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Goals of Physical Prep for Golfers

Goals of Physical Prep for Golfers
Putting Golfers in the Best Physical Position to Perform
Welcome to the AE Golf Performance Newsletter!
Today I want to cover some basics about physical prep for golfers. Whether you are a coach working with golfers or a golfer trying to be as physically prepared as you can, hopefully this gives you some things to think about.
Golf is a highly technical sport, and no amount of physical preparation will make up for a lack of technical skill on the course. But, simple and effective strategies for preparing the body in the short and long term has a lot of value. For example:
Fitness or strength & conditioning (S&C) has wide reaching benefits. Yes, it can help increase distance when performed appropriately. But for many golfers, the health and general fitness benefits will have the largest overall impact over the long term!
Golf is hard enough as it is. So if you can at least be in the physical state to perform day in and day out, you have given your best chance to express your skill on the course.
A lot of physical prep is not complicated, and is more about planning and habit building than anything.
If I can provide strategies that help golfers feel and perform at their best day in and day out, then I’ve done my job.
Here is a slide from a presentation I gave to a college team that I was working with. I’ll hit on a few points below.

Physical prep for golfers can be broadly divided into two categories:
Strategies that help golfers feel and perform well in the short term (e.g., during a tournament week or important round). I refer to this as acute prep.
Strategies that set the foundation for long-term development (e.g., building a solid athletic base, keeping them healthy, etc.). I call this chronic prep.
I want to briefly touch on a few aspects of each of these.
Acute Prep: Helping Golfers Express Their Best Stuff When It Matters
I never want a lack of physical prep to disrupt a golfer’s ability to express their technical skill. Golf is hard enough, and adding fatigue, hunger, poor sleep, or a lack of a proper warm-up to the mix only makes it harder. You won’t get this 100% right all the time, but a solid routine and a bit of planning can go a long way.
This is mostly about doing the simple stuff really well, and hitting a few goals:
Dialing in strategies that check the boxes for being physically prepared,
Doing so in a way that also makes the golfer feel prepared psychologically as well as physically.
Seamlessly integrating these strategies into their schedule so that they can focus time and energy on their golf instead.
Take for example a pre-round warm-up. I want to work with a golfer to ensure the warm-up not only prepares the body, but also makes them feel prepared psychologically, fits into their preferred schedule, and works well with the equipment or space available.
Here are a few other strategies that can be useful:
Sleep Hygiene strategies. These can be applied to both the day-to-day routine, but become especially important during tournament weeks and travel.
Programming fitness sessions around tournament schedules or important rounds without causing negative effects. This can include low-volume “priming sessions” before the tournament, working some micro-doses of training into warm-ups or post-round, and even full sessions depending on schedule and golfer preferences.
Hydration and fueling strategies for before, during, and after rounds. Planning ahead to ensure access to what they need, and making sure they’ve experimented with their plan to know how you respond to it, is key.
Having a plan to take advantage of slow portions of the round to perform brief “rewarming” protocols. Usually 2-3 movements that keep their body feeling good throughout the 4-6 hours of a competitive round.
When done well, these strategies integrate seamlessly into your routine and become somewhat second nature. And ideally they become habits that contribute to chronic prep over time as well!
Chronic Prep: Long-term development
Chronic prep strategies largely address goals 4-6 on the presentation slide.
Strength & Conditioning/Fitness
A solid strength & conditioning program should aim to develop performance as well as overall health and injury resilience. Importantly, this should align with what the golfer needs, how they respond to given methods, and should fit into their schedule without taking away too much time/energy from the technical work and other obligations they have.
Managing Training Load
Managing overall load is an important component to this process as well. Ideally, this should involve a solid collaboration between golfer and their entire team.
This can involve discussions about total practice load during specific times of the year. For example, here are a few situations I’ve had to manage in the past:
A golfer is coming off an injury and wants to “make up for lost time” by diving into high volume practice. This could increase the risk of re-injury or delay full recovery.
A golfer is going through swing changes and grinds it out on the range to ingrain the new movement, leading to a massive spike in practice volume.
A golfer has started to engage in high volumes of speed training, and is worried about it affecting their swing and/or causing pain or injury of some sort.
In each case, helping them understand the potential risks of large spikes in volume can be beneficial. For example, I am a proponent of speed training. But I believe some golfers can go a bit overboard without building the pre-requisites. It can be addicting to push higher and higher volumes to make the speed numbers go up! But sometimes, progressively increasing the volume on top of a strong foundation is preferable.
Final Thoughts
Finally, it’s critical that we keep priorities in line. While I may care a ton about strength and conditioning, I also need to respect that it is secondary to, and supportive of technical work for most golfers. Physical prep is there to help the golfer without excessively disrupting their technical work and prep. Or in the case of recreational golfers, offering value while not adding too much to their busy schedules of work, family life, and golf!
Want to learn more about any of these specific aspects of physical prep? Let me know with the link below or send me a message via social media!
Until next time,
Alex
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