Science of Speed Training Part 1: Short-term Gains

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in distance and speed as performance contributors in golf. This has likely been driven by several factors, including:

• Advancements in statistical analysis methods and an improved understanding of performance contributors.

• Increased ability to accurately and conveniently quantify various impact and ball flight variables via launch monitors and other tech.

• The continual evolution of golfers seeking performance advantages over their competitors.

• Noteworthy examples of high-profile golfers experiencing success after gaining speed and distance, (e.g., Bryson DeChambeau and Matt Fitzpatrick). 

As a result, there’s also been growing interest in methods that increase speed and distance. While many methods can contribute to swing speed and distance (we’ll cover others at a later time), the concept of “speed training” has been brought to the forefront in recent years.

What is “speed training?” Most in the golf industry associate the term with specific products or systems, often involving weighted sticks or clubs to provide “overspeed” and/or “overload” to the swing. Others see it as simply using your own driver and swinging as fast as possible. 

My view? I think the terminology should probably evolve, since training to increase swing speed and distance is more than any single tool or method. It should be a well-structured approach using the right tool at the right time and for the right reasons, and stemming from a strong understanding of the direct contributors to swing speed and golf performance as a whole. This also means that there is no “golden ticket” when it comes to performance in complex sports like golf. Every method you use involves compromises of benefits and risks, and not all methods work equally well in all circumstances or for all golfers. 

But for the sake of the next few posts, let’s define “speed training” as the practice of using either your own driver or speed sticks to work on swinging faster than normal. My goal over the next few long-form posts is to break down some of the science of how/why I believe speed training works, and what this means for using the method most effectively.

Keep in mind that this thought process will almost certainly evolve and change over time as I and the rest of the industry continue to learn. But I believe there is a need to connect the anecdotal observations on speed training with the science of how the body responds and adapts to different training stimuli.

For Part 1, we’re going to focus on the short-term gains that occur within a single speed training session. 

Short-Term Gains in Speed

Let’s consider a situation that is commonly presented on social media. 

A golfer performs speed training for the first time. During the first few swings, they may be swinging at ~100 mph. They go through some speed training drills and high-intent swings, and all of a sudden they start to see speeds of 105 mph or more. A 5 mph gain within one single session! 

But will this gain stick around beyond this single session? Maybe, if in the process of doing the drills and swings they identify a different way of moving that they can take to future swings (more on this in Parts 2 and 3). But usually a large percentage of this gain is short-lived.

This does not mean the short-term gains are meaningless, just that they are temporary. By “unlocking” some of this additional speed in the short-term, you can provide a more potent training stimulus that will hopefully help build longer lasting speed gains over time. 

For example, awhile back I created this figure with some thoughts on speed training. I hope to have an updated and improved version soon.

As a result, I believe the process of gaining speed via speed training is not linear, but looks a bit more like this:

In the short-term, the speeds will bounce up and down within and across sessions. But over time, the accumulation of speed training stimuli means that there is a progressive trend up in terms of speed. So the overall trend is up, but this involves smaller short-term shifts in speed within individual sessions.

I believe there are several specific reasons that these short-lasting gains occur: 

1. Warming and Potentiation

2. Exploration of new movement strategies due to changes in the task, effort/intent, and the feedback received. 

Let’s go through each of these. 

Warming Up and Potentiation

There are generally a few reasons you warm-up before a physical activity:

1. Prepare your body, joints, and muscles for the demands to follow (and hopefully reduce the risk of injury).

2. Put yourself in both a physiological and psychological state to perform at the highest level possible.

In my experience, most people do some form of warm-up before speed training, mostly out of concern for injury risk. But they only reach their optimal performance state as they progress through the speed training session itself. I believe that as they begin to swing with some intensity, they progressively reach a state where they can achieve higher intensities by the end of the session from both a physiological and psychological perspective.

This can occur through a few different factors, which are commonly studied within the context of different warm-up or “potentiation” protocols (which are designed to result in short-term performance gains during a subsequent test or exercise). 

Increasing Muscle Temperature

Muscle contractions are not 100% efficient, meaning that a percentage of the total energy is released as heat. This is why you sweat during exercise; it is a thermoregulatory response to keep body temperature within normal limits.  

However, during reasonably intense or prolonged warm-up activities, muscle temperature can also slightly increase, resulting in more efficient muscle fiber force production and transmission. In other words, as you progress through earlier parts of the speed training session, it is possible that you are increasing muscle temperature and allowing for more efficient force production. Particularly if your dynamic warm-up did not have enough intensity and/or duration to increase the temperature of the relevant muscles.

Why does muscle temperature matter? Muscle fibers produce force by rapidly and repeatedly cycling through a series of steps to bind together two contractile protein filaments (forming a “cross-bridge”), perform a pull-like action to generate tension, detaching, and repeat. To move really fast, we need to 1) activate a lot of muscle fibers to get as many cross-bridges involved as we can, and 2) cycle each cross-bridge within activated muscles through this attach-pull-detach cycle rapidly so that force is produced at a fast rate (faster “cross-bridge cycling”).

Cross-bridge cycling rate is regulated by an enzyme called myosin ATPase, which is influenced by temperature. As the muscle increases its temperature, cross-bridge cycling can occur faster, resulting in faster muscle fiber shortening (e.g., contraction) and more rapid force production from the active muscles.

To put this in context, studies where relatively intense exercises are done before testing can increase muscle temperature by ~0.3 - 0.9 degrees Celsius, which could reportedly increase power by at least 1-5%, if not more (Blazevich et al. 2019). 

So it may be that the progressive increases in intensity that occur during a speed training session could literally be warming up the muscles, and allowing for a bit better force production and speed. This has implications for how we build up our pre-speed training warm-up sessions and the design of the speed training sessions as a whole. More to come on this later.

Increased Blood Flow and Muscle Water

In addition to increases in muscle temperature, repeated intense contractions (like during speed training) increases blood flow to the active muscles. This could theoretically result in improved muscle performance due to more water within the intracellular space of the muscle. While this is difficult to study during tasks like the golf swing, this increase in muscle water has been found to increase force and shortening velocity of individual muscle fibers, and would theoretically help you produce force more efficiently and move faster alongside the muscle temperature gains (Blazevich et al., 2019). 

Opening Up Range of Motion

A key rationale for the inclusion of dynamic stretches during a warm-up is that moving joints through a fairly large range of motion can help open up some mobility and prepare the joints for the demands to follow. Swinging faster through a fairly large range of motion during the early parts of a speed session may help mobilize key joints in a highly specific manner. So as you progress through the session, you may be opening up additional range of motion within the swing (i.e., able to create a longer hand path or rotate through more space than previously). For this reason, I’ll often include some specific golf-specific warm-up activities in my speed sessions to “open up” some of the rotational range of motion I want during speed work.

Muscle Activation

When it comes to warm-ups, we often hear about the need to “activate” the muscles. This is often used to justify the use of fairly low-level mobility drills or warm-up exercises. But when the goal is moving fast, the activation of the largest, fastest muscle fibers is critical. And these fibers require high levels of intensity, motivation, and effort to activate.

This is because muscle fibers are organized into functional groups called motor units, where one motor neuron (nervous system cell that sends signals to muscle fibers) is responsible for activating some number of muscle fibers. Within a muscle there is a continuum of motor units from very small (and usually slow) to very big (and usually big/fast). The smallest ones are activated first, and then progressively larger ones added on until the correct amount of force is achieved for the task. In other words, fibers within the biggest/strongest motor units require a very strong signal from the nervous system in order to become activated and contract, because they are reserved for when high levels of force, speed, or power is required. 

For example, lifting a really heavy weight tends to result in these large/fast “high-threshold” motor units being recruited, since your brain will send a massive signal to the muscles to try to get as many motor units involved as possible. Similar things happen when trying to move as fast as you possibly can.

So it is possible that speed increases within a session occur because you begin to activate some of those largest/fastest muscle fibers. It’s been suggested that performing intense exercises or movements could make it easier to recruit these muscle fibers during future actions. But the research on this is still a bit unclear and mixed. 

But the final piece of warming up that I want to talk about is likely closely related to activation, and that is the psychological preparation that likely occurs throughout a speed session.

Psychological “Warm-up”: Arousal, Motivation, and Effort

Even if the intensity of the early speed training swings do not directly lead to better activation of the fastest/biggest fibers later in the session, it is quite likely that increases in motivation and arousal might! The strength of the signal sent down to the muscles from the brain is heavily dependent on motivation and arousal. When you’re amped up, have music blaring, or competing against a buddy, you tend to be able to produce higher force, speed, and power, which is likely associated with more efficient activation of as many muscle fibers as possible (along with other potential factors). In contrast, when you are fatigued or tired, feeling lazy, or have other things on your mind, it can become challenging to get those big/fast fibers activated and involved. 

In other words, as you work through a speed session and start to hit some high speeds, it may be that you become more psychologically dialed in to the process, allowing for faster and more efficient activation of the big/fast motor units that play a critical role in maximizing speed. In fact, many long drive competitors mention how it can take quite a few swings before they’re psychologically primed to reach their fastest speeds, and this is a potential reason why this could be the case. 

Summary of Warm-up/Potentiation Factors

In other words, as you progress through the speed training session, you are likely able to move a bit faster and more explosively due to progressively increasing 1) muscle temperature and blood flow, 2) joint range of motion, and/or 3) activation of the “fast twitch” muscle fibers that can contract the fastest and with the most force. 

While this hasn’t been studied extensively, a few studies have purposefully used high intensity speed stick swings and/or explosive vertical jumps before swinging golf clubs, and found that it increases swing speed for a short-time (Bliss et al., 2021; Hebert-Losier et al. 2024).

Exploration of New Movement Strategies

Golfers tend to move a bit differently and explore new movements when completing speed training sessions compared to when they normally play and practice. In many cases, these minor tweaks and changes will result in the golfer swinging a bit faster as the session progresses. This largely occurs because of two main factors during speed training sessions: 

1. We change the movement goals

2. We use higher effort/intent levels

3. We change the feedback provided

I am going to dive deeper into these concepts in future posts, but let’s briefly introduce them here. 

During normal practice or play, we are faced with a complex task and multiple sources of feedback that we tune into. The task is to coordinate the actions of many joints and muscles to move the club through space with enough velocity and precision to strike the ball in a way that will launch it with the intended distance, direction, and trajectory. In other words, golf is hard and it provides a significant motor control problem for the body to try to solve with each swing. Associated with the task of striking a golf ball are multiple sources of feedback that we as golfers tune into. This includes feedback about how the swing felt, the quality of the contact with the ball, the flight of the ball (including start line, curvature, trajectory, etc.), and the end result (did it end up where I wanted it to?).

Why does this matter? When we swing, we use a movement strategy that helps us navigate the complexity of the task while also considering these different goals and feedback sources. A common one is to “freeze degrees of freedom”, or to lock down or pair up certain body segments together to make it a simpler movement, allowing you to make contact more consistently (more to come on this in a future post). This manifests as a swing that looks very constrained.

But many speed training sessions will change the task goals and the feedback given. Instead of having to worry about swinging fast AND striking a ball in the center of the face AND achieving the correct ball flight, we can just focus on swinging fast. This is a key consideration because golfers care A LOT about strike and ball flight. It is hard to focus on the process of getting faster if it means you will be hitting it poorly and all over the place in the short term. Isolating the goal of swinging fast (without having to think about other factors) will often result in you moving and swinging differently than usual, especially if you have a fairly constrained swing to begin with. 

This change of task and feedback is combined with higher effort levels and intent that is directed towards swinging fast (vs intent to balance speed and accuracy). Importantly, golfers change how they move when they use different effort levels. For example, several research studies have measured how the biomechanics of the swing change when a golfer is asked to swing at different effort levels. In general, when golfers are swinging at higher effort levels and/or trying to hit the ball further, they produce higher ground reaction forces (i.e., push harder into the ground), rotate through larger ranges of motion, rotate key joints and body segments faster, and create greater separation between the trunk and hips (McNitt-Gray et al., 2013; Meister et al., 2011; Lamb & Pataky, 2018).  

Check out a social media post that dove into these studies and implications for speed training below:

In other words, people tend to swing a bit differently when you 1) take away the ball, 2) tell them to swing as fast as possible with high efforts (instead of having to balance speed and control), and 3) provide feedback on speed to see if they’re achieving that goal of swing faster. 

The result is that golfers will often start to open up and swing a bit more dynamically by the end of a speed training session, using biomechanics that are more conducive to speed vs their normal swings. 

But much more to come on this concept later.

Takeaways

The short-term gains in speed are not magic, but just physiology and motor learning. 

• Changing the goals of the swing (swing fast vs balancing speed, strike, and ball flight), effort/intent, and the feedback provided can all cause adjustments in how you move and swing. Sometimes this is a conscious decision to try different strategies to achieve faster swings. Other times it is a subconscious process, where you find yourself swinging differently to make the speed number go up, without realizing it. 

• As you progress through the session, you are likely warming up/potentiating the body and allowing for higher expressions of speed and intensity over time. For example, you may be gradually increasing muscle temperature, blood flow, joint range of motion, and muscle activation (particularly of fast twitch fibers), all of which can be conducive to swinging a bit faster as the session progresses. Closely intertwined with these physiological factors are psychological factors such as arousal, motivation, and effort provided.

• It may be that certain factors come into play more for some than others, and that other factors may also be involved.

But the fact that these are mostly short-term gains does NOT mean they are unimportant. The explorations you make from a movement perspective can help identify useful movement strategies that can carry over to future sessions and your normal swing. While swinging faster than normal by the end of the session can provide a more potent stimulus for you to adapt over time, both from a motor learning and from a physical perspective. 

Importantly, by understanding the factors involved with how we increase speed in the short-term (and eventually the long-term), we can be more efficient with the design of speed training sessions. For example:

1. Designing warm-up and potentiation strategies that are most likely to allow us to maximize speed earlier during the session. This means 1) a higher % of your swings may be at a faster speed and/or 2) you won’t need to take dozens of swings before you start to hit your max for the day (less time spent and lower volumes needed). 

2. By understanding how your movement strategies change within and across speed training sessions, it is easier to find the balance between technical changes that are conducive for speed gains without it negatively influencing other aspects of the game. 

More to come on this in the upcoming posts, when we dive into translating this to speed gains that stick around and transfer to better performance on the course. 

References

1. Blazevich, A. J., & Babault, N. (2019). Post-activation potentiation versus post-activation performance enhancement in humans: historical perspective, underlying mechanisms, and current issues. Frontiers in Physiology, 10, 1359.

2. Bliss, A., Livingstone, H., & Tallent, J. (2021). Field-based and overspeed potentiated warm-ups increase clubhead speed and drive carry distance in skilled collegiate golfers. Journal of Sport and Exercise Science, 5(2), 107-113.

3. Hébert-Losier, K., & Wardell, G. L. (2024). Acute and persistence of the effects of the SuperSpeed Golf™ weighted-club warm-up on golf driving performance and kinematics. Sports Biomechanics, 23(6), 709-727.

4. Lamb, P.F. & Pataky, T.C. (2018). The role of pelvis-thorax coupling in controlling within-golf club swing speed. Journal of Sports Sciences, 36(19), 2164-2171.

5. McGowan, C. J., Pyne, D. B., Thompson, K. G., & Rattray, B. (2015). Warm-up strategies for sport and exercise: mechanisms and applications. Sports Medicine, 45, 1523-1546.

6. McNitt-Gray, J.L., et al. (2013). Regulation of reaction forces during the golf swing. Sports Biomechanics, 12(2), 121-131.

7. Meister, D.W, et al. (2011). Rotational biomechanics of the elite golf swing: benchmarks for amateurs. Journal of Applied Biomechanics, 27(3), 242-251.

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