Putting Golf Demands Into Perspective

Welcome back to the AE Golf Performance newsletter. I’ve taking a long hiatus as I focused on other projects, but I intend to become more active in the coming months with some quick articles and emails hitting on different topics within golf strength & conditioning, the use of golf tech/data, and other assorted golf topics.

I also will soon have some openings available for both remote golf performance training and data/tech consulting (if you are a coach or facility looking for help on better leveraging data/tech within your setting). Let me know via the link below if you 1) have suggestions for content or 2) would be interested in those offerings when they become available.

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But now onto the topic at hand.

Golf Swing Demands and Injury

Every so often, there’s renewed discussion about golf-related injuries. This usually occurs after a notable golfer gets injured or when a golfer arrives on the scene with a unique and demanding-looking swing. Unfortunately, the discussion of injury in golf often becomes rapidly over-simplified (i.e., “that swing will lead to back issues”, or “look at ____ golfer from the past that swung a specific way but never got injured.”).

The problem? This over-simplifies a difficult to predict thing (injury), which is influenced by multiple factors.

Golf swing technique contributes to the demand, but within the context of overall physical preparation and workload.

Athletes have learned to tolerate much more physically extreme and demanding actions than the golf swing. While we cannot simply copy and paste approaches from other sports or activities (there are a lot of contextual differences between sports and athletes), we should learn lessons on how to approach physical demands and apply them to golf in a holistic fashion.

Let’s consider the javelin throw:

Javelin throwers create forward momentum, get into extreme ranges of motion, then create massive amounts of vertical force as they hammer the lead leg into the surface to rapidly accelerate the body and javelin at high speeds. This is a more extreme version of the golf swing, with large ranges of motion, very large and fast separation of the hips and shoulders, and an intense loading of the lead leg (5x bodyweight or more in elite throwers. They also spend considerable time preparing their body for these demands while also refining technique, while balancing the required intensity and volume with recovery.

Or how about the triple jump, where the athlete may put over 10x their bodyweight into the ground as they launch themselves through the air.

Now is it fair to compare these movements to the golf swing? Yes and no. They are not the same, the athletes tend to be at the peak of human performance, and golf requires fairly large spread of skillsets across many aspects of the game. But it does showcase that with a proper balance between physical preparation, workload management, AND technique, the human body can withstand remarkably intense actions.

Importantly, I think there are lessons to be learned from track & field athletes, who are generally much more systematic about 1) developing the physical capacities to prepare their bodies for this stress, 2) carefully planning, monitoring, and managing their overall training load on the body alongside refinements in technique.

Takeaway for Golf

I personally view golf demands as a function of several factors:

• Swing Technique/Biomechanics: affects how the body is loaded with each swing

• Factors that influence the ability to tolerate or manage that loading: fatigue, how warmed up you are, and the physical capacities and robustness of the tissues.

• Workload Management: the overall cumulative loading you are placing on the tissues, and how well that is balanced with recovery.

These factors all intersect, as I’ll briefly talk about below.

Technique/Biomechanics

How you swing the club does influence loading on the tissues. For example, if all else is the same, faster swings and getting into more extreme positions (e.g., bigger hip-shoulder separation, pronounced side tilt, etc.) will change how the tissues are loaded. So there is truth in the fact that how you swing affects the loading on the tissues.

But that in isolation does not tell the whole story. Because the end result also depends on your capacity to tolerate and effectively disperse that loading, as well as how you manage the cumulative workload placed on the body. Someone with a massive capacity for tolerating those demands, and that manages their workload, fatigue, and recovery could have an aggressive swing but never experience an issue. Alternatively, someone with an identical swing could have issues if they have less physical capacity to tolerate the loading and/or poorly manage the cumulative workload over time. The inputs per swing can be similar while the long-term results can vary dramatically.

In other words, it absolutely can make sense for a golfer to make technical changes if they are not responding well to a given movement strategy. Especially if you have already experienced an injury, given that previous injury is perhaps the strongest predictor of future injury. But a given movement strategy does not guarantee injury will occur if other factors are different (e.g., they are better able to tolerate that specific type of loading, they manage overall workload differently, etc.). It is the net result of several interacting factors that matter.

Factors that influence the ability to tolerate loading

Several factors can influence your ability to tolerate the demands of repeated swings.

When you’re fatigued, your body may coordinate and load structures slightly differently. The body is designed to adapt and compensate, so it will often still find a way to swing to try to accomplish the goal of the task. But if you combine fatigue with higher intensity sessions (e.g., really high volumes, especially high volumes of speed training), then this could change how your body normally tolerates the loading.

Warm-ups are another example. If you jump right into an intense, high-volume session without increasing the temperature of the muscles and getting the joints moving, you may again affect 1) how you move and load the tissues within the swing and 2) the tissue’s capacity to tolerate that loading.

Finally, physical capacity matters. Elite athletes place massive demands on their body, but they also generally have a greater physical capacity to tolerate those demands. Golfers are beginning to understand the importance of training their bodies, but in my opinion we still have a long way to go. Many golf fitness programs under-load key parts of the body in the pursuit of golf specificity. This often involves methods that seem logical on the surface, but don’t deliver a stimulus that will actually drive the physiological changes needed to prepare golfers.

Instead, golfers need to build into appropriate ranges of motion, develop strength out of those ranges of motion, and the capacities to tolerate the unique rotational and stretch shortening cycle (e.g., stretch and then contract) type nature of the golf swing. Whether they are an elite professional or a recreational golfer that spends most of their day at a desk. More to come on this.

Importantly, the physical capacity piece includes both modifiable and non-modifiable factors. Modifiable factors are those you can change with things like training, while non-modifiable are your genetically-determined body shape/structure.

Workload Management

Given that many golf injuries are overuse related, it’s important to consider the cumulative demands being placed on the body, and how that is balanced with recovery. For example, if you keep bombarding the body with repeated stressors with minimal time to recover and repair, the cumulative stress could eventually exceed what you can handle.

Your body can and does adapt to specific demands placed on it. This includes the golf swing. But there is also a balance act there as well. Where I have seen issues arise is with sudden spikes in workload. For example, here are some common examples that I have dealt with when consulting with golfers:

• Swing Changes: A golfer is making a swing change. They know it will take many repetitions to instill and gain confidence with the new movement. So they rapidly ramp up their range time to dial it in. The issue is the combination of 1) a spike in workload beyond their normal volumes and 2) changes in their typical movement, which their body may not have had the chance to adapt to. High workloads PLUS movement changes tend to be a risky time in my experience.

• Start of the Golf Season: Many golfers, especially those with harsh winters, will rapidly ramp up total play and practice time at the start of the golf season. They go from minimal swings per week to many. This short-term spike can cause issues if they are not physically ready for it.

• Coming back from injury: Another big one (especially with competitive golfers) is the time period AFTER an injury has already occurred. They are often itching to get back to practice and “make up for lost time.” If they’re not careful, they jump in with too much at once. This is a big issue since the number one predictor of injury is previous injury. And during this initial return, the tissues may not be fully prepared for a full workload. So placing a large spike of workload onto them is likely a risky move, and I have seen this prolong the times to full recovery.

In each of these cases, the solutions are similar:

• Develop the physical capacity to increase your tolerance against the workload.

• Ramp up golf workload gradually, avoiding the sudden massive spikes in volume.

The Bucket Analogy

Here is a simple analogy to help summarize all these points. Think about a bucket that is being filled with water. You do not want it to overflow. There is water entering from a faucet above, and then there is a small drain at the bottom gradually releasing water. In this case:

• Your swing technique and workload are the rate at which the faucet adds water.

• Recovery is the rate at which water drains out. It helps balance out a given workload.

• The size of the bucket is determined by your physical capacity. The more physically prepared you are for the demands of the swing, the larger the workload you can theoretically tolerate (if all else remains constant).

The Takeaway for trying to reduce risk of injury:

• Yes, technical changes can certainly help. Especially in cases where the technique does not align well with golfer’s physical capacities and tolerance (e.g., it’s not a good idea to force a technique on a golfer if they don’t have the capacity to tolerate it).

• But managing workload, recovery, and training your body to prepare for the demands of the swing also play a big role.

• Most things in golf require a more nuanced, holistic view. This topic is certainly one of them.

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