For decades, golf was viewed as a game of skill, strategy, and mental resilience. While these qualities remain fundamental, modern golf has evolved into a sport where physical preparation plays a significant role in performance. From the power-driven game of today’s tour professionals to the weekend golfer looking to hit the ball further and avoid injury, fitness has become an essential component of success.
The Physical Demands of Modern Golf
A golf swing may last less than two seconds, but rounds can last over five hours, walking between five and seven miles while carrying or pushing equipment, often in varying weather conditions and terrain. This physical exertion, cognitive strain of strategic decision making, performing under pressure and the fine technical details of the swing make it a challenge to perform at your best. The ability to maintain these qualities over multiple rounds and throughout a competitive season separates elite performers from the rest of the field.
Physical Preparation in Elite Golf
The modern professional golfer resembles a high-performance athlete more than ever before. Players now work with multidisciplinary teams that may include strength and conditioning coaches, physiotherapists, nutritionists, sports psychologists, plus their technical coaches. Reasons for this drive to improve physical preparation are multi-factorial; golfers are now playing more tournaments a year, they have worldwide travel commitments, longer golf courses and the ability to earn a large income while keeping your playing availability high. Therefore it’s vital to reduce injury rates, improve technical skill and develop physical benefits over competitors.
Largest Benefits: Most Bang For Your Buck
The best elite golfers prioritise full-body strength training. While maximum strength is hugely significant in sports like weightlifting, increasing golfers’ strength provides the foundation for generating greater clubhead speed and reducing injury.
Our coaches understand the largest impact of physical preparation on better golf comes from having the golfer reach the ‘start line’ more than ever before. If a golfer can feel ready to perform at every tournament they enter without fear of pain or fatigue, they have a higher chance of better performance. In the case of a golfer with injury history physical preparation builds ‘availability’ and ‘durability’ of which they didn’t have before. Increasing a player’s availability allows for more tournament play without injury or illness to gain ranking points and earn increased income. Adding player durability increases the volume of golf they can tolerate symptom free, therefore allowing more technical practice volume, in turn more tournament volume, and cognitive capacity develops leading to long term improvements.
With elite professionals, a smaller but still important impact comes from enhancing their movement mechanics e.g. improving the consistency of ball striking. These changes are developed largely from a mix of physical and technical aspects working together to achieve a common goal (Brearley et al, 2019).
Programming
The scheduling of training can be a difficult challenge when golfers are based away from home at tournaments, they can experience global travel and facilities that change each week with long wrap-around seasons. In the case where you do have a week or two away from tournament golf, training sessions can have added volume to develop muscle hypertrophy and cross-sectional area whilst you have time to recover. In tournament weeks this is not the case for players regularly making the cut. Training sessions need to be adapted to include lower volume and higher intensity focusing on development of speed and power of the lower and upper limbs. This leaves the golfer feeling ready to perform whilst still creating long term adaptation without excessive fatigue.
One method our coaches find useful is that of ‘microdosing’ during warm ups. Shorter but more frequent sessions of 20–40 minutes 5 times a week as an expansion of a warm up session has been shown to be useful to players who like the feeling of regular movement but have a lower tolerance to accumulative fatigue of bigger sessions. Research has shown that resistance training in warm ups has a significant effect on golf performance whilst static stretching alone isn’t impactful enough (Ehlert A and Wilson P. 2019).
Typical strength exercises include:
- Squats and split squats
- Deadlifts and hinge variations
- Pull-ups and rowing movements
- Pressing exercises
- Loaded carries
- 360 degree Trunk training
Performance Testing
Distance remains a major competitive advantage in modern golf. Consequently, professional players are always looking to increase the clubhead speed for the ability to hit longer drives. To understand where to start your physical preparation and to objectively prove its impact is via performance testing. Key metrics worth measuring are Countermovement Jump Impulse (CMJi), Isometric mid-thigh pull (IMTP), Isometric Trunk Rotation (iTR) and Clubhead Speed (CHS). CMJi has the highest significant correlation with clubhead speed due to its large relationship with generating vertical ground reaction force very quickly. IMTP ticks off maximum strength capacity then iTR shows rotational strength capabilities (Wells JE, 2024). At Remedy we have access to the gold standard testing equipment to obtain your performance metrics.
Recovery and Longevity
Golf is an individual sport and as such every golfer is different. Daily or sessional wellness scores can be taken to provide a snapshot into how the golfer is feeling. The wellness questions can be tailored to physiological factors e.g. muscle soreness or psychological factors e.g. cognitive strain or mood. There is no right or wrong option but a mixture of factors are needed to measure what the golfer is concentrating on improving. By collecting this data, recovery methods can be prescribed such as:
- Sleep Optimisation
- Mindfulness
- Soft Tissue Therapy
- Mobility Sessions
- Cold Water Immersion
- Nutritional Support
Common Injuries
Golfers are at an increased risk of injury; during the golf swing compressive forces on the spine can reach 8x bodyweight and shear forces up to 1.5x bodyweight, therefore it’s no surprise that areas around the spine are suspect to injury (Patrick G. Robinson, 2023). Spinal injuries and wrist injuries cost golfers the most time away from the course. The professional golfer can be hitting 300 balls a day with 5am wake ups and uncommon nutrition week to week, therefore it’s not surprising that a lot of injuries are overuse and fatigue based. When forming a training programme injury prevention exercises should be included. In the case of golf, a predominantly one-sided rotational action like the golf swing can lead to strength imbalances, focusing on limiting those imbalances before injury or discomfort occurs is a good place to start (Ehlert A and Wilson P. 2019).
To conclude, the modern elite golfer has a very demanding schedule that is ever changing, the game of golf has become increasingly physically demanding and the ability to keep up requires a well thought out physical preparation programme. Consistency is the key — to keep training when the schedule is tough, to keep completing your recovery routine when you’d rather not, alongside the technical practice.
This is not an easy task to do well but reaching out to Remedy Health and Performance will make the process smooth and impactful.
References
- Brearley, S, Coughlan, D, and Wells, J. (2019). Strength and conditioning in golf: Probability of performance impact. Sport Performance and Scientific Reports, 1, 1–3.
- Ehlert A and Wilson P. (2019). A Systematic Review of Golf Warm-ups: Behaviors, Injury, and Performance. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 33, 3444–3462.
- Wells JE, Mitchell AC, Charalambous LH, Fletcher IM. Relationships between highly skilled golfers’ clubhead velocity and kinetic variables during a countermovement jump. Sports Biomech. 2024.
- Patrick G. Robinson, Christopher C. Dodson, Anna Zickerman, Matthew Watson, and Joshua S. Dines: Golf Injuries. Aspetar Sports Medicine Journal, Volume 12, Sports Medicine in Golf.