to kind of twenty five. There's
almost no Nobody pays any attention to what your body
can and can't do. It's all about go buy a
new putter, Go buy a new driver, Go get new chefts,
go get losts and lies and all of that. And
but rarely do people come in and say, listen, I've

(10:44):
been physically screened. You know, the average golfer that I teach,
rarely does someone come in and say, listen, yeah, no,
I know my body can do this. I know my
body can't do this. And it's always frustrating for me
because I just don't think there's any other sport that
you would play. I mean, as we get older, we

(11:05):
do see people get injured playing pickup basketball, playing soccer,
playing baseball, cricket, whatever the sport is. You are going
to get injured the older you get playing those sports
just because your body isn't designed to play them. In
your thirties. I mean, you know, I have golfers who

(11:27):
come in and we'll say, yeah, I was out for
six months because I was playing pickup basketball and I
blew my ACL out, And I'm thinking, you know, you
probably didn't do any sort of real warm ups ida
micro disectomy in two thousand and eleven. And you know,
golf to this day is difficult for me to play

(11:48):
from the physical standpoint. So if I do practice, I
need to go through a full kind of what I
see the guys on the PGA Tour do go through
a dynamic warm up. I need to get stretched before
I go hit balls. I need to go through a

(12:08):
big dynamic warm up before I go hit balls. I
need recovery and work done immediately after I play. You know,
we have a tournament here at my club. It's a
pro member and I play, you know, once a year,
and my physio he stretches me, works on me before
I hit golf balls. Then I go through a dynamic
warm up. Then afterwards I get stretched, I go through

(12:31):
you know, soft tissue, I you know, get heat, I
get ice. Because my body, at fifty five, there are
a lot of things that swinging a golf club my
body doesn't like to do. And so I just think
so many golfers are looking for so much enjoyment and
have such big expectations out of their golf swing and

(12:55):
their technique. But I think part of the execution of
golf and playing golf is knowing what the hell your
body can and can't do. Can it sustain any of
the physical things that we are going to ask it
to do in a very short time window. You know,
golf swings are over in a second and a half to
two seconds, and we're asking you to do a lot

(13:16):
physically in a very small time window. The four kind
of screens that you guys put out to people. Talk
me through what they are and what you're looking to
gain from testing those things.

Speaker 2 (13:32):
Yeah, so I think it's it's probably best conceptualized for
everyone listening to start from the end. So basically what
we found is there's kind of three buckets that golfers
end in, right, and they're going to either end in
I would say less than five percent end in the
golden bucket, in which we call more RPMs under the hood,
which is somebody who physically can go really really fast,
but golf wise, they have no idea how to get

(13:54):
it out of their body. Right, So that's somebody who's
no physical concerns. They just literally need to figure out
how to get the speed out. And that's where you'll
get guys unfortunate. Is what you see a lot on
social Right, you see guy go they come in swing
one hundred miles an hour. Magically, in eight minutes they're
one hundred and twenty five miles an hour. Right. That
guy was like primed and ready to go. He just
didn't know how the heck to use what he had
to call it like a cage gorilla, right, So that's

(14:14):
kind of like the more PM underhood, the middle space
is called we call balanced golfer. So when we go
through our screens, there's the form mobility test. We have
two power tests that causationally can tell us you know,
how fast somebody should go percentile wise, and the obviously
have club at speed. And so basically the balanced golfer
is their club head speed is within about fifteen to

(14:35):
twenty percentile points of their power numbers, and they pass
all their mobility tests. So that's somebody who you know,
they're not swinging out of their shoes relevant that their
body can handle, nor are they swinging way too slow
or what they should be doing.

Speaker 1 (14:47):
But the car works. The car is exactly it's it's
not a Lamborghini, it's not a brand new, souped up supercar,
but it is a car that will drive at decent
speeds hand fairly well. And obviously if you're going to
try and drive a car like that faster, two things

(15:07):
have to happen, right. You have to know if the
car can sustain the speed that you're trying to does
the car have the ability to go this fast? And
can you drive the car at that speed not crash it?

Speaker 2 (15:20):
One hundred percent. Yeah, are the breaks gonna like plow
you down once you get up to THEO saspis right,
And so I think that's the level where we always
try to. That's where the level where when we talk
about longevity, you know, where we get people. And it's
just it's kind of a fun pendulum game where hey,
we're going to work on getting stronger, and hey, you're
actually so you're strong and be able to produce power efficiently.
We can actually these clubhed speed is going to go
up and then we'll get a little stronger and maintain

(15:41):
that mobility as we do. And it's kind of like
this little Seesaw game. And that's really where we see guys,
you know, maintaining longevity. That's the kind of the goal
we want to get to. Unfortunately, we're ninety five percent
of guys over the age of fifty or will be
called ticking time out. And honestly it's a lot of
the pros too. We see I mean, Kyle Brooks are
he came in. He was a mess. He came in
because he had torn something and we looked at him,
We're like, well, dude, no wonder you tore this? Your

(16:02):
shoulders don't move. And so that's where when we look
at the four rotary centers. Basically to be a ticking
time bomb, either you fail run of the one of
the four rotary tests. So that's your hip internal rotation tests.
So that's your ability to rotate into your leader trail
leg in your volve swing. You fail. You can't rotate
your shoulder back behind. So if you think of like
a baseball pitcher throwing the ball, your forearm doesn't get

(16:23):
beyond your spine angle right, then you know a trunk rotation.
So if you're sitting in a chair, you can't rotate
you know, at least fifty degrees, which is be more
than halfway both ways. And then neck like you can't
touch your chin to your collar going both sides right.
So yeah, so perfect pass for you. So that's where
for most guys. Most guys, it's funny when we do
it with people will get I get a bunch of

(16:45):
people in a room as my favorite I do like
a big presentation. We say, all right, guys, we'll go
through the four roadary centers and we'll test the neck
and everyone passes and everyone's feeling good, patting themselves on
the back. So then we'll go to the shoulders, and
you know, seventy five percent of the room will fail.
It's like, oh, guys, like, oh okay, we got one problems.
And then we go to the spine because then generally
most people can pass that, and if not, we do
some twists and tilts and and they fix pretty quickly

(17:06):
and you can show them like a quick fix. And
we always end on the hips because that's the most impactful.
And that's where somebody, you know, they're sitting in a
chair and they try to rotate their fut out to
the side. They're cramping in the front of their hip.
They're like, wait, it's supposed to move, Like how do
you do that? Like that's like, you know, they like
you like an exorcist as much as your your your
hip is moving. And that is the aha moment that
most golfers have when they're like, oh my god, you

(17:27):
know And this is I think, honestly the reason why
a lot of guys go to lessons and have no idea.
They just don't have they don't have no clue they
even have a problem. And that's to me, that's like,
that's my mission is, like how do I get in
front of as many golfers as possible. Literally, these tests
take less than five minutes and you can This is
like the stuff we have on our website for free,
Like you literally can go take them and like immediately

(17:49):
you know you are armed with the information of hey,
I have a problem or I don't have a problem.
And then if you do pass the mobility tests, you
know that's like level one. Level two is to get
out out of taking time bomb. How strong are you?
And this is where we see a lot of single
digit guys because obviously you can create clubhead speed without
necessarily having tons of strength, right. You see this on

(18:10):
tour all the time, just waiting for auction to crumble.
He's a rally kid, right, but like he's crazy elastic, right,
And you'll see and he creates speed with technique and
technical efficiencies. And so we'll see a lot of guys
as they get older that they are still able to
have and we see a Southern Champions Tour too, right, guys,
they aren't. They just have great technical ability to create speed.

(18:31):
They're optimized in their equipment. But then when you look
at their actual strength numbers, they you know they may
be only in like the twentieth percentile strength, but they're
swinging at the eightieth percentile speed for their age, right,
And that's somebody to your analogy. They are driving a
car faster than what the brakes are able to handle.
They're driving a Ferrari with nineteen eighty six rusted out
Honda a cord brakes. And that's the song that's like

(18:53):
you just you just know at some point that curve
is going to come and boom. You know there's going
to be an injury. And so so when we look
at those tests for guys, that's where I'm always thinking,
as a golfer, are you a ticking time bomb? Are
you a balanced golfer? Or are you somebody who can
get a ton more speed right now? Unfortunately, everybody thinks
they're that last category, right, And that's where we see
that all these speed training tools. Everybody wants to just

(19:14):
go to the speed stuff. That's where we see a
lot of people getting hurt is they're going there without
the prerequisites. And I think if you're armed with the
knowledge of what your body can and can't do a
your speed games are going to be better. And we
actually do what we call a predicted safe swing speed,
Like what's your max safe swing speed? And I think
that's eye opening for guys when it's like, hey, I

(19:34):
swing one hundred and ten. You do the testing and
you're like, well, based on the database, you can safely
swing ninety five. Which how many days of a year
does your back hurt? Like, oh, yeah, I missed like
a month a year. Oh well, duh. That makes sense.
And I think that's a cool place to get to
for golfers where they know where they stand, they know
what they need to do to where they want to go.
And that's to me, that's how we create longevity in

(19:56):
the game and people really enjoying it.

Speaker 1 (20:00):
I teach a girl plays on the LPGA Tour, Marina
Alex She's won a couple of times. She was on
the Solheim Cup team and Marina is five three. She's
had some pretty significant back issues that almost took her
out of the game. She can carry the golf ball. Yeah,
she hits more fairways than she hits greens. She carries

(20:21):
the golf ball two twenty five to thirty in the air.
Obviously for her distance is a massive, massive component to
her improving as a player, but physically all of the
speed training that you would want to try and send
someone like her down speed sticks, you know, all the

(20:42):
kind of dynamic stuff her body like we joke about,
you know, anytime anybody puts up on social doing speed training,
you know an LPGA or you know an aspiring LPGA player,
she'll joke about it. She'll go, goch I'm having a
panic attack watching that. You know what I'm giving what

(21:02):
I know that type of work would do to my body.
And I think there's so much information out there now.
So you know, I asked you earlier, Chris, what is
golf fitness? So for you, what is speed in the
golf swing? Because everybody is trying to hit the golf

(21:23):
ball further, right, I mean that is the holding grail.
Everybody on tours trying to hit the golf ball further
at the elite level, everyone in college, the amateur level
is trying to hit it further. If you're a junior
golfer and you hit it far, you can you can
succeed just because of the distance you're can hit it.
So I think everybody is trying to get speed. Everybody

(21:43):
is trying to gain speed. So when you think about
speed in the golf swing. What does that look like
for you?

Speaker 2 (21:51):
Yeah, I think it's a it's a I always use
a pizza pie now like a visual for people. So
I always think of it as there's four pieces to
the speed pie, right, And speed is a skill. It
is one hundred Some people are born with more natural
natural of it than others, right, But everybody can you know,
I've yet to meet a golfer who couldn't get faster, right, obviously,
minus somebody who's maybe got some massive medical things, and

(22:12):
there may be a certain speed that that's as high
as they can get. But the four pieces to the
pie to me, are you know, the top two or
more in your realm. Right. There's the equipment side, and
there's the instructional side. So it's a technique how efficient
we get. Are we optimized on equipment, Like I can
give somebody a long drive driver and magically they're going
to swing faster, Like we can manipulate those things. The

(22:32):
bottom half of the pie is to me, that's that's
where that's where I live, right, And so that's where
the science of the fitness side of things is. And
to me, there's two pieces to that. There are is
a mobility piece, which based on all the data that
we have, mobility is actually not statistically. There's two. There's
what's called causationally and there's correlated, right, So correlated means hey,

(22:53):
sometimes when the mobility is better, speed gets better. Causationally
is if I increase X, you know, mobility of hip
to hear speed will go up. So they are not
related in that fashion on the mobility side, but it
is one percent related that way on the injury side.
So when we're talking about speed, if you don't have
the necessary mobility and you need more mobility, the faster

(23:14):
you're going to go. If you don't have that mobility,
the likelihood you get hurt goes way up. Also, the consistency,
you know, how consistent the sequence and physic of that
side of things is going to be is going to
go down if you don't have the mobility. The other
piece is the strength and power, which you know obviously,
how much force you can produce multiplied by how fast
you produce it is power, right, So to me, clubhead

(23:36):
speed is the purest expression of power in the golf swing, right, Paul.
Speed Obviously there's an element of skill and where do
you hit it? On the club face and all that.
And that's why I think it's funny when we say, oh, yeah,
the fitness guy really helped, that's why he's hitting itself far. Well.
I can make a guy swing one hundred fifty miles
an hour real like, but if he doesn't have the
center of the club face, I didn't really have anything
to do, Like Paul's not going anywhere. So yeah, I

(23:59):
think that's when I think about speed. I think I
always I focus on those bottom two, but I'm always
aware of what are the four and what's the low
hanging fruit? Right? And I think you mentioned that ten
to fifteen handicapped person who comes in and they don't
know anything about their body. They may have clubs from
fifteen years ago. That might be the simplest, lowest hanging
fruit for them, right. They may never have swung golf,

(24:19):
but they don't know how to hold the club correctly.
I don't know, right. There may be other other hacks
that we can gain some stuff. But when we talk
about the body, we talked earlier about the bottom of
that pyramid, the four roadary centers, the hips, the spy,
and the shoulders in the neck. Well, the next level
up that we look at it. The big two are
going to be we look at vertical leap and then
we look at a seated chess pass and those two statistically,
when we look at stats, you know, those have a

(24:42):
causational impact on club. It's been meaning for every x
amount of inches somebody increases their chest pass, their club
can go that much faster. Like it's basically a direct
measure how much bigger.

Speaker 1 (24:54):
You're not a fiable exactly, You're not guessing in that there.
You guys have enough data that you can look at
putting a player through their vertical jump, seated chess pass
with a met ball, and then if those increase, right,
you can see a direct increase in speed and distance

(25:14):
or just speed.

Speaker 2 (25:15):
So very important distinction here. And this is I think
where the beauty of the team that you know TPI
always talks about is I can increase the size of
an engine. Nope, like every time, guaranteed, every like that's
not that's that's easy for me, right. The challenge is
when you start talking about does the person know how
to drive the engine? Right? I could have somebody who
comes in with three gears and I can increase their mobility.

(25:38):
I can increase their vertical leap their basically how much
power their lower body produces, how much power their upper
body produces. And I can tell you, hey, look, I've
increased your ability to swing ten miles an hour faster,
like literally no, like, no problem, but that doesn't mean
you're going to use it right And then yeah, that's
where then like okay, well then how do I actually
to me that there's the third level of the pyramid,

(25:59):
which we call transfer training, right, and that's how to
use the ground correctly. Do you time? I think we've
talked in the past about I had two golfers who
produced on our force plates the same exact same amount
of vertical force. One guy swung like fifteen or twenty
minutes or fifteen or twenty miles an hour faster. He's
one of the top college players in the country. The
other guy's fifty five. And the difference of was that

(26:22):
the fifty five year old guy who used to have
terrible hit mobility, still produced power like he still had
terrible hip mobility. He produced all his force after he
hit the golf ball, whereas the younger guy who produced
the same amount of force, he produced it basically right,
at the right after the transition before P five right,
so like he actually got to use his power versus
the other guy had no idea how to use that power, right.

(26:44):
And I think that's where a lot of To me,
that's where you start. The fun part for me is
that's where it really starts to bridge the gap. You
get people better on mobility, they feel better, they get
out of pain, they're moving better. They're like, oh my god,
I didn't know I could move this well. And I
didn't know I didn't have to hurt. After I played
all that sort of stuff, you get their strength up
and they're like, wow, I can play multiple days in
a row, Like my resilience is up, all right, I
can take my body can take more of a beating.

(27:06):
And then you get to that last that next level
and it's like, oh my god, I can actually express
it in my golf swing. And so to me, that's
when I think about speed. There's those three elements are
keys to it, and it's a matter of the person
and when and where and how much of each do
you need to then put in. And so that's why
I think of that speed. Just to sum it all up,
I think of four pieces to that pie. Technique. Equipment

(27:30):
you know, power are basically how strong you are and
how fast you can produce it. Uh, and then obviously
the mobility and then it's figuring out in that pie.
If I want to get speed, to me, speed is
easy to me. This is you know, a little peppi
back like I think a monkey could teach somebody to
swing the golf club faster. I think the true genius
is and the and the true skill is when you
can get somebody to swing the club faster safely so

(27:53):
that they can continue to do it and it actually
helps their game, like score wise, right, And that's where
you come in.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
Well, listen, I mean we have watched players go down
the speed rabbit hole, you know, at the elite tour level.
I remember Luke Donald, who was, you know, one of
the best putters in the world and one of the
best wedge players in the world. And Luke was never
a prolific driver of the golf ball. Right, he got
to number one in the world, won the Order of
Merit you know in Europe and the US and everything,

(28:22):
and then immediately kind of got rid of his coach
and went down this route to start to hit it further,
And I remember watching him on the range and part
of me in my head and I said this to
his coach that he let go, who he subsequently was rehired.
But I was like, is this ten years too late?

(28:44):
Trying to get speed now from Luke? Luke entire game
was predicated on. Actually, Jeff Maggert came to me a
couple maybe five years ago and asked me if I
could help him hit the golf ball further, you know,
to try and make some gains from a speed standpoint,
And I said, yeah, I mean, I think we can
do that, but I said, it is going to take

(29:05):
a one hundred and eighty degree mind shift for you,
because your entire career has been based and predicated on accuracy,
on keeping the ball in play. So to hit the
golf ball further, yeah, you can do some stuff in
the gym, like you said, you can create some better mobility,

(29:29):
some better strength and all of that, but fundamentally, if
you're going to try and hit the golf ball further,
like you said, you have to do it responsibly because
it does require you to swing the golf club faster.
And for some players, I mean, wouldn't you agree across
the board. I think we are seeing rates of diminishing

(29:50):
return in Okay, yeah, you've made a speed game, you've
increased your clubhead speed, you're maybe hitting it a little
bit further, but your game is going to shit because
you can't control what you're doing anymore. How to rebalance
that out? Because I think that's where I see, Chris,
A lot of people are trying again, They're trying to

(30:12):
do the right thing. They're trying to get better shape,
they're trying to hit it further, They're trying to make
mobility gains, strength gain, speed gains. But hitting the golf
ball fifteen yards further with your driver is not a
silver bullet to becoming a better golfer and improving your
your handicap.

Speaker 2 (30:32):
No, I think where I think speed is the most important.
So I think two points. I think one is I
see it more so in like the fifty plus crew, right,
the crew, like they're actually like, if you look at
the population level data that we have at this point,
like from your fifties to your sixties, like you're gonna
lose distance from your sixties to your seventies. You're gonna
lose more if you do the right stuff. We know.

(30:53):
What we see in our data is like, for instance,
from fifties to sixties, on average, you're gonna lose about
eight to ten miles an hour. If you do the
right stuff, you can cut that loss to one to two. Right,
So you can't stop the loss, but you got it
by almost the factor.

Speaker 1 (31:05):
Like, yeah, there's a big difference losing eight to ten
miles per hour and loosing free.

Speaker 2 (31:12):
Yeah, exactly. And so I think, and those gaps just
get bigger as you go the later in the population,
you know, from the decades. But so I think in
those groups, to me, the speed gains are more like
trying to stave off loss and kind of stay where
you are. And the cool thing is for a lot
of those guys is initially you know they'll gain like
we see on average in the first ten to twelve weeks,
on average, we see you know, about three miles now

(31:34):
is about ten yards. Right in the first year, we
see about five to seven miles an hour across the
population since gets close to twenty. And now that's just
because a lot of the guys have lost a bunch
to begin with, and so you're kind of gaining back
stuff that they lost. So I think in that population,
changing distance a lot of times helps. I think when
you're talking the elite level player. So I'll use Ryan
Gerard as an example. He's scorn fairy guy, had a

(31:56):
great run, kind of top five in the Honda, and
then he's a Raley kid and he kind of played
his way through conditional stats for ever the other year.
And for him, it's fun having conversations with him. It's
like he's come in and we're like, dude, like, how
are you He's like, what are you working on? He's like, well,
I'm between like one seventy four to one seventy six
ball speed. If I get too close to one eighty,

(32:16):
I start to lose it. So I really just want
to stay where I am. Like, if I gain one
or two, that's fine. But really, for him it became
it was a longevity perspective of how can we make
sure he maintains his mobility and his strength and if
we want to build his we want to almost build
a buffer for him. So for a lot of those guys,
it's like I just want to keep swinging like one
seventy you know, mid one seventies, let's say ball speed.

(32:38):
But I'd love for my engine speed to be you know,
mid if it's one hundred and eighty, now like let's
make it to mid one eighty or high one eighties.
So I'm actually using less energy to maintain those ball speeds, right,
And so I think for the there is a sweet
spot at the high levels of those guys where it's like, hey,
like far enough's far enough, Like the diminishing return will
be there, right if you're if you've lost twenty yards

(33:01):
in the last five years, probably not too worried about
diminishing returns for that guy. But for the highest of
high golfers, I think that's where I'm looking at it
at very in a ton of detail of like how
do we how do we get your you as big
of a buffer as possible because we all know, I mean,
you know this the beginning of the year, you know
that they're great, and then they get to this time,
you know, September October, you got duct tape on them,

(33:23):
trying to keep them together terms, right, So it's really
in the you know, and even if you get an offseason,
these guys are playing in the fall and they got
to play. They just play year round. You're trying to
start with as much of a buffer as humanly possible
for these guys, as you know, that's gonna whittle down.
And that's I think when you're talking about speed, I
think those are kind of the two lenses I look
at it based on the player.

Speaker 1 (33:43):
You're working with. Kyle Berkshire, who has, you know, just
insane type of speed, like his clubhead speed with a
five iron is what.

Speaker 2 (33:56):
I don't even know whatice club at it with a
five iron is. It's got to be. I mean, he's
got to be. I'm trying to think how fast I've
seen him get. I've seen him. I've seen him get
his pitching ledge up to like one fifteen, like something stupid.

Speaker 1 (34:10):
Like that is just that is crazy for a guy
like Kyle from a long drive standpoint, What is he
trying to do from a speed standpoint, what are some
of the limitations he has? And what are some of
the things that you're trying to improve to help him?

(34:30):
Kind of, because I mean he is constantly you know,
his care is constantly in the red right. He is
at full throttle all the time, and we saw that
with Bryson. I mean, you can't sustain that long term
if you're not doing certain things. So from Kyle's standpoint,

(34:52):
where does in your opinion, Kyle get his power currently
and what is he trying to improve?

Speaker 2 (35:00):
So Kyle's interesting, I think it Actually you see it
with the you know Xela Taurus getting injured. You see
a lot of guys in their mid twenties they start
their bodies change. So Kyle's kind of coming through that
phase as well. So Kyle naturally, like like real talk,
is a freaking nature like some amazing ability, crazy joint
for joint, the most flexible human I've ever met. Uh,

(35:22):
And then you layer on top of that how strong
he is? So like he now he's put incredible work, ethic,
incredible intelligence on top of incredible genetics. I think when
you look at him and even all the long drive
guys and their constraints are literally no different than anyone else.
Like when he came when he was injured, he had
partially torn oblique. His shoulder rotation was he couldn't even

(35:45):
get it past his spine angle like it was. It
was awful, right, but it had come at it. And
this is where I think that the human body is fascinating.
He had broke his hand on his uh it was
lead side. He had a handmad fracture and like a
year he then like a year prior, like we weren't
working with him at that point, we didn't know he
broke his hand. He got back playing after two weeks

(36:06):
apparently docked, and he just played the whole season. And
then over time he started overusing his trail side, his
right side, his opposite side to make up because that
left side was getting so you know, it just was weaker, right,
and so over time, when the body's weaker, it will
actually start to restrict your motion. So he didn't even
realize that it was happening. But when you look at
video of him, like the last World Championship last year

(36:29):
and like up to that, his swing had gotten so
short just because he had lost the mobility, and so
it ends up happening and then he compensates. Now he's
an amazing athlete, so he's going to still be able
to swing one hundred and fifty five hundred and sixty
miles an hour and get away with it until he tears.
So he comes in. We literally did this same stuff
with him, with the same mobility test, the same strength test.
We literally he couldn't even like on a cable machine,

(36:51):
couldn't externally rotate. Just basically think of like if you
start with your elbow at your side, just pull your
hand out to the side with your elbow at ninety degrees.
He couldn't pull out five five pounds, Like his nervous
system was so shut off, and so all of his
issues actually came from his left hand. And then his
oblique was coming because of all the changes that were
happening on his right shoulder. And then he ends up

(37:12):
with an oblique issue. But yes, like how does he
do it?

Speaker 1 (37:15):
So?

Speaker 2 (37:15):
I think like he actually won the World Championships never
swinging more than eighty percent. I think that's the wild
thing about Kyle is his ball speeds were literally like
ten miles an hour faster than everyone else on average,
and crazy about long drive. And this gets down another
rabbit hole. Just the sport, there's actually a literal point
of diminishing return where the landing zone is like fifty

(37:36):
yards where most guys will land, where Kyle can land,
it gets skinnier. Yeah, Now, in most in most distance sports,
do you get a cone that gets wider as you go,
so it actually disenfranchises you in the sport of long drive,
your disenfranchise to swing as hard as you possibly can
because you have less of a chance of it landing
and bounds. So that's where like we when he came

(37:56):
to us, he was swinging probably one hundred high one
fifties round one sixty. He added like five miles an
hour of club as speed. But he never like we
literally after every set we would recheck his you know,
for him, the big thing his shoulder turned would that
was his tail. Everybody has a tell, and that's I
think the cool part for golfers is to learn what
your tael is. His was his shoulder rotation would get

(38:17):
under seventy degrees, So we'd test after every set and
if it dropped to seventy, we'd increase it. And he
got through it just fine. But he literally claud He
won that without ever swinging more than like eighty percent.
It was wild.

Speaker 1 (38:30):
That is just fascinating that you would think that he
would get a lot of his speed from flexibility, from elasticity,
and that's actually not the case. He's getting it by just.

Speaker 2 (38:44):
Well so and he does. And I think that's the
interesting thing is and that's what you see that's what
we're seeing on tour. We bring it back to like
to golf right, a lot of these young guys I
talked about oxhay or like is al Taurus like they're
they're getting a lot of their speed JT. You know, example,
because of elasticity. As we age, are the elasticity are
elasticity in our bodies decreases. So now creating force you

(39:06):
can you know, you can have how much rubber band is,
how much rubber band stretch you have, and then there's
also how much force you can create, which how strong
you are. So you know, there's an interesting test that
I'd encourage everyone to do. It kind of let you
know how elastic you are. If you basically do a
vertical leap, so you're standing up, you kind of dip
down and you jump up and like stick a piece
of tape or a sticky note on the wall. Right,
that's elastic, right, because you created a stretch when you

(39:28):
dip down, and you want to then the next and
take another sticky note, squat down, hold it for like
five seconds, don't dip any further, just go straight up.
So there's no elastic stretch and the difference of what
those two sticky notes are is you can calculate what's
called the elastic utilization ratio, which is basically how much
elasticity do you use to create your power? So what

(39:49):
happens in these guys kind of pre mid twenties, they're
going to jump way higher when they can dip down
and jump up when you look at as they get older,
that difference gets smaller, and if they don't get stronger,
they eventually have to either reach harder or try to
pull harder. The rubber band's gonna start getting skinner and
skinnier and skinnier at those end ranges, and not to mention,

(40:12):
you start adding in the spine changes that happen structurally
and kind of around that twenty six twenty seven. You know,
then all that extra side bending and stuff guys are doing.
Now we start seeing issues with backs and those sorts
of things, particularly if the hips aren't clear and it's
adding more stress on the back. It's just a downward spiral,
So you need both. What makes Kyle and all the
long Drive Colton, all those type if anyone the world

(40:33):
long Drive, all those top ten guys and girls, is
there phenomenal at all of them, at both elastic and strength.
I mean Coulton, he literally is a professional crab fisherman
out in Alaska in the offseason. I g is the
dude's forearms are like my quads, So they have crazy strength,
they have crazy elasticity. The funny thing is the fastest
players in the world probably have the worst mobility and

(40:54):
that's why they have the shortest shelf life in terms
of injuries. Kyle was the first World long Drive World
Champion and to have to w D because of injury
and be able to ever come back and win that Literally,
if you get to the top, you get hurt and
that sport generally you're done.

Speaker 1 (41:10):
But that's just never thought about that. That's right though.
There isn't a domination where you dominate, you know. Jason
Zubac kind of the old school. They didn't win ten
in a row. He had that kind of white hot
minute where he was the longest and then it left.

Speaker 2 (41:26):
Generally, generally they get hurt, they don't have the mobility
and they're out. And so I think even at the
top of if you want to call World Long Drive
like the best at speed in the world, there's still
literally we are teaching them the top players in the
world right now, Like, hey guys, you need mobility. This
is what hip rotation is. Like they literally have no idea.
It's wild, but that that all trickles down into the PJA,

(41:49):
LPGA and then obviously the damn game.

Speaker 1 (41:53):
One of my pet peeves is the approach that people
take to golf. There's no warm up, there's no stretching.
It's you know, some fake toe touches, you some things
that look like something from Jazzer Size in the eighties.
But so give give everyone listening three things that they
can do. Five would be great, but we know people

(42:16):
are going to do five. So three things that they
can do before they hit golf balls that are going
to help prepare their body or what we're going to
ask you to do.

Speaker 2 (42:27):
Yes, I was actually hoping you're gonn asked that question.
So we actually what I did is I actually if
people go to mt put the shows, PARP, success dot Com,
slash harmon, we actually put together the home assessment for
everybody to do. So this is I don't want to
just give you like a general this actually is going
to be like a specific thing that you listening can
do the best thing you can do pre warm up

(42:47):
is know what your limiting factor is and then you
warm up that particular area. So for most of you listening,
it'll probably be the hips and the most thing like
what you like. What you said Claude was dynamic, right,
So when we think of warming up, our muscles are
like I always use the analogy our muscles are like
silly putty. Right. If anybody's had silly putty and you
put it in the freezer and you take it out,
it's like a rock, right, And that's why everybody's really tight.

(43:08):
And when it's cold out it takes longer to warm
up versus put in the microwave or boiler the water.
It's really stringy. So the key is we want to
get our muscles as stringy as possible. And so the
more multiple joint movements that you can do, the better.
So I think, for instance, if your hips are your
limiting factor, one of the simplest things that I love doing,
or it would be called like a stork turn, or

(43:29):
you could even do like a lunge with a twist
or with a rotation into it. Right. So the more
multiple joints you get moving at once, the better. So
a stork turn would basically like standing on one leg.
Let's say you stand on your right leg, you hook
your left foot behind your right knee, so your kneat,
your left knees kind of bent, and then you just
kind of swing in your left knee around in front
of your right foot. So think of it as if
you were staying on your right foot and you're like
rotating into your back swing if your right handed player,

(43:52):
into your follow through if you're a left handed player,
right so you just kind of swinging dynamically that knee
kind of back and forth, and obviously you'd switch. Now
you can use your golf club to balance your sell
or golf carts, you know, fall over, you know, a
lunge with a twist, you step out, you lunch, and
then you can rotate your upper body over, you know,
over the front leg that's out in front of it.
You can create a little bit of rotating into that
lead hit now if you have so, that would be

(44:14):
that would be kind of like two options that I
give people for the hips. That's the most commonly failed one.
The second most commonly failed one is are the shoulders
right and so the easiest one to do for that
I was like, is you know people us, they can
kind of use your golf club, kind of get it
behind your back and you can dynamically just slowly kind
of pull that that arm back a little, loosen it
up back into external rotation. Another one that's that's easy

(44:35):
to do is if you kind of think of your
elbow straight out to the side arm bet ninety degrees,
put it on the golf cart right, and then you
just basically and while you're standing there, you try to
keep your elbow on the on the golf cart, and
then you're just trying to pull that hand off of
the golf cart. So you think of you're kind of
like rotating it back. So think if you're trying to
pull your arm back like how a baseball pitcher would
throw right, and you're just actively dynamically moving it back

(44:57):
and forth right. So the more we can actively turn
muscles on and move them, that's going to warm them up,
which obviously tries to make them a little string here.
So that gives you four. The other one I would
do look at it would be the twist until it
is one of my favorites, and that steal that one
hundred percent from Greg basically, guys, you're sitting on a
chair or like sitting in your golf cart or bench
on the range. It needs together. You put your arms

(45:18):
on your shoulders right and you just rotate as far
as you can to your left side and then tilt
your right shoulder down to your knees, come back up,
rotate more right. You're just kind of like like almost
like ratcheting yourself to get a little bit further right
and left right. Those would be the big five that
I would say, are there. I think the most important
thing for you guys to know is if everyone listens,
like figure out which one because as you know, like
literally the people show up at two minutes, so like

(45:40):
if we can get if we can get one, we'll
take it. And if there is a like a method
to why you're choosing it, like massive win, we'll take that.

Speaker 1 (45:46):
Yeah. I'm like, like you said, I think one of
the things that would be advantageous is to get physically
screened so you know what is your what is the issue?
Is it the lower bodies, the upper body, is it
your whatever that is, and then before you hit golf balls,
do something dynamically to kind of get some blood flow
to get some movement, to get some circulation, to get

(46:07):
some space in those joints, in those areas, because we're
going to ask you to do a lot in your
golf swing, and most people are doing that in a
very very I mean Brooks DJ, all the players that
I work with on tour, Marina, everybody, they have physios
full time that travel with them. They do not hit

(46:27):
golf balls without getting stretched. They don't get golf balls
without warming up. They don't hit golf balls without getting
worked on after they hit balls or practice or play.
It's not that I mean on tour now that every
single week, on every tour. Now there's cold plunges, there's
you know, everybody is traveling with normatecs, thera guns, you

(46:49):
know all that stuff. So there are ways out there
to get your body moving, get your body prep all
those you know kind of pressure guns. Now they're making
those smaller and smaller. Put one of those in your
bag and just turn it on before you hit golf

(47:11):
balls and run it over your hips, your legs, your glutes,
your calves, your chest, your shoulders. Just get some movement
and some blood flow so that you're prepared to do
some of the things that you're asking your body to do.

Speaker 2 (47:24):
Yeah, when I think you bring up a good point
of the recovery side, I don't think that's talked about enough.
I think that's totally overlooked. That people don't realize all
the guys on toard do that and the girls on
toward do that is and I think it's particularly as
you get older, Like the recovery, I would argue, is
almost probably more important than the warm up. Like if
you recover, if you do their correct recovery, then you
actually need less warm up the next day, like say

(47:44):
you're playing a two day or multiple day event, and
that's you can almost do the same stuff that you
do for your warm up as you're cool down or
you know, just moving into the I think, and this
is the point that I always try to kind of
ram home to you, whether it's juniors or pros, you know, seniors,
whoever it is, is like the core principles don't change,

(48:04):
Like you have to be able to rotate in your
hips and in your shoulders and your spine, your neck,
like those things don't go away. And when you go
out and you play for five six hours, you hit balls,
you walk four or five milet like, like there is
a tissue reaction where trigger points are going to form,
they're going to tighten up, and when that happens, you
actually you lose elasticity, You're more likely to get hurt.
So you want to get rid of those as quick

(48:26):
as you can to help yourself recover. And yeah, I
think you can take a note out of the guys
who are playing for millions and millions that like, if
they're doing it, there's probably a reason for it, and
you know, there's certainly a massive reason for everyone listening
to do it as well.

Speaker 1 (48:39):
Well. When Brooks kept a turned professional, Mark Wall, who
is his physio, I told him I was working with
Jimmy Walker at the time and knew Mark through the
guys at TPI, and I said to Brooks, you need
to hire Mark full time. And he's like, man, have
you seen what that guy charges? And I said, he
will be the most important person on your team And

(49:01):
he said more important than you. I said, absolutely, because
what your body is going to go through over the
next you know, this was almost ten years ago, twelve
years ago. I said, you know, you're going to play
more golf than you played. You're going to travel more
than you've ever traveled. And to get your body in
the position it needs then to you need someone to

(49:23):
take care of your car. And I have spent over
the last decade so much time with Mark, you know,
watching what they do, watching how they work, watching when
you know, I like to go sit in when the
guys are getting stretched, to talk to the physios, to
talk about what they can and can't do. It's a

(49:43):
fascinating topic. I mean, we could spend you know, ten
hours talking about it. Chris, if people want to find you,
where's the easiest with You've got the podcast love the
name of the podcast by the way, Yeah, we got
the Golf Bitness Bomb Squad.

Speaker 2 (49:56):
That's the pod. And then you know, our goal is
to try to yeah, I guess diffuse as many of
you ticking time bombs as possible that are out there.
But yeah, for parp success on all the channels, Instagram,
so Facebook, you know all those places. YouTube, We do
a bunch of content there. And then also you know,
parpsuccess dot com is our website. If you go slash

(50:17):
harmon you guys can grab the free assessment made if
all you guys just for listening to the show. That
can give you, guys, you know, a good giveaway just
to really understand what exactly you need to do. You
get all the mobility tests, you'll get the power test,
you'll be able to see what your predicted safe swing
speed is, all for free, just to my number one
goals to educate everybody.

Speaker 1 (50:33):
So yeah, that's that's amazing. If if everybody listening this
doesn't take one full advantage of that, you're crazy. Because
in a very very short period of time, you could
do the home assessment, you could get an idea of
what your body can and can't do, and then you're
able to then go Chris to the people you're working

(50:54):
with on the instruction side and say, listen, I'm my
lower body doesn't rotate well, my upper body doesn't rotate well,
whatever the cause is. That was my issue. You know,
when I first went and started getting physically screened with
Greg and Dave twenty years ago, I had no internal
hip rotation. Greg told me, it's not a question of
if you're going to have back surgery. It is a

(51:16):
question of when you will have back surgery. It's on
point twenty eleven. I couldn't walk out of micro to
sect to me, and you know, Greg was the first
person I called. Hopefully, if people spend more time with
people like you guys and do these home assessments, it
can help your golf game and the number one thing,

(51:38):
it can help make sure that you're not injured or
in pain hitting golf balls. Chris, thanks so much for
taking the time to talk to us. The bucket thing
to where you're putting the under the hood. I really
really like that. I'm definitely going to steal that. I'll
give you a credit for it, but listen, man, thanks
so much. Good luck with the podcast and everything you

(51:58):
guys are doing in North Carolina. And appreciate you talking Josin.

Speaker 2 (52:01):
Yeah for sure. Thanks Thud.

Speaker 1 (52:04):
I want to thank everyone for listening, Rate, review, subscribe
wherever you get your podcast. It's the son of a
bunch of podcast