Bulking Up Your Game

If you're not getting the most out of your ability, try a golf-specific workout regimen

 Ready for some tough love?

“You can hack away and get some good shots, but consistency only comes from consistent body movement. And golf is one of the most challenging sports there is in this way.” That’s the explanation why you absolutely need a golf-specific workout, delivered by Tony España, a Titleist Performance Institute-accredited golf fitness trainer who runs Target Zone Golf and the Golf Performance Leagues in the Chicago area.

Now here’s some sweetener from España: “I’ve had patients who gained 20 to 25 yards in a month after starting to work out. They say, ‘I’m getting my hips through the ball now. I can feel the crack of the whip.’”

How about you? Do you feel the crack of the whip when you swing? Or have you lost 20 or 25 yards in the past several years and just can’t seem to find the “oomph,” despite springing for a new driver every summer? Or worse, do you feel pain in your shoulders, back, or hips? These are the telltale signs of muscle imbalances, poor mobility, and the age-related loss of strength. And all of them, according to the Chicago-area golf trainers interviewed for this story, can be slowed, stopped, or even reversed with a golf-based workout.

One of the trainers interviewed for this story—Robert Van Tholen, a chiropractor who runs Body Wellness Chiropractic in St. Charles and is Titleist Performance Institute-certified—says he’s quite sure that 99 of the top 100 PGA Tour pros have dedicated trainers and personalized workouts. One of the reasons, he adds, is that up to 30 percent of them are fighting some sort of injury at any one time.

If golfers, despite all their natural gifts, feel the need for trainers and workouts, why would you be exempt? You’re not. According to Janeé Matteson—a licensed athletic trainer with extensive pro tour experience who now runs Fit 4 Golf in Western Springs—if you spend most of the workday sitting at a desk or in a car, it’s no doubt shortened the angle between your thighs and pelvis from when you were 25 and hitting the ball noticeably farther.

Says Matteson, “So your pro is telling you, ‘Reverse pivot! You’re not shifting your weight right!’ And it’s not going to happen. Because if you have muscle imbalances, like in your pelvis, you’ll have a whole host of swing faults.”

Every fitness trainer has a slightly different way of describing it, but every explanation boils down to a specific sequence of events—a “kinetic chain”—that has to happen for you to hit the ball farther, straighter, and without pain. “If you look at Jim Furyk and Freddy Couples, and Tiger Woods, although their styles look different, how they transfer energy is exactly the same, and always efficient,” Van Tholen says.

Van Tholen explains that in the optimum golf kinetic chain—starting with the feet gripping the turf as you begin your swing and ending with the wrists as they fire through the ball—every other joint is either a “mobility joint” or a “stability joint.” One joint remains relatively rigid to store and transfer energy so the next one can flex to use it. When a joint is stiff or painful, the joints around it try to compensate. The result is more pain, more stiffness, and a sub-optimal golf swing.

And there’s little point in ignoring pain, Matteson points out. “Pain is a lagging indictor,” says Matteson. In other words, when the pain starts, muscle imbalances and joint immobility are already well established.

Having read this much, right now you might be kicking yourself for not having found a trainer sooner. Or perhaps you’re using one of the excuses many golfers use for simply buying more clubs, beating more balls, and paying more greens fees in the hope of getting better: Time commitment. Money commitment. It’s boring. Or “I used to hit it far; I can again, on my own.”
“They fear it will take time and effort and require an overhaul of their whole body,” explains Kevin Dutton, a chiropractor with Essential Health Chiropractic in Highland Park and another Titleist Performance Institute-certified trainer. “Plus, there’s a ton of good information online, but it’s conflicting and not tied to your specific needs.”

So just as trainers have regimens for your body and your game, they have ways of convincing the skeptical to commit to a workout. “We ask, ‘What’s the most successful thing you’ve accomplished? Were there specific steps and elements to it? If you’d missed a step, would you have been successful?’” says Paul Callaway, former head PGA Tour physical therapist and now president of Callaway Golf Fitness, which operates in conjunction with the Cantigny Golf Academy.

And he’s not done yet with the questions. “’Was it easy? Was it comfortable? Did you have to jump through hoops?’ They agree, and we say, ‘Tell me what you want to achieve,’ and the blinders come off. They realize, ‘I don’t have to lower my standards.’”

Dutton puts it another way. “You don’t mind three minutes for your teeth each night for your health, right? Well, if you can put in something simple, like 15 minutes in the a.m. and p.m. on your living room floor while you watch the news, it won’t rule your life but it will change your golf game.”

It won’t rule your life, but it will require some commitment: of time and money. Just how much? All of the trainers quoted here say they start with a thorough physical evaluation, and some of them give you a limited workout on day one and a notebook with your exercises illustrated in it. Trainers aligned with the Titleist program set you up with an online account where you can watch the appropriate videos and track your own workouts—video of your exercises can even be downloaded to your smartphone.

You might meet with your trainer weekly at first for a few months, then less often thereafter—or you can keep up the pace if you see the need. Cost ranges from a few hundred dollars for a simple program to upwards of $1,000 for something more involved. Touring pros pay for or receive from their tours thousands of dollars worth of training a year, and so can you if you’re out to wring the last bit of improvement out of your formerly stiff, overcompensating body.
But every trainer will caution you of one thing: Fitness isn’t the magic bullet any more than a new driver is. They point to the five components of a good golf game: the physical (including flexibility, strength, posture, coordination, and balance); the mental; innate ability; the right equipment; and lessons. As for the latter two, every trainer interviewed here insisted that his or her work pays incomplete dividends if the golfer hasn’t been professionally fitted for clubs and isn’t working with a pro on his or her game. But the benefits are there. “So many times I’ve identified a physical problem in a golfer, and he’s said, ‘My pro is telling me the same thing, only in golf terms!” says Matteson.

So just what is a golf-focused workout? Chances are, after a detailed swing analysis that might involve some serious video technology, your trainer will start with hands-on work like a deep-muscle massage or other manipulations. From literally hundreds of distinct exercises, the trainer will assign things like squats, lunges with upper-body rotation, single-leg balance exercises while you rotate around your swing plane, and postures like “the plank” in which you put your forearms, palms and feet on the floor and suspend your body parallel to it. You’re working up to two minutes. “I’ve had people who struggle after 10 or 20 seconds at the start,” España says.

Still not convinced? Callaway says that golf fitness lets you start to forget about your body and swing the club like it’s second nature, “like driving a car, shooting a basket, or throwing a ball,” he says. He says that for too many golfers, the old saying that “golf is 90 percent mental” refers to their conscious, doomed efforts to keep their swing together. “If your body isn’t right, it’s like sitting on a chair that’s missing one leg. Of course it’s mental then. It’s a challenge just to stay up.” CG