February 28, 2025 • 12 mins
In This episode of the Golf Fitness Bomb Squad, join Chris as he dives into the science and myths surrounding golf workouts, with a focus on medicine balls and club head speed. In this episode, Chris breaks down why not all medicine ball exercises are created equal, debunking common misconceptions fueled by social media and pro-player trends. Backed by a research study from P4S, he compares medicine ball throws to dynamic exercises that target vertical force in the lower body and push power in the upper body, revealing which methods truly maximize club head speed with the same effort. Tune in to learn how to train smarter, not harder, and why rotary medicine ball drills might not be the game-changer you think.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Welcome to the Golfer as well. I'm Squad, I'm your host,
Chris Finn, and today we're going to dive into the
cliche topic of medicine balls and clubet speed. So a
lot of golfers out there, you maybe included, are thinking
about trying to increase club at speed when you're at
(00:29):
the gyp. That's a very common thing that we think
about as a golfer, and a lot of golfers unfortunately,
because I see them at the gyp, if not at
deep vers Golf, but when I go to just you know,
I'm down the road or travel it, whatever it is.
You know, I see people just pounding these medicine balls
against center black walls, and they just there's a lot
of misunderstanding of why they're doing it and when they're
(00:52):
doing these exercises, are actually doing them the wrong way.
So today we're going to dive into how to use
medicine balls, when not to use them. Why we're going
to do this in the context of the study that
we did looking at club at speed based you know,
clubate speed gains based on if people used medicine balls
or if we trained a different way. So let's let's
(01:13):
dive into that because it's there's a number of pretty
interesting nuggets to pull from it that I think are
important to share. So this is a cool study where
basically we took you know, we had this bigger up golfers,
took half of them. We said, you guys are gonna
or we said both groups, because we broke them into
two groups. We said, everybody's gonna do the same strength
training exercise, everybody's gonna do the same mobility exercises. And
(01:35):
we tested before we started, we had them do gamer
swings on our simulators. We took course placed readings, three
D kinematic, so we had kinetic data, kinematic data. We
had to launch monitor data every right, But so we
got baselines. So we did I wondered like five gamer
we call them gamer speeds, which is like you're just
on the golf course, you know par five, you're trying
(01:57):
to keep it in the fairways, hinden driver. And then
we did five Hey, you don't care where the ball goes,
swing as part as you possibly can. Right, That's how
we got our baselines. Now, Once we had that, and
then we had those two groups broken up and we said,
all right, Group A you're gonna do the same program
as Group B, but there's gonna be one difference. The
difference is Group Hey, you're gonna do medicine ball rotary work,
(02:21):
So you're gonna do iron man throws, which would be
like having a medicine ball kind of in your on
your armpit and your trail side armpit, and then you
kind of step and like almost like punch it like
like a punching motion, basically like launching it on a
line drive into the wall. That'd be an iron man throw.
Another variation that we had them do where scoop throws
(02:42):
think of two hands on the medicine ball, kind of
more down by the hip. This is one that I
see all the time at the gym and just kind
of you know, obviously you know, try to rotate and
throw it against the wall. Those are just two examples
of the med ball variations that we had them do
that was bad. Group B. Their power work was not
nothing medicine ball related. It was all lower body vertical
(03:03):
power related and upper body push power related. So I
think jumping think you know it's vertical, likes overhead slams.
So if you take them a slam ball, not a
medicine ball that's bouncy, a ball that has stand in
it that when you throw it on the ground it
just kind of is dead. You kind of bring it
up over the head and then slam it onto the ground.
That's a way that actually trains vertical forces. Great technique
(03:25):
if you're listening, have joint replacements or brightis in your
hips or knees like you're just jumping. This is not
something you feel good about after you do it to
your sore or whatever it may be. So it's a
great non impact way to train vertical forces. And then
upper body we do push power, so cable punches, you know,
we actually would use medicine balls here for rebound exercises
(03:48):
those sorts of things. So not nothing rotary. Remember the
study was looking at rotational use of medicine balls for
power versus a number of different ways of just training
upper body push power like a bench press and lower
body vertical power like a jump. Right, because those are
the two that we know from past studies have statistically
speaking causational impacts on clupet speechs. Meaning if we get
(04:11):
them better, club at speed gets faster. So we ran
the study for I believe it was eight to twelve weeks,
and then we decided to take a look obviously at
the end of retest and say, hey, what was what
was the difference? Right, And it was pretty astounding, you know,
the results. We were shocking in a way. I mean,
I definitely didn't think that I had a hypothesis. I
(04:33):
did not think the hypothesis was going to be this
stark in terms of how different it was. And so
basically what we saw was the medicine involved group really
you know, maybe got like marginally a little bit better,
but the group that did the vertical and the upper
body push power training outgained them by like three miles
(04:53):
an hour. Like it was stupid. Like it's literally like
ten yards right in a two to less than ninety days.
They did literally everything else the same, but the guru
b did the right power training that actually impacts the
golf swing and increases clup that speed. Now there's where
we'll dive into why that happened and why, you know,
(05:14):
it's important for you guys to take note of. But
I just want to drive home the fact of just
simply by picking the correct power exercise, one single group
gained an extra ten yards and literally spending the exact
same amount of time of the gym. That's wild and
I hope you hear that, and a kind of like
one little change can make that big of a difference
in the answers. Yes, if you're assessed and you're not
(05:35):
guessing what you need to be doing. So the reason
why a lot of these med ball drills don't work is,
you know's there's a couple of reasons. Number one, the
way that people do them is the wrong kinematic sequence.
So there's a lot of people I'll see doing like
a scoop toss for example. We have the you know,
the balls around your ways. So you're just trying to
like you're standing in place and just repeatedly banging this
(05:56):
thing off the wall ten twenty times. What happens is
you don't with your hips. You just end up making
it this upper body dominant move, which is the wrong
sequence to create power. We know this is from all
the research we've done force plates and looking at our
core four and one of the first most important things
is weight shift, followed by hips andiche in the downs way.
(06:16):
So if you're doing a medicine ball throw and you're
not doing either of those what the hell are you
doing like you're actually the answer is nothing. You're actually
training the opposite of what you want for doing. So
that that's one reason why a lot of the medicine
ball stuff doesn't work now if you coach it correctly.
I think this is a key point. Medicine balls do
work rotationally if you know what you're trying to get after.
(06:39):
So if somebody has good mobility, they have good strength,
and we're trying to improve the way that they use
the ground kinetically, medicine balls have a very, very important
place in this situation where you can use an iron man.
You're gonna use an iron man throw very differently than
a scoop toss. You may use a hot back medicine
ball toss, or there's lots of different variations. If you're
trying to increase somebody's scoresyle course, or maybe you're trying
(07:02):
to increase their vertical force, or maybe you're trying to
increase their toe heel force. Well, when you test these
different medicine ball exercises on force plates, how somebody is
coached in the awareness of what they're trying to do
makes a massive difference. Like literally on hundred and eighty
degree difference like total opposite based on how they're how
they're thinking about it when we look at their force
(07:23):
play data. So I think number one, people are doing
the wrong exercises, and number two they're they're doing them wrong.
Number three the third one, I can make a massive
lister hereble just stick to three. The third on is
that people a lot of people do medicine ball throws,
just like way too many of them. They'll like bang
out twenty of them. And in reality, if we're training,
(07:45):
if we understand the laws of physiology powertraining, after like
five reps, it's not power training anymore, it's becoming aerobic
capacity training. It's becoming endurance based training. And so they're
using these lightweight med balls that are heavier. They're like,
it's too heavy relative to a golf club to go
faster than you would with a golf club, and they're
(08:05):
too light relative to how strong the person generally is
for it to actually be an overload impact to create
to create striketh So you're kind of in this like
no man's land, which is why they're actually beneficial. More
so when you're trying to improve sequence, kinematic or kinetic. Remember,
kinematic is the order of movement in terms of the
hips moving first, then the torso, then the shoulders and
you know, than the pants, as opposed to kinetic, which
(08:29):
is the order of sequence of the forces in the ground.
So in a golf swing, it should be a horizontal
force peaking first, then a toe heal force, then a
vertical force, particularly through the lead leg is where most
of the vertical drive should come from. So it's I
think there's there's just so many ways that people screw
up medicine ball throws. It seemingly it seems like a
(08:51):
stupidly simple exercise, but it's actually incredibly nuanced and complex
and detailed. But once you understand that, can you understand
what you need? It's actually simple integration. I know, we've
seen people using medicine balls when we used why don't
we used them? Because hey, they have good mobility, they
have good strength, they just don't understand how to sequence
and use the ground correctly. Let's pick this specific medicine
(09:14):
ball drill, and we're gonna use this singular drill and
in a matter of like a week or two, I
mean honestly, within a session, I've seen somebody who up
ten miles out. I'm just because the light bulb clicks
and they're like, oh, I get it now, all right,
let's go put a club in your hand. Now it's
actually sports specific, training, golf specific. With the actual club
in your hand, that's the only way it's golf truly
golf specific. Then we can actually go and trans see
(09:36):
that translate out into the golf swing. So a little
bit more of a technical deep dive episode today, but
I really wanted to make sure that you guys understood
this just kind of myth, that this myth. Honestly, it's
it's all over Instagram, It's all over social media, and
it looks cool. It looks like the golf swing. And
so I see so many of you just jumping on
(09:56):
this bandwagon. You see, yeah, full season season or a
full swank season one to two or three whatever one
you just you see these guys throwing a medicine ball
without any context around why. And unfortunately, I mean this
news flash here, a lot of the guys on tour,
their trainers have no idea why they're doing them, like
it's a guy that they know, or like it's astounding
(10:19):
how many people actually have no idea what forces specific
medicine ball drills actually drive, even at the highest levels.
So if you're going to use a medicine ball, this
is my plea, please understand what you are specifically trying
to train and know that what you're doing is actually
going to do that, because if it isn't, you're wasting
(10:41):
your time. Like if you go back to the beginning
of this episodeever three miles an hour difference by changing
one thing, that's ten yards, same amount of time in
the gym, same amount of soreness, sweat all that, but
by doing the wrong thing, you lost ten miles an
hour compared to what you could have gaped about ten
(11:01):
miles now ten yards some cases i've seen ten. I've
seen it be ten miles an hour, And that can
happen when you have all the other boxes checked. If
we think of the golf performance pyramid of mobility at
the base, then the strength, and now you're working on power.
That's your constraint. It you know or not it power
If none of those three are your constraint, and it's
(11:21):
really just translating it to the golf swing. Using medicine
balls to unlock that ground force sequence that you need
that will gain ten miles an hour. In some cases,
it's it's stupid. How cool is this? But hopefully this
kind of sheds some light on some of the common
misunderstandings that there are out there about medicine balls. I
challenge you, if you see someone at the gym banging
(11:43):
a medicine ball, ask them what they're working on and
ask them how they know that they're getting any better.
They're not going to have an answer for you. I've tried,
and I do my best to try to educate people.
It's funny how indignant a lot of people are. No
I saw this, I saw Rory doing it, So this
is what I'm gonna do. Who are you great? You're
not Rory? Enjoy men, just keep hanging that ball. But
(12:04):
I think the takeaway is at the end of the day,
vertical forces through your lower body upper body push power,
those are going to be your two biggest rois most
consistently that you've got to make sure those are in
your programs. Medicine balls do have a place. Fortunately for
nine or nine percent of people, we're not putting them
in the correct place. I hope is that after this
(12:26):
you will, So thanks always for hanging out with a
year on the golf at a spot squad and look forward
to catching on the next episode
Welcome to the Golfer as well. I'm Squad, I'm your host,
Chris Finn, and today we're going to dive into the
cliche topic of medicine balls and clubet speed. So a
lot of golfers out there, you maybe included, are thinking
about trying to increase club at speed when you're at
(00:29):
the gyp. That's a very common thing that we think
about as a golfer, and a lot of golfers unfortunately,
because I see them at the gyp, if not at
deep vers Golf, but when I go to just you know,
I'm down the road or travel it, whatever it is.
You know, I see people just pounding these medicine balls
against center black walls, and they just there's a lot
of misunderstanding of why they're doing it and when they're
(00:52):
doing these exercises, are actually doing them the wrong way.
So today we're going to dive into how to use
medicine balls, when not to use them. Why we're going
to do this in the context of the study that
we did looking at club at speed based you know,
clubate speed gains based on if people used medicine balls
or if we trained a different way. So let's let's
(01:13):
dive into that because it's there's a number of pretty
interesting nuggets to pull from it that I think are
important to share. So this is a cool study where
basically we took you know, we had this bigger up golfers,
took half of them. We said, you guys are gonna
or we said both groups, because we broke them into
two groups. We said, everybody's gonna do the same strength
training exercise, everybody's gonna do the same mobility exercises. And
(01:35):
we tested before we started, we had them do gamer
swings on our simulators. We took course placed readings, three
D kinematic, so we had kinetic data, kinematic data. We
had to launch monitor data every right, But so we
got baselines. So we did I wondered like five gamer
we call them gamer speeds, which is like you're just
on the golf course, you know par five, you're trying
(01:57):
to keep it in the fairways, hinden driver. And then
we did five Hey, you don't care where the ball goes,
swing as part as you possibly can. Right, That's how
we got our baselines. Now, Once we had that, and
then we had those two groups broken up and we said,
all right, Group A you're gonna do the same program
as Group B, but there's gonna be one difference. The
difference is Group Hey, you're gonna do medicine ball rotary work,
(02:21):
So you're gonna do iron man throws, which would be
like having a medicine ball kind of in your on
your armpit and your trail side armpit, and then you
kind of step and like almost like punch it like
like a punching motion, basically like launching it on a
line drive into the wall. That'd be an iron man throw.
Another variation that we had them do where scoop throws
(02:42):
think of two hands on the medicine ball, kind of
more down by the hip. This is one that I
see all the time at the gym and just kind
of you know, obviously you know, try to rotate and
throw it against the wall. Those are just two examples
of the med ball variations that we had them do
that was bad. Group B. Their power work was not
nothing medicine ball related. It was all lower body vertical
(03:03):
power related and upper body push power related. So I
think jumping think you know it's vertical, likes overhead slams.
So if you take them a slam ball, not a
medicine ball that's bouncy, a ball that has stand in
it that when you throw it on the ground it
just kind of is dead. You kind of bring it
up over the head and then slam it onto the ground.
That's a way that actually trains vertical forces. Great technique
(03:25):
if you're listening, have joint replacements or brightis in your
hips or knees like you're just jumping. This is not
something you feel good about after you do it to
your sore or whatever it may be. So it's a
great non impact way to train vertical forces. And then
upper body we do push power, so cable punches, you know,
we actually would use medicine balls here for rebound exercises
(03:48):
those sorts of things. So not nothing rotary. Remember the
study was looking at rotational use of medicine balls for
power versus a number of different ways of just training
upper body push power like a bench press and lower
body vertical power like a jump. Right, because those are
the two that we know from past studies have statistically
speaking causational impacts on clupet speechs. Meaning if we get
(04:11):
them better, club at speed gets faster. So we ran
the study for I believe it was eight to twelve weeks,
and then we decided to take a look obviously at
the end of retest and say, hey, what was what
was the difference? Right, And it was pretty astounding, you know,
the results. We were shocking in a way. I mean,
I definitely didn't think that I had a hypothesis. I
(04:33):
did not think the hypothesis was going to be this
stark in terms of how different it was. And so
basically what we saw was the medicine involved group really
you know, maybe got like marginally a little bit better,
but the group that did the vertical and the upper
body push power training outgained them by like three miles
(04:53):
an hour. Like it was stupid. Like it's literally like
ten yards right in a two to less than ninety days.
They did literally everything else the same, but the guru
b did the right power training that actually impacts the
golf swing and increases clup that speed. Now there's where
we'll dive into why that happened and why, you know,
(05:14):
it's important for you guys to take note of. But
I just want to drive home the fact of just
simply by picking the correct power exercise, one single group
gained an extra ten yards and literally spending the exact
same amount of time of the gym. That's wild and
I hope you hear that, and a kind of like
one little change can make that big of a difference
in the answers. Yes, if you're assessed and you're not
(05:35):
guessing what you need to be doing. So the reason
why a lot of these med ball drills don't work is,
you know's there's a couple of reasons. Number one, the
way that people do them is the wrong kinematic sequence.
So there's a lot of people I'll see doing like
a scoop toss for example. We have the you know,
the balls around your ways. So you're just trying to
like you're standing in place and just repeatedly banging this
(05:56):
thing off the wall ten twenty times. What happens is
you don't with your hips. You just end up making
it this upper body dominant move, which is the wrong
sequence to create power. We know this is from all
the research we've done force plates and looking at our
core four and one of the first most important things
is weight shift, followed by hips andiche in the downs way.
(06:16):
So if you're doing a medicine ball throw and you're
not doing either of those what the hell are you
doing like you're actually the answer is nothing. You're actually
training the opposite of what you want for doing. So
that that's one reason why a lot of the medicine
ball stuff doesn't work now if you coach it correctly.
I think this is a key point. Medicine balls do
work rotationally if you know what you're trying to get after.
(06:39):
So if somebody has good mobility, they have good strength,
and we're trying to improve the way that they use
the ground kinetically, medicine balls have a very, very important
place in this situation where you can use an iron man.
You're gonna use an iron man throw very differently than
a scoop toss. You may use a hot back medicine
ball toss, or there's lots of different variations. If you're
trying to increase somebody's scoresyle course, or maybe you're trying
(07:02):
to increase their vertical force, or maybe you're trying to
increase their toe heel force. Well, when you test these
different medicine ball exercises on force plates, how somebody is
coached in the awareness of what they're trying to do
makes a massive difference. Like literally on hundred and eighty
degree difference like total opposite based on how they're how
they're thinking about it when we look at their force
(07:23):
play data. So I think number one, people are doing
the wrong exercises, and number two they're they're doing them wrong.
Number three the third one, I can make a massive
lister hereble just stick to three. The third on is
that people a lot of people do medicine ball throws,
just like way too many of them. They'll like bang
out twenty of them. And in reality, if we're training,
(07:45):
if we understand the laws of physiology powertraining, after like
five reps, it's not power training anymore, it's becoming aerobic
capacity training. It's becoming endurance based training. And so they're
using these lightweight med balls that are heavier. They're like,
it's too heavy relative to a golf club to go
faster than you would with a golf club, and they're
(08:05):
too light relative to how strong the person generally is
for it to actually be an overload impact to create
to create striketh So you're kind of in this like
no man's land, which is why they're actually beneficial. More
so when you're trying to improve sequence, kinematic or kinetic. Remember,
kinematic is the order of movement in terms of the
hips moving first, then the torso, then the shoulders and
you know, than the pants, as opposed to kinetic, which
(08:29):
is the order of sequence of the forces in the ground.
So in a golf swing, it should be a horizontal
force peaking first, then a toe heal force, then a
vertical force, particularly through the lead leg is where most
of the vertical drive should come from. So it's I
think there's there's just so many ways that people screw
up medicine ball throws. It seemingly it seems like a
(08:51):
stupidly simple exercise, but it's actually incredibly nuanced and complex
and detailed. But once you understand that, can you understand
what you need? It's actually simple integration. I know, we've
seen people using medicine balls when we used why don't
we used them? Because hey, they have good mobility, they
have good strength, they just don't understand how to sequence
and use the ground correctly. Let's pick this specific medicine
(09:14):
ball drill, and we're gonna use this singular drill and
in a matter of like a week or two, I
mean honestly, within a session, I've seen somebody who up
ten miles out. I'm just because the light bulb clicks
and they're like, oh, I get it now, all right,
let's go put a club in your hand. Now it's
actually sports specific, training, golf specific. With the actual club
in your hand, that's the only way it's golf truly
golf specific. Then we can actually go and trans see
(09:36):
that translate out into the golf swing. So a little
bit more of a technical deep dive episode today, but
I really wanted to make sure that you guys understood
this just kind of myth, that this myth. Honestly, it's
it's all over Instagram, It's all over social media, and
it looks cool. It looks like the golf swing. And
so I see so many of you just jumping on
(09:56):
this bandwagon. You see, yeah, full season season or a
full swank season one to two or three whatever one
you just you see these guys throwing a medicine ball
without any context around why. And unfortunately, I mean this
news flash here, a lot of the guys on tour,
their trainers have no idea why they're doing them, like
it's a guy that they know, or like it's astounding
(10:19):
how many people actually have no idea what forces specific
medicine ball drills actually drive, even at the highest levels.
So if you're going to use a medicine ball, this
is my plea, please understand what you are specifically trying
to train and know that what you're doing is actually
going to do that, because if it isn't, you're wasting
(10:41):
your time. Like if you go back to the beginning
of this episodeever three miles an hour difference by changing
one thing, that's ten yards, same amount of time in
the gym, same amount of soreness, sweat all that, but
by doing the wrong thing, you lost ten miles an
hour compared to what you could have gaped about ten
(11:01):
miles now ten yards some cases i've seen ten. I've
seen it be ten miles an hour, And that can
happen when you have all the other boxes checked. If
we think of the golf performance pyramid of mobility at
the base, then the strength, and now you're working on power.
That's your constraint. It you know or not it power
If none of those three are your constraint, and it's
(11:21):
really just translating it to the golf swing. Using medicine
balls to unlock that ground force sequence that you need
that will gain ten miles an hour. In some cases,
it's it's stupid. How cool is this? But hopefully this
kind of sheds some light on some of the common
misunderstandings that there are out there about medicine balls. I
challenge you, if you see someone at the gym banging
(11:43):
a medicine ball, ask them what they're working on and
ask them how they know that they're getting any better.
They're not going to have an answer for you. I've tried,
and I do my best to try to educate people.
It's funny how indignant a lot of people are. No
I saw this, I saw Rory doing it, So this
is what I'm gonna do. Who are you great? You're
not Rory? Enjoy men, just keep hanging that ball. But
(12:04):
I think the takeaway is at the end of the day,
vertical forces through your lower body upper body push power,
those are going to be your two biggest rois most
consistently that you've got to make sure those are in
your programs. Medicine balls do have a place. Fortunately for
nine or nine percent of people, we're not putting them
in the correct place. I hope is that after this
(12:26):
you will, So thanks always for hanging out with a
year on the golf at a spot squad and look forward
to catching on the next episode
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