Golf Weight Training

Golf Weight Training Basics

The golf weight training program below is split into 3 phases. Each phase is simply a period of time in which you train in a particular way to achieve a particular objective. The exercises are different in each phase and build on the ones performed previously. Each phase requires only 2 sessions a week commitment.

Warming up is essential before a round and there are scientific studies to back this up. It's also important to warm up before each golf weight training session. Perform 5-10 minutes of light aerobic exercise (jogging, stationery bike, cross trainer etc.) and then do some stretches to all the major muscle groups.

Some of the exercises below are unique and you may not be familiar with them. It's important to master correct technique and you can only do this by first using very light weights. Spend at least a session of two becoming familiar with the exercises without resistance.

It goes without saying that if any of the exercises cause you pain or discomfort you should stop them immediately.

Sets and repetitions are indicated below. To make gains in strength you have to overload your muscles above and beyond what they are comfortable with. That means the last few sets should be difficult. If a target of 10 repetitions is set and you can perform 12 with ease, the weight is too light. Similarly, if you can only perform 6-8, the weight is too heavy and you need to decrease the resistance.

Each routine below is performed twice per week. But avoid training on back-to-back days. In fact ideally leave at least two days between golf weight training sessions. You should also avoid strength training the day before a competition or important 18 holes.

Phase 1 - Build a Solid Foundation

The off-season (usually winter) when you play no competitions and less golf, is the ideal time to start your golf weight training program. Of course, the timing may not fit and it's better to make a start now than to wait until next year. Remember though, whatever point your are in the year, always start with this phase.

The exercises in this phase of the golf weight training program are more conventional and use moderate weights. At this stage THE most important goal is prepare the body for more demanding sessions later on. It's also a time to address some of the imbalances inherent in many golfers.

The session is set up in as a Circuit. This simply means you perform one set of each exercise in succession with minimal rest between exercises.

here are the exercises...

1. Push-ups x 15-20

2. Alternating Squats with Press x 15

3. Lat Pull Downs (wide grip) x 15

4. Oblique Crunches x 20

5. Dumbbell Lunges x 10 (each leg)

6. Barbell Upright Rows x 15

7. Reverse Flyes x 15

8. Dumbbell Curls x 15

9. Back Extensions on Stability Ball x 20

10. Barbell Reverse Wrist Curls x 15-20

Phase 2 - Develop Golf-Specific Power

Once you've built a solid foundation of strength, it's time to convert those gains into explosive power. The golf swing is a powerful movement - power being a combination of strength AND speed.

Just becoming stronger won't necessarily allow you to hit the ball further. Becoming stronger and then developing the ability to apply that strength quickly is the real key. That's how you'll increase club head speed and that's how you'll hit the ball farther.

The exercises below should be performed explosively (unless stated otherwise). On the contraction or the difficult part of the lift, aim to move the weight as quickly and forcefully as possible. Slowly lower the weight to the start position and repeat. Do not LOCK joints out at any stage. Always keep a degree of flexion in the elbows or knees for example.

Instead of circuit training format (where you move straight from one exercise to other) during these sessions you perform 2-3 sets of one exercise before moving onto the next.

here are the exercises..

1. Good Mornings to Shoulder Press x 10-12

2. Single Arm Dumbbell Rows x 12-15 (each arm)

3. Diagonal Medicine Ball Chop x 10-12 (each side)

4. Plyometric Push-Ups x 10-12

5. Dumbbell Squats and Rotational Swings x 10-12

6. Dumbbell Lateral Raises x 10-12

7. Standing Torso Twist x 10 (each side)

8. Reverse Crunch with Stability Ball x 20

9. Reverse Barbell Wrist Curls x 12-15

10. Barbell Wrist Curls x 12-15

Phase 3 - Maintain Your Newfound Strength

Let's recap for a moment...

During the off-season (ideally) you've built a solid base of strength, which will help to balance your musculature. You then progressed onto a more golf-specific, more demanding 6-week routine to help develop your power...

Now the goal is to maintain those gains in strength and power that you've worked hard to develop.

The program below is an example of how you can achieve this. Of course it's always good to vary your program every 6 weeks or so. That you can avoid overworking certain muscle groups while neglecting others, plus it acts as mental stimulation.

some sample exercises..

1. Alternating Squats with Press x 15

2. Lat Pull Downs (wide grip) x 15

3. Oblique Crunches x 20

4. Push-ups (or front press) x 15-20

5. Dumbbell Lunges x 10 (each leg)

6. Standing Torso Twist

7. Single Arm Dumbbell Rows

8. Diagonal Medicine Ball Chop

9. Back Extensions on Stability Ball x 20

10. Reverse Barbell Wrist Curls



** If you're not sure how to perform these exercises click here for exercise descriptions and images **

Phil Mickelson's Short-Game Clinic

BASIC CONCEPTS COME FIRST

A solid game from 50 yards and in is all about following a small set of basic principles. Excel at them, and you'll be able to pull off almost any shot.

The first principle is what I call "hinge and hold." For crisp contact and good distance control on all greenside shots, hinge your wrists very early on the backswing (left) and avoid swinging your lead arm back more than necessary. On the downswing, feel like you maintain the hinge, so your hands remain ahead of the clubhead for a descending strike (lower photo)





KEEP THE HANDS MOVING

Another key principle is to accelerate your hands on the downswing and keep accelerating them toward the target until well after the ball is gone (below). Slowing your hands is a killer because it ruins your release, changes impact conditions and often causes you to hit the shot fat.

A related concept is to maintain the loft of your wedge through impact and beyond, the face aimed at the sky for as long as possible (far right). Note how I haven't allowed my wrists to roll over. I want to keep the same clubface loft I established at address.






A 3-STEP GUIDE TO THE SETUP

I've followed the same short-game setup formula for years, and I think it will help every player's consistency:
(1) Align your feet and the clubface square to the target.
(2) Rotate the clubface open until you establish sufficient loft for the shot you're playing. Remember to regrip the club after you open the face, so you don't simply rotate your hands and "fake" the open clubface.
(3) Rotate your stance and upper body open until the face is aimed at the target (left). Make your normal swing.





SHORT PUTTS: THINK 25-75

On shorter putts you must accelerate the putter through the ball and impart a smooth, true roll. Try to make your backstroke shorter than your follow-through. The stroke should break down as 25 percent back and 75 percent through (left), though it varies slightly depending on the length of the putt.

As for obtaining a true roll, avoid hitting down on the ball or catching it on the upswing. You want the putterhead moving level, with the shaft angle at impact the same as it was at address.

ไม่...เสถียร

"ช่วงนี้ผมไม่ค่อยเสถียรว่ะ.... " คำพูดติดปากของน้าอ้น(พี่รุ่นเพื่อน..เอ๊ย..เพื่อนรุ่นพี่)ที่มักจะพูดอยู่เสมอๆ ผมมักจะแอบคิดติดตลกในใจว่า....มันอะไรวะ ไอ้ความไม่เสถียรเนี่ย.. แต่พอมานั่งนึกย้อนดูดีๆูอีกทีก็ได้รู้ว่าี ไอ้เรามันก็เคยเกิดอาการนี้มาแล้วสองครั้งนี่หว่า มันเป็นยังไงเหรอ...สำหรับตัวผมแล้วมันก็คืออาการหวิวๆในท้อง จะอ้วก แปลกๆ ร่างกายไม่ค่อยสมดุลย์ แตไม่ใช่เพราะปัญหาเรื่องอะไรนะครับ เพราะไม่ว่าเรื่องอะไรสำหรับผมแล้วมันก็เหมือนกันทั้งนั้น วันนี้แก้ไม่ได้ พรุ่งนี้ค่อยว่ากันใหม่.. แต่ไอ้เรื่องที่ว่ามันก็คือเรื่องของหัวใจของผมเอง..ซึ่งมันก็เกิดขึ้น ณ ตอนที่มีความรักนั่นเอง
ไอ้อาการนี้นะ...ผมว่าเป็นกันทั้งบาง ตั้งแต่เด็กไปจนถึง ผู้ใหญ่ที่เริ่มจะหาสีดำบนหัวไม่ค่อยเจอแล้ว มันก็ต้องเคยเกิดขึ้นกับตัวเองมาแล้วทั้งนั้น
ด้วยการนึก คิด ถึง...คนๆนั้น อยู่ตลอดเวลา ณ ช่วงใดช่วงนึงของชีวิต จนลืมนึกถึงตัวของตัวเอง ผมเองโดนเข้ากับตัวเองเต็มๆถึงสองครั้ง..(แทบบ้า),(แต่มันก็มีความทรงจำดีๆให้ได้นึกถึงนะี) สุดท้ายพอผ่านมันมาได้ มันก็รู้ว่าต้องรักษาตัวเอง และดูแลหัวใจตัวเองให้มากขึ้น อย่าไปเป็นแบบนิ้... อย่าไปรักใครง่ายๆจนทำให้ไม่เป็นตัวของตัวเองอีก.. จนมันทำใหผมกลายเป็นคนปิดตัวเองและไม่ค่อยกล้าที่จะไปรักใครอีก ..และก็ดำเนินชีวิตโดดเดี่ยวสุดเหงาของตัวเองต่อไป..
"แต่ของอย่างนี้มันไม่เข้าใครออกใครหรอก" แมร่งงงง.. กลับมาอีกแล้วครับ คลื่นความรักระลอกล่าสุด เข้ามาฮิตเต็มๆ(ยังไม่สามารถระบุได้ว่าสาเหตุเกิดจากอะไร) ตกลงไปในหลุมอย่างจังเบอร์ ระบบในร่างกายเริ่มกระพริบเตือนถึงความไม่สมดุลย์...เริ่มไปคิดถึงใครอีกคนอีกแล้ว(แต่อาการอย่างนี้ผมก็ชอบนะ บางครั้งมันก็ช่วยกอบกู้หัวใจในยามที่อ่อนล้า เหนื่อยหน่ายและต้องการใครซักคนได้ดีเหลือเกิน)
แต่ด้วยเวลาของชีวิตที่เพิ่มขึ้นทกๆวัน มันได้สอนให้เริ่มที่จะรักใครได้โดยใช้แค่้ความคิดถึงที่มี นึกถึงเพื่อทำให้ใจมีความสุข เป็นกำลังใจและผ่านแต่ละวันไปได้โดยดีไม่มีความคาดหวังอะไรทั้งนั้น (ถ้าจะบอกว่าไม่คาดหวังอะไรเลย มันก็เกินไป.. อย่างนึงก็คือคาดหวังให้เค้าได้ดูแลตัวเองเยอะๆ พักผ่อนให้มากๆ ยังไงซะจะทำงานให้ดีได้ ร่างกายมันก็ต้องได้รับการพักผ่อนที่พอเพียงด้วย...จริงมั๊ย)

มีความสุขจัง....มีฟามสุขจัง

น้าอ้นครับ " ผมแม่ง..ไม่เสถียรว่ะ "

um0612 07/04/2007

10 years of Tiger Woods

In his first decade as a pro, he changed the game. Now what does he do?



By David Owen
Golf Digest
August 2006

A telling measure of how dramatically Tiger Woods has changed golf during the 10 years since he turned pro is the many ways in which he now seems old-fashioned. The game's most recent equipment revolution was fueled in part by the yearning of lesser players to catch up to him, yet his irons have the same specs as the irons he used when he was 14, meaning that his 9-iron has more loft than Phil Mickelson's pitching wedge. Woods' miles-long drives have been a major contributor to the obsession with distance off the tee, but he will surely be remembered less as a power hitter than as a shotmaker, a species once thought to be extinct. His work ethic, in the gym and on the practice range, is responsible for the hardened pectorals and diminished social lives of his competitors, yet he has managed to build a fulfilling private existence, and has found the time to take two-week ski vacations with his wife and various childhood buddies, to dive without scuba tanks above the Great Barrier Reef, to spearfish off the Cayman Islands, and to bungee-jump in New Zealand, as well as to compete in tournaments all over the world, to help run a major charitable foundation, and to assemble a portfolio of business interests worth hundreds of millions of dollars. When his career began, he was notable for the educated respect he paid to his athletic forebears--Nicklaus, mainly, but also Palmer, Hogan, Nelson, Jones and others, whose battlefield tactics he had studied since childhood, and whose deadliest weapons he has borrowed for his own arsenal; nowadays, history-minded youngsters think only of him.

Last November, I attended a big junior tournament in Georgia. Every talented teenager in the field was a child of Tiger Woods: The best players, boys and girls, played his game, with big drives, dazzling approaches, creative recoveries and fearless short games, and they looked like athletes because he looks like an athlete. (Nicklaus, early in his career, was called Fat Boy, Fat Jack, Blob-o and Whaleman.) On the PGA Tour last year, players named Charles Warren, Wes Short Jr. and Jeff Brehaut missed a combined 36 cuts, finished in the top three just three times among them--and won more than a million dollars each. They owe their jumbo mortgages to Woods, who is the main reason that the tour's total purse today is 3 1/2 times the size it was in 1996. When teenage LPGA stars Paula Creamer and Morgan Pressel strut before the television cameras, announcing that victory is the only outcome that interests them, they are channeling Tiger Woods. The effect extends to Woods himself. On "60 Minutes" last March he said that when he plays alone, for fun, he likes to imagine that he's on the final hole in the U.S. Open, with a chance to win: Even Tiger Woods, it turns out, pretends to be Tiger Woods.



The next generation

The last part of the game to be transformed by Woods will be the one that almost everyone thought would be the first: In 1996, he became the first black American to earn his first PGA Tour card since Adrian Stills in 1985; a decade later, we're still waiting for the second. "It takes time," Woods told me in January. "In the inner cities, where a lot of the kids are underserved and are minorities, golf is still not a realistic sport. You can always find a basketball hoop, anywhere, but if you're in Harlem you can't say, 'Let's go hit some balls; let's go play Winged Foot.' " This is undeniably true. The paradox is that Woods, who has done more than anyone to broaden golf's constituency, has also, by extending the game's appeal among young people of all backgrounds, pushed the biggest prizes further out of reach. Because of him, the game's next superstars will almost certainly be gifted athletes who started early and had years of high-level competitive experience and intensive specialized training, as he did. That means that the next Tiger Woods is more likely than ever to emerge from the world of private clubs and sports academies, rather than from the inner cities or the caddie yards.





Even so, Woods has cracked golf all the way through. When Tiger won his first Masters, in 1997, Lee Elder said, "After today, no one will turn their head when a black man walks to the first tee." Elder was talking about that tournament in particular, but his comment applies to all first tees. Post-Woods, the indefensible is considerably harder to defend. Truly changing the ugliest parts of American country-club culture will take time--but it will take less time than it would have taken if he hadn't come along. Six years ago, Earl Woods told me, "Tiger has already transcended the game of golf. The next step is for him to be someone on the world scale who makes an impact on humanity, and that is what he is going to be doing."


"The Earl of Woods," as he sometimes called himself, was never one to make modest predictions for his son, but that doesn't mean he was a flake. Of all the many lessons he taught Tiger, the greatest was his insistence--which he repeated virtually from the cradle onward--that outsize natural gifts carry outsize moral obligations. How many other great athletes (or their parents) can honestly claim to believe the same thing? In 1993, some members of the American Ryder Cup team threatened to boycott a pre-tournament visit to the White House to protest President Clinton's tax plan, which increased the top marginal income-tax rate to 39.5 percent. That's what passed for social awareness among professional golfers in the pre-Tiger era. Woods, in contrast, seems determined to leave the world a better place than he found it, and not just for himself. He is also that rarest of modern sports superstars, one whose athletic records and private life are untainted by even the rumor of scandal. The worst his critics can say is that he has a penchant for swearing after bad shots and placing the occasional wager, and he employs an overzealous caddie. Earl Woods also often said, "As good a golfer as Tiger is, he's a better person." Given how good a golfer he is, that almost has to be a stretcher--but who knows? Earl wasn't wrong about a lot.


Mainly, of course, Tiger's gift to the rest of us has been his golf. For 10 years, he has dominated the game in a way that, at this stage in its history, ought to be mathematically impossible. (On the World Golf Ranking, the difference between Woods' points average and that of the No. 2 player exceeds the points average of all but three players--meaning that Woods has enough points to simultaneously be ranked as both the best and fifth-best golfers in the world.) Even his record during his two so-called slumps--the months-long periods when he was renovating his game, treating history's best swing as a tear-down--would constitute a highly respectable lifetime career for the vast majority of the guys who have ever played on tour, because even when Woods is struggling he manages to make cuts, contend in the majors and win the occasional tournament. Comparisons across athletic generations are always unfair--there is simply no way of guessing how Hogan or Nelson would have played if they'd been born in 1975, or what Woods' record might have been if his principal rival had been Paul Runyan, the tour's leading money-winner in 1934--but they're irresistible nevertheless. Here are two historical facts to think about: Nicklaus played most of his career at a time when professional golf was a comparatively tiny game (the world's best players in his prime were mostly American, whereas 14 of the 20 top golfers in the world today were born outside the United States), and he rarely had to endure the suffocating public attention that has followed Woods from the beginning (only a small fraction of the shots that Nicklaus struck in his PGA Tour career were even shown on TV). Yet Woods has been so dominant that sportswriters have sometimes accused his rivals of not trying hard enough.


Can it really have been a decade? In 2000, at an event in Oklahoma City sponsored by his foundation, Woods looked back on the opening day of his professional career. "That first tee shot is always difficult, I'm telling you," he said, before a crowd that consisted mainly of children. "When I first turned pro, I'll never forget, in Milwaukee, I teed up my golf ball, put my club down, and thought: I'm fine, no big deal, I can do this. I took the club back, and, I swear, it felt like it took about 15 seconds for that club to get to the top of my swing. It was so heavy. I have never experienced anything like that in my life. But I got through it, and, luckily, my ball went out there 330."

And so on, for 10 unforgettable years.