March 13, 2025 • 11 mins
In this episode of the Golf Fitness Bomb Squad, Chris Finn debunks common myths surrounding strength training for golfers. He emphasizes that lifting heavy weights does not make you stiff, and that strength training is essential for maintaining mobility and improving performance. The discussion covers the importance of lifting heavy relative to one's ability, the ineffectiveness of light weights and high reps, and the necessity of strength training for longevity in the sport.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
Welcome to the golf but this Bomb Squad, I'm your host,
Chris Finn, and today have an exciting topic for you
and when it comes to strength training and the myths
around doing that for golf. So if you didn't hear
last couple episodes, we've started live streaming these, so uh,
that's a fun part for us on that we're typically
doing these on Tuesday, so we'll make sure we got
more info on that for you guys on whatever platform
(00:32):
you're on, whether it's YouTube, Instagram, there's just you know
a number of them that we're doing it on. We
actually are adding one every week, so a fun way
for you guys to interact with me as questions as
you have on these topics. It's definitely you know, check
out our social so you can find those. But let's
dive into this. The training miss that I find, there's
kind of big three of them when it comes to
strength training for golfers that tend to really hold people back.
(00:55):
The first one really is that lifting heavy stuff is
gonna make you stiff and hurts your golf swing. Couldn't
be more false. So let's diffuse that bomb right now.
I just it's interesting when and I understand where this
comes from. I think there's historically a thought process around
seeing kind of big bodybuilders and they're really big and muscular,
(01:15):
and like they don't have tons of flexibility. Or you
talk to your buddy who played football and can bench
a lot, and he sucks at mobility, right, and there's
this I guess, stereotype that's put towards people who lift
a lot of weight that they're not going to have
a lot of mobility. The fact of the matter is
your buddy who benches you know, three point fifteen and
(01:37):
sucks it with shoulder mobility, just as he sucks because
he doesn't do shoulder mobility. It's not because he's benching
a lot of a lot of weight. And so I
think when you actually look at this of the data,
so this is what we see is when it comes
to if we talk about the big four lifts, bench, squat,
dead a deadlift, and a pull motion, those are kind
(01:58):
of the big four moves, and what we see as
there is a direct relationship between how much people can
move and those how much force people can produce in
those movement patterns. So hiphinges would be the equivalent, you know,
is it deadlift. A squat pattern would be like squatting
with a bar in your back or a goblet squat,
whatever variation you're doing. Upper body push power would be
like a bench press, dumbbell, bench press, whatever variation you're doing.
(02:22):
And then you know, a pole, the big one that
we're seeing is very impactful, is like a lap pole.
So a single arm lap pole down is what we test.
We look at how much load you can move it,
how fast you can move it actually give us a
power output. So those are the big four that really
matter when it comes to strengthening. And so I think
it's just it's in a way kind of funny just
because of the people that tend to have these concerns.
(02:44):
So most of you who have this concern either A
have never lifted weights, B have never lifted weights in
any serious way, shape or form, or c have lifted
weights and done it the complete wrong way and gotten
and become tight and then blamed it on lifting weights
and getting stronger. There is you got to look. You
have to look no further than the gymnath you know,
(03:05):
look at the Olympics. Like a gymnast. They're strong as
all hell and they're the most flexible people in the building.
But I think when you look at the like the
actual stats around it, uh, you know you will get
gains relatives to clubs in terms of your club speed
going up as you get stronger for a deadlift, until
you get to one point seventy five times your body weight.
(03:26):
So if you weigh one hundred pounds, you should be
able to deadlift one hundred and seventy five pounds for
one rep. You know, one point five times bodyweight for squat, right,
so you should be able to squat you weigh one
hundred pounds one hundred and fifty pounds, right. You guys
can do the math your pounds. You should be able
to squat three hundred pounds or not should be able to,
but you could go up to three hundred pounds and
it would still help your your golf game. So it's
(03:47):
all relative bodyweight. Your your bench press is one point
two five times to one point three body weight for
it to be helpful for your club speed. Once you
guys hit those body eight percentage, like, there's no benefit
to going any higher. You really just can maintain those
and then you're going to start to shift to you're
going to get a bigger ROI out of other areas,
(04:08):
whether it's spectrum speed training, whatever, it may be. The
idea that getting to those numbers would make you stiff,
either A you're doing it wrong or B you're not
doing your mobility work. And I think that's a big
thing we always talk about about when we think of
our performance period. Pyramid for golf is at the bottom
layer is mobility, particularly in the core four roadary centers,
(04:28):
your hips, your shoulders, your spine, your neck. If you
have those abilities to move in those areas and you've
maintained those, then what can happen is you actually the
strength actually helps you to maintain that mobility. The number
of reason why guys will lose mobility is because they
actually are becoming weak and your body's trying to limit
(04:48):
the mobility because they don't have the strength to control it.
So less mobility means you need less strength control it.
So it couldn't be more false that lifting heavyweights is
going to make you stiff and hurt your golf swing.
If you do it the right way, it actually will
make you more durable, less likely to get hurt, and
it will actually help you maintain your mobility because that
should be a part of your program as well. Now,
if you only go to the gym and all you
do is bench squad on deadlift and you don't do
(05:10):
anything else, probably not helping your golf game. You have
to have some other stuff in there. But those core
foundational elements are definitely critical for longevity in the game
of golf. All right, myth one busted. Let's go to
number two. Strength training for golf should only be lightweight
and high reps. So this is I think comes out
of the fear from myth one that you if I
(05:31):
get too strong, I'm gonna get stiff and it's going
to hurt my golf swing. So I know I'm supposed
to go to the gym because that's good for me
golf fitness, and all the pros do it. So I'm
just going I'm just gonna lift like lightweight. So I'm
gonna do like ten to twenty reps a set, and
that way I don't get hurt. So this is a
complete and utter disaster of a waste of time because
(05:54):
there's a couple things we're going to try to dive
into this without losing anybody. Golf is a power sport.
What that means is, you know, the downswing everyone knows
is less than a second, and then you walk to
your neck to your ball and you hit your next shot.
And there's generally about five minutes between those shots. If
you're playing by yourself, maybe it's three minutes. If you
don't hit it very far, maybe it's ninety seconds. I
don't know. But the energy systems required to do that
(06:16):
are the glycolytic and then the anaerobic power like those
the short acting power systems, not the aerobic endurance side
of things, which start to be triggered when you start
going ten twelve, fifteen, twenty reps. When you go for
long runs, you know, three mile, four mile, five mile
marathons like those are very different energy systems than what
(06:39):
golf requires for you to be successful. We had this
discussion actually, we just had an accelerator event here. We
had fifteen guys flying from all over the country, and
one of the questions was like, should I be doing cardio?
And it was like and so the discussion was around,
I mean, cardio is not bad for you, right health wise.
There's a cardiovascular benefit to getting your heart rate up,
(07:01):
and you know, doing incline walking, and those sorts of things.
You know, keeping your heart you know, your heart rate
within a threshold where you know you're not you know,
basically training aerobic capacity, you're anaerobic capacity. You could certainly
do those different types of training, but once you start
doing long distance training, you're actually training your systs a
different You know, you have a certain percentage of your
muscle fibers that are trainable. Your nervous system obviously is trainable,
(07:25):
and the message there is let's go long and slow
for a long period of time. Let's go slow as
opposed to what golf is, which is, hey, I'm going
to swing this in a second, and let's go as
fast as we can or as hard as we can
to make the ball go as far as possible. So
two very different outcome goals. So the training, you know,
generally isn't going to be intermingled in an ideal wish,
(07:46):
you know, an ideal situation. Now. So when you're doing
lightweight training, you're obviously going to have to do a
lot of reps in order to feel anything. So it's
kind of the equivalent of going for long runs. It's
obviously not exactly the same, but it's the general idea,
that's the type of training generally you'll do when you're
doing long distance training, you'll sprinkle in other cycles and
all that. For all you fitness nuts out there that
(08:07):
are no, that's not how you do it. I know
that there's more specificity to it. Trying to keep this
high level for everyone listening, uh, the you know, so
it kind of goes into the you know, back to
kind of myth one of you know, we want you
to lift heavy relative to where you are right, So
one hundred pounds may be heavy for you know, person a,
(08:29):
you know, for John, but for Bob, you know, one
hundred pounds may be a warm upset and he maybe
lifts in with three hundred pounds. It's all relative and
that's what matters, is the relativity of it. But if
you don't lift heavy, then you're gonna have to do
you're doing light weight, you're doing high reps. If you're
lifting heavy, because the weight is heavier, you're only going
to be doing five, maybe eight reps. And I think
(08:51):
that's the cool thing. A. You don't have to do
as many reps. B You're you're not going to be
a sore because you're not doing as many reps right,
high reps, high volume as acts, it makes you sore.
So if you lift heavy and do fewer reps, that's
what we have all of our players do in season
to maintain as high of a force output as possible
without having them you know, get sore. So that's myth too, stomped, crushed.
(09:14):
Hopefully that helps clear that one up for you guys.
Final one third myth that strength training isn't necessary for golf.
Now this is just complete bowl. I don't know if
I'm allowed to cuss on this. I don't know if
we calber, do we have an explicit rating, I don't
know if we do bs. So it really, I mean,
that's just funny at this point. I mean time, I
think that was probably very well accepted, like two thousand
(09:35):
and before along came a guy named uh I think
his name was Tiger Woods if anyone's ever heard of him.
Before him, he had Gary Player, and it's just only
become more and more accepted. And you know, if anybody's
seen any of the full swing seasons, there's at least
one scene of every player pretty much in the gym
doing something fitness oriented. You know, there's it's just I
(09:56):
mean it's just stupid at this point, effectively say it
straight isn't necessary for golf. If you're trying to play
this game for a long time. If you don't strength train,
what will happen is your technical ability will outpace your
physical ability, which will lead you to you swinging faster
than what your body can handle, and you eventually get hurt.
If that doesn't happen, what eventual will happen is you
will just lose clubhets be because you can't produce force
(10:19):
and you lose mobility, and so you don't have as
long as a runway to create the force that's called
the impulse. So your clubhets be drops. And we see
this in the data. Guys like if the average the
person who is not doing anything physical, like not working
on their body the right way for golf, you're going
to lose ten miles an hour every decade. If you
start to do the right stuff, that loss drops to
(10:41):
two miles an hour a decade. Now, the average person
that we work with who isn't doing anything today and
starts doing something tomorrow will gain in the next year
five to seven miles. Now, so let's say you gain
seven miles an hour, Right, if you gain seven miles
an hour and year one, then that means you just
you won't lose ten miles an hour instead of one decade,
(11:03):
you won't lose it for the next three decades, so
next thirty years. So like literally doing one year working
on your body will in the gate thirty years of loss.
That's like a mistatic. Do the right stuff for one
year will in the gate thirty years three decades worth
of loss of if you did nothing. That is the
cost of doing nothing is thirty miles an hour, which
(11:26):
is like one hundred yards. And that's why most people
stop playing the game of golf when they get into
their later sixties and seventies. But you want to be
the guy that's carrying his bag in his nineties and
enjoying the game and having fun. And that's you know,
that's ultimately the why we do it here, and that's
you know, hopefully this, you know, these three myths being
busted helps you, you know, get on the right path
and start doing the right type of strength training to
(11:46):
help you play better golf for a really, really long time.
So thanks as always for hanging out with me here
on the golf in this bomb squad, and we'll look
forward to catching on the next episode.
Welcome to the golf but this Bomb Squad, I'm your host,
Chris Finn, and today have an exciting topic for you
and when it comes to strength training and the myths
around doing that for golf. So if you didn't hear
last couple episodes, we've started live streaming these, so uh,
that's a fun part for us on that we're typically
doing these on Tuesday, so we'll make sure we got
more info on that for you guys on whatever platform
(00:32):
you're on, whether it's YouTube, Instagram, there's just you know
a number of them that we're doing it on. We
actually are adding one every week, so a fun way
for you guys to interact with me as questions as
you have on these topics. It's definitely you know, check
out our social so you can find those. But let's
dive into this. The training miss that I find, there's
kind of big three of them when it comes to
strength training for golfers that tend to really hold people back.
(00:55):
The first one really is that lifting heavy stuff is
gonna make you stiff and hurts your golf swing. Couldn't
be more false. So let's diffuse that bomb right now.
I just it's interesting when and I understand where this
comes from. I think there's historically a thought process around
seeing kind of big bodybuilders and they're really big and muscular,
(01:15):
and like they don't have tons of flexibility. Or you
talk to your buddy who played football and can bench
a lot, and he sucks at mobility, right, and there's
this I guess, stereotype that's put towards people who lift
a lot of weight that they're not going to have
a lot of mobility. The fact of the matter is
your buddy who benches you know, three point fifteen and
(01:37):
sucks it with shoulder mobility, just as he sucks because
he doesn't do shoulder mobility. It's not because he's benching
a lot of a lot of weight. And so I
think when you actually look at this of the data,
so this is what we see is when it comes
to if we talk about the big four lifts, bench, squat,
dead a deadlift, and a pull motion, those are kind
(01:58):
of the big four moves, and what we see as
there is a direct relationship between how much people can
move and those how much force people can produce in
those movement patterns. So hiphinges would be the equivalent, you know,
is it deadlift. A squat pattern would be like squatting
with a bar in your back or a goblet squat,
whatever variation you're doing. Upper body push power would be
like a bench press, dumbbell, bench press, whatever variation you're doing.
(02:22):
And then you know, a pole, the big one that
we're seeing is very impactful, is like a lap pole.
So a single arm lap pole down is what we test.
We look at how much load you can move it,
how fast you can move it actually give us a
power output. So those are the big four that really
matter when it comes to strengthening. And so I think
it's just it's in a way kind of funny just
because of the people that tend to have these concerns.
(02:44):
So most of you who have this concern either A
have never lifted weights, B have never lifted weights in
any serious way, shape or form, or c have lifted
weights and done it the complete wrong way and gotten
and become tight and then blamed it on lifting weights
and getting stronger. There is you got to look. You
have to look no further than the gymnath you know,
(03:05):
look at the Olympics. Like a gymnast. They're strong as
all hell and they're the most flexible people in the building.
But I think when you look at the like the
actual stats around it, uh, you know you will get
gains relatives to clubs in terms of your club speed
going up as you get stronger for a deadlift, until
you get to one point seventy five times your body weight.
(03:26):
So if you weigh one hundred pounds, you should be
able to deadlift one hundred and seventy five pounds for
one rep. You know, one point five times bodyweight for squat, right,
so you should be able to squat you weigh one
hundred pounds one hundred and fifty pounds, right. You guys
can do the math your pounds. You should be able
to squat three hundred pounds or not should be able to,
but you could go up to three hundred pounds and
it would still help your your golf game. So it's
(03:47):
all relative bodyweight. Your your bench press is one point
two five times to one point three body weight for
it to be helpful for your club speed. Once you
guys hit those body eight percentage, like, there's no benefit
to going any higher. You really just can maintain those
and then you're going to start to shift to you're
going to get a bigger ROI out of other areas,
(04:08):
whether it's spectrum speed training, whatever, it may be. The
idea that getting to those numbers would make you stiff,
either A you're doing it wrong or B you're not
doing your mobility work. And I think that's a big
thing we always talk about about when we think of
our performance period. Pyramid for golf is at the bottom
layer is mobility, particularly in the core four roadary centers,
(04:28):
your hips, your shoulders, your spine, your neck. If you
have those abilities to move in those areas and you've
maintained those, then what can happen is you actually the
strength actually helps you to maintain that mobility. The number
of reason why guys will lose mobility is because they
actually are becoming weak and your body's trying to limit
(04:48):
the mobility because they don't have the strength to control it.
So less mobility means you need less strength control it.
So it couldn't be more false that lifting heavyweights is
going to make you stiff and hurt your golf swing.
If you do it the right way, it actually will
make you more durable, less likely to get hurt, and
it will actually help you maintain your mobility because that
should be a part of your program as well. Now,
if you only go to the gym and all you
do is bench squad on deadlift and you don't do
(05:10):
anything else, probably not helping your golf game. You have
to have some other stuff in there. But those core
foundational elements are definitely critical for longevity in the game
of golf. All right, myth one busted. Let's go to
number two. Strength training for golf should only be lightweight
and high reps. So this is I think comes out
of the fear from myth one that you if I
(05:31):
get too strong, I'm gonna get stiff and it's going
to hurt my golf swing. So I know I'm supposed
to go to the gym because that's good for me
golf fitness, and all the pros do it. So I'm
just going I'm just gonna lift like lightweight. So I'm
gonna do like ten to twenty reps a set, and
that way I don't get hurt. So this is a
complete and utter disaster of a waste of time because
(05:54):
there's a couple things we're going to try to dive
into this without losing anybody. Golf is a power sport.
What that means is, you know, the downswing everyone knows
is less than a second, and then you walk to
your neck to your ball and you hit your next shot.
And there's generally about five minutes between those shots. If
you're playing by yourself, maybe it's three minutes. If you
don't hit it very far, maybe it's ninety seconds. I
don't know. But the energy systems required to do that
(06:16):
are the glycolytic and then the anaerobic power like those
the short acting power systems, not the aerobic endurance side
of things, which start to be triggered when you start
going ten twelve, fifteen, twenty reps. When you go for
long runs, you know, three mile, four mile, five mile
marathons like those are very different energy systems than what
(06:39):
golf requires for you to be successful. We had this
discussion actually, we just had an accelerator event here. We
had fifteen guys flying from all over the country, and
one of the questions was like, should I be doing cardio?
And it was like and so the discussion was around,
I mean, cardio is not bad for you, right health wise.
There's a cardiovascular benefit to getting your heart rate up,
(07:01):
and you know, doing incline walking, and those sorts of things.
You know, keeping your heart you know, your heart rate
within a threshold where you know you're not you know,
basically training aerobic capacity, you're anaerobic capacity. You could certainly
do those different types of training, but once you start
doing long distance training, you're actually training your systs a
different You know, you have a certain percentage of your
muscle fibers that are trainable. Your nervous system obviously is trainable,
(07:25):
and the message there is let's go long and slow
for a long period of time. Let's go slow as
opposed to what golf is, which is, hey, I'm going
to swing this in a second, and let's go as
fast as we can or as hard as we can
to make the ball go as far as possible. So
two very different outcome goals. So the training, you know,
generally isn't going to be intermingled in an ideal wish,
(07:46):
you know, an ideal situation. Now. So when you're doing
lightweight training, you're obviously going to have to do a
lot of reps in order to feel anything. So it's
kind of the equivalent of going for long runs. It's
obviously not exactly the same, but it's the general idea,
that's the type of training generally you'll do when you're
doing long distance training, you'll sprinkle in other cycles and
all that. For all you fitness nuts out there that
(08:07):
are no, that's not how you do it. I know
that there's more specificity to it. Trying to keep this
high level for everyone listening, uh, the you know, so
it kind of goes into the you know, back to
kind of myth one of you know, we want you
to lift heavy relative to where you are right, So
one hundred pounds may be heavy for you know, person a,
(08:29):
you know, for John, but for Bob, you know, one
hundred pounds may be a warm upset and he maybe
lifts in with three hundred pounds. It's all relative and
that's what matters, is the relativity of it. But if
you don't lift heavy, then you're gonna have to do
you're doing light weight, you're doing high reps. If you're
lifting heavy, because the weight is heavier, you're only going
to be doing five, maybe eight reps. And I think
(08:51):
that's the cool thing. A. You don't have to do
as many reps. B You're you're not going to be
a sore because you're not doing as many reps right,
high reps, high volume as acts, it makes you sore.
So if you lift heavy and do fewer reps, that's
what we have all of our players do in season
to maintain as high of a force output as possible
without having them you know, get sore. So that's myth too, stomped, crushed.
(09:14):
Hopefully that helps clear that one up for you guys.
Final one third myth that strength training isn't necessary for golf.
Now this is just complete bowl. I don't know if
I'm allowed to cuss on this. I don't know if
we calber, do we have an explicit rating, I don't
know if we do bs. So it really, I mean,
that's just funny at this point. I mean time, I
think that was probably very well accepted, like two thousand
(09:35):
and before along came a guy named uh I think
his name was Tiger Woods if anyone's ever heard of him.
Before him, he had Gary Player, and it's just only
become more and more accepted. And you know, if anybody's
seen any of the full swing seasons, there's at least
one scene of every player pretty much in the gym
doing something fitness oriented. You know, there's it's just I
(09:56):
mean it's just stupid at this point, effectively say it
straight isn't necessary for golf. If you're trying to play
this game for a long time. If you don't strength train,
what will happen is your technical ability will outpace your
physical ability, which will lead you to you swinging faster
than what your body can handle, and you eventually get hurt.
If that doesn't happen, what eventual will happen is you
will just lose clubhets be because you can't produce force
(10:19):
and you lose mobility, and so you don't have as
long as a runway to create the force that's called
the impulse. So your clubhets be drops. And we see
this in the data. Guys like if the average the
person who is not doing anything physical, like not working
on their body the right way for golf, you're going
to lose ten miles an hour every decade. If you
start to do the right stuff, that loss drops to
(10:41):
two miles an hour a decade. Now, the average person
that we work with who isn't doing anything today and
starts doing something tomorrow will gain in the next year
five to seven miles. Now, so let's say you gain
seven miles an hour, Right, if you gain seven miles
an hour and year one, then that means you just
you won't lose ten miles an hour instead of one decade,
(11:03):
you won't lose it for the next three decades, so
next thirty years. So like literally doing one year working
on your body will in the gate thirty years of loss.
That's like a mistatic. Do the right stuff for one
year will in the gate thirty years three decades worth
of loss of if you did nothing. That is the
cost of doing nothing is thirty miles an hour, which
(11:26):
is like one hundred yards. And that's why most people
stop playing the game of golf when they get into
their later sixties and seventies. But you want to be
the guy that's carrying his bag in his nineties and
enjoying the game and having fun. And that's you know,
that's ultimately the why we do it here, and that's
you know, hopefully this, you know, these three myths being
busted helps you, you know, get on the right path
and start doing the right type of strength training to
(11:46):
help you play better golf for a really, really long time.
So thanks as always for hanging out with me here
on the golf in this bomb squad, and we'll look
forward to catching on the next episode.
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