Golf Fitness; Where To Start...

*5 minute read

Tips for golf fitness are everywhere.

A quick scroll through your social media feeds and you’ll be inundated with advice on “this is the best exercise for more power” and “do these exercises to hit the ball further”… but they can’t all be right! So what gives?

Golf Fitness In A Nutshell

For the average golfer, if you can become more mobile, potentially lose a few inches off of the waistline and improve your balance and coordination, then you are going to hit the ball further, straighter and more consistently.

Then if you add in some strength training, that distance is going to multiply.

Only once you have these foundations in place, can a speed training programme become a consideration!

But for most, we tend to do the inverse of that… which can lead to injury and invariably leads to spraying the ball off the planet for a period of time.

So… where do we start to improve our golf fitness? 

Mobility

Your body is not going to perform well, whether it be in the gym or on the course if you don’t have adequate mobility in your joints.

In my experience, pretty much every player that I have ever taken through a TPI movement screen will fail at least 2 of the tests.

Why is this so important?

Quite simply, if you can’t achieve efficient positions throughout the different phases of your golf swing (due to a lack of mobility), you’re going to be limiting what you can achieve with this swing.

So this is our first port of call.

It’s not sexy, it’s not glamorous, but if you are looking to get fit for golf and improve your handicap, then your mobility should be the first thing you address.

If you are not testing, you’re guessing. So to start, you’ll need to be taken through/run yourself through a movement screen.

This will help you diagnose where you are lacking in mobility and a simple search on google will help you find the best drills to rectify these.

Balance and Coordination

A golf swing is a highly coordinated sequence of movements. Of which, you need to remain balanced from the moment you take the club away all the way through impact.

If you are lacking in either of these, you can be the fastest player on the planet, but you’re likely to be spending most of the time wandering through the trees or hitting provisionals… not ideal if you’re looking to build a score and drop your handicap.

These exercises shouldn’t be the first exercise in each session of a training programme, but they should definitely be a permanent feature. Particularly if you score badly on the balance tests within your movement screen, I’d tip the scales to get more of these in.

Upper body:

Standing single arm cable rows, unilateral chest press, plank shoulder taps, landmine overhead press, overhead ball slams, windmill ball slams.

Lower body:

Single leg toe touch, single leg RDL’s, lunges, lateral lunges, step ups, offset racked squats, single leg hip thrusts, airplanes.

Mixed in with some core work:

Palof press, dead bugs, bird dogs, low cable wood chops, offset deadlifts, side plank rows.

A good blend will see you take leaps on both fronts!

Strength training

Now that you have mobile joints and your balance and coordination resemble that of an olympic gymnast, we can now start to build the foundations of strength.

But it’s not quite as simple as just lifting weights or throwing objects fast!

In the strength and conditioning community we have two theories we like to use to help us structure our clients strength/gym based training…

General Physical Preparedness (GPP) and Sport Specific strength training.

GPP

The focus of GPP is on building the robustness of your body (ability to tolerate both loaded and unloaded movements whilst avoiding injury) and the ability to produce force.

Essentially, to make you a better all round athlete.

Think… loaded/weighted: squats, deadlifts, chin ups, bench press, lunges, RDL’s, Hip thrusts, farmers walks along with some core work.

Sport specific

Once we know your body can now tolerate the strains of strength training, we can then look to build in the parts that are going to make you a more explosive golfer.

Think… vertical jumps, broad jumps, box jumps, drop jumps, bounds, rotational jumps, rotational slams, overhead slams, rotational band work, sprinting and then… 

Speed training

Why does this come last?

Quite simply… you wouldn’t put an F1 engine in a smart car chassis (imagine the carnage)… yet most golfers will pick up a speed training aid and go full beans with it, without having done all of the foundation work to build up their athletic base, to build up their robustness and their mobility.

Which, as you can probably imagine, often leads to injury and/or smashing balls off the planet, as they don’t have the coordination to keep that speed under control!

So… get the main parts right first, then focus on building that F1 engine!

Summary

Stop copying the pro’s!

They may be doing all of these wonderful looking exercises on social media that you think will definitely improve your game, but it’s generally not the case!

You are not them! They are elite athletes! Athletes who are incredible at all of the fundamentals. There’s a high chance that you aren’t currently in the same period of your athletic development as they are.

You wouldn’t try Usain Bolt’s training programme and expect to be running the 100m in 9.58 in a few months would you? (Maybe you would, I don’t know).

The same applies to the top golf pro’s in the world.

Start from the foundations and build your way up!

1 - Mobility. Diagnose where you lack mobility and work on it 3-6 times per week - 10-20 mins per day.

2 - Add some exercises in to your weekly routine that will improve your balance and coordination

3 - Get that gym membership and load up on GPP strength work.

4 - In time, balance the GPP work with some sport specific work.

5 - Add in the speed training protocol.

If you are starting from the beginning in your golf fitness journey, start with 1 and 2.

If you are a little further along; 1-3.

Then, when you have built a robust and strong physique, 1-4.

And when you are feeling robust, balanced, strong and explosive, your body will then tolerate 5. Only then would I ever advise a speed training programme using implements.

Rinse and repeat.

Should you have any questions on the above, then fire me over a message directly or reach out via Instagram @TourStrength.

This article was written by Ben Foulis.

The founder of Tour Strength, a sports science graduate who has accumulated more than 5000 hours of 1-2-1 personal training sessions working with golfers.

He is qualified with both TPI and is an accredited member of the UKSCA.