Famous owner of Westside Barbell, Louie Simmons, once said, “Big is not strong, strong is strong.” After watching strong people swing a golf club, I piggybacked off of this and said, “Strong is not fast, fast is fast.”
Let’s think about this. Can you be big and strong? Absolutely.
Can you be strong and fast? Yup.
If you train correctly, can you be big, strong, and fast? You bet!
The problem lies in that most people train for one of these attributes, maybe two, but not many programs incorporate all three.
Do golfers need to be big?
There’s some debate about this, suggesting that bigger golfers can produce more force to hit the ball further. Ever heard of Isaac Newton?
Newton’s second law of motion states that force equals mass times acceleration (f = ma). This implies that if we are larger, we have more force, and the faster we accelerate, the more force we can create.
That conversation is for another blog, but most bodybuilding programs focus solely on getting big, not strong, and certainly not fast. Nutrition also plays a major role in how big you actually get, but again that’s for another time.
I want to focus on strength's relation to speed.
Strength is a prerequisite for speed. How much strength is necessary is unknown, but you certainly cannot create force without strength. If you can apply more force, you have the potential to create more speed.
This is where a lot of programming falls short. We have to find ways in our training to create more speed, which is how you will swing the golf club faster and (with proper technique) hit the ball further.
When we think about the type of strength needed, it’s not going to be things like bicep curls. We need total body strength. Compound exercises are proven to be the most effective: squats, deadlifts, lunges, presses, pulls—things of this nature.
These exercises help create ground force, enhance core strength, improve coordination, and develop many other qualities needed on and off the course.
Then we have to take that hard-earned strength and turn it into power.
How do we do that?
In the gym, perform exercises that force you to move rapidly. Jumps, med ball slams, and power band rotations are some of my favorites. The goal is to move fast, so no need to go very heavy on these exercises with bands or med balls.
On the range, you need to practice purposely swinging your driver fast. Don’t even tee up a ball, just swing as hard as you can (after a proper warm-up and with a radar is ideal).
In my program Lift Heavy, Swing Fast that’s how we build strong and fast athletes.
