Research Round-Up: July 2024

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the AE Golf Performance newsletter. I’ve enjoyed crafting out these initial posts for you all, and will continue to explore different topics, formats, and content styles! Feel free to let me know if there is anything you’d find most interesting, either via social media or by clicking the link at the bottom and completing the topic submission form!

Also, I wanted to give you a heads up that I will soon have some availability for remote golf performance training, so keep an eye out for that and let me know if you may be interested!

Now on to the research roundup for July!

Research Roundup
July 2024

At the end of each month, I want to highlight some of the interesting research studies that I came across recently. Here are a few interesting ones from the past few weeks! This will cover a combo of golf, training/exercise, and other performance-related topics, depending on what new studies become available and caught my eye.

Now let’s get to it, with three interesting studies that I came across this past month!

Golf-Related Study

Mori et al. 2024

Title: Effects of two-step golf swing drills on rhythm and clubhead speed in competitive juniors

Purpose: Evaluate the effects of step drill session on the swing characteristics and clubhead speed of junior golfers. 

Background

Step drills are commonly used in golf to promote more dynamic and rhythmic shifts in pressure and body segment sequencing. I use them myself as part of a pre-speed training warm-up to help promote some of the movement patterns that I am hoping to translate into my high-speed swings. This was among the first studies to evaluate the effects of performing step drills on golf swing characteristics and clubhead speed. 

What they did

The authors recruited a sample of 10 skilled junior golfers (15-18 years old) to complete a series of two-step swing drills. Each golfer performed 7 driver swings before and after the step drills, which were measured via motion capture and force plate analysis to determine changes over time. 

What they found

They found a few significant changes after the step drill session. Notably, clubhead speed was faster, and this was accompanied by several changes in swing biomechanics, including: 

• Greater max unweighting during transition

• Greater trail-side push

• Greater horizontal movements of the body and pelvis

• Greater vertical movements of the body during the backswing

• Increased peak angular velocities throughout the swing

Practical Implications

Overall, this study provides some initial evidence that step drills as part of a warm-up may translate over into some changes within subsequent golf swings. Importantly, many of the biomechanical changes are often advantageous for speed. This includes a dynamic shift off the ball back and up, followed by a large “unweighting” of the body as you push off the trail side, “fall” into the lead side and then push hard through the lead leg. 

I’d like to see more data on how different drills influence swing mechanics and speed, but this seems to align with my experiences of using drills before speed sessions. Specifically, when I am focused on speed, I tend to use athletic and dynamic drills like step drills which are not overly technical in nature but promote some useful movement patterns that I generally think have value in my own swing. 

That being said, I do not think people should fall into the trap of just picking out cool looking drills they see online and assuming it will benefit them. Drills should be selected strategically to emphasize movements or feels that align with what you are trying to do from a technical or movement standpoint. 

Training/Exercise Studies

Curovic et al. 2024

Title: Vertical Strength Transfer Phenomenon between upper body and lower body exercise: systematic scoping review

Purpose: Review research on the “Vertical Strength Transfer” (VST) Phenomenon, where training of the upper body increases strength of the lower body, or vice versa. 

Background

If I told you to only train legs, would you expect your arms to get stronger? I would assume people would say “no way!” But there is growing evidence that there are global benefits to training which transfer to other parts of the body. 

For example, studies on the cross-education effect have found that training one leg can transfer into benefits to an untrained leg. This has implications for injury or rehab situations, where staying active in the healthy limb may help preserve strength and function in the injured one until it can be directly trained. 

More recently, similar findings have been found for vertical transfer, where upper body training may promote lower body gains and vice versa? While this may seem impossible, there are several mechanisms through which this could occur, including the release and circulation of various endocrine (hormonal) factors from the active muscle, which act on other tissues. Additionally, the ability to rapidly send signals from the central nervous system to activate and contract muscle fibers is critical to strength and performance, and there may be some overlap in neural adaptations for one body region to another. 

This review dove into the research on the topic to sort through our current understanding of this vertical transfer phenomenon!

What They Did

The authors systematically searched four different research databases for studies that looked at the effects of upper or lower body training on adaptations to the other region. They ended up including 24 articles in the review. Four of the studies looked at acute (short-term) effects, and most were with general population or moderately active individuals rather than athletic populations. 

What They Found

The main findings included:

1. Adding upper body strength training to lower body-focused endurance training (running or cycling) may have beneficial effects on lower body strength and power (mostly tested in older adults). 

2. Fairly high-volume lower body strength training may increase strength in the upper body. 

3. This effect is likely due to increases in neural signaling which extend to the other body region and/or global effects due to the release of endocrine factors from the working muscle. 

4. More research is needed on athletic or rehabilitation settings and factors that influence the effectiveness of this transfer. 

Key Takeaways

First off, I am not suggesting you should just train one body region and hope for transfer to the other regions. You will always get the best adaptation from directly training each major muscle group throughout a program. But this area of research has some interesting implications, which will hopefully be explored more! 

For example, I am a proponent of finding ways to stay active around an injury within reason. Hurt your knee? You can still safely train the other leg and upper body. Tweak a shoulder? You can still find ways to train the lower body, trunk, and other parts of the body. The research on cross-education (left to right transfer) and now vertical transfer are confirming that this may not only help overall health and avoid complete detraining, but perhaps even maintain some strength and function in the injured limbs.

But still much more to learn on this topic!

Sousa et al. 2024

Title: The importance of recovery in resistance training microcycle construction

Purpose: Review research on different ways to structure programs and how it influences recovery between training sessions. 

Background of the Research

The basis behind how exercise training works is that the human body is incredibly adaptable to stress when it is of reasonable intensity and we have proper recovery. Exercise is a controlled dose of stress to the body, which will disrupt its function in specific ways within the short-term. This causes complex signaling pathways to trigger adaptations to prepare the body for similar stressors in the future. The end result, is that we can apply specific training stressors to the body, which promote specific adaptations to body tissues and the nervous system that can be beneficial.

Structuring workout programs involves balancing the stress and recovery components. After training, we will have fatigue where the body does not quite function to its normal level (i.e., your muscles will be fatigued after a challenging strength workout). Then recovery processes will act to reduce that fatigue, and trigger the adaptations that make us more prepared for similar stressors in the future. 

The training must involve “progressive overload”, where it causes enough stress on the body to trigger adaptation. And we must progressively increase that stress over time as our body adapts. But needlessly adding more and more stress will lead to unnecessary fatigue and greater recovery demands (not to mention injury risk if it’s beyond what your tissues can tolerate).

So this review wanted to identify available evidence and recommendations around this stress-recovery balance. 

What they did

The authors searched 5 different research databases as well as looking through the reference lists of studies to find potentially useful studies on the topic. They specifically were interested in studies on how different training structures and strategies influence recovery. They ultimately reviewed 24 studies. 

What they found

They identified several factors which can increase recovery demands:

1. Training to Failure: performing reps until you cannot perform any more.

2. Greater training volumes: performing more total work (sets, reps, etc.).

3. Greater eccentric demand: challenging the eccentric or “active stretch” component of lifts can be highly beneficial, but is associated with greater muscle damage and recovery needs, especially when muscles are stretched at longer muscle lengths. 

4. Greater total muscle contribution: High-intensity compound movements which recruit a lot of muscle tend to require greater recovery (e.g., squats, deadlifts).

Practical Applications

First off, the point of this article is not to say we should always avoid strenuous training to reduce recovery demands. We need to progressively overload the body for it to continue to adapt and improve. But the art of a solid program long-term is understanding how, when, and to what magnitude to apply that overload based on the context of what is going on. Sometimes, overload is the priority, other times recovery and reducing fatigue may be.

There was a ton of useful and interesting information in this article, but here are a few valuable takeaways for golfers:

• When recovery is important (e.g., before/during a tournament or important round), you may want to avoid training to failure (finish a set with a few “reps in the tank”), use exercises your body is familiar with and that are not eccentric-heavy (e.g., for example, a deadlift where you drop the bar from the top eliminates the eccentric phase), and focus on lower volumes (1-2 sets of each exercise). 

• A viable strategy can be to perform a low-volume speed/power day one day, and then a more extensive strength training day the next. This is a common approach I use for programming speed training alongside strength training when a golfer wants to do something back-to-back days. 

• A tapering strategy can be valuable leading into particularly important stretches. For example, a golfer may perform more demanding training for 4-5 weeks, and then reduce it down to a smaller dose with less recovery demands leading into a very important 1-2 week stretch of tournaments. 

Proper planning is one of the most important things that a good coach brings to the table. Anyone can make you tired and sore. It is much more challenging (and useful) to apply the right types and amounts of stress at the right times. 

And that’s that for this month’s research roundup! Keep an eye out at the end of August for an overview of more studies I read or found interesting!

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