If you're trying to gain speed, we're going to cover some really
good topics today. We're talking speed gains today.
Things like how do you speed sticks?
What is the ideal speed training session look like?
What are the key determining factors of if you have speed or
not? And what are some, you know,
speed journeys that you might expect to be going through?
I'm going to share some of what I've been learning and we have
an awesome guest, doctor Alex Ehlert today.
He is spent a long time researching and looking at
speed, fit, fitness, the body, how all these correlate
together. We had a great conversation.
He is awesome to follow on Instagram is always pulling out
these interesting insights and ideas that are research back
data back. So love to follow that.
Yeah, let's get let's get right into it.
Let's let's talk about speed. OK, so well, I sent over the a
video and kind of have told you a little bit about my speed
journey. So I guess like what things have
I left on the table that I could try or what do you think are
like some of what you've been seeing with with distance gains
that that you would want to ask or learn about to see if for
maxing it out? Yeah, First off, there's a lot I
liked in there. So you kind of brought up a lot
of the ways that you kind of explore different strategies and
you're using feedback to kind of drive that prosper.
Designing sessions where the feedbacks help pushing you in
the direction you want is such a powerful tool when it comes to
speed training. I don't think many people
appreciate how much of a skill it is.
It's not just a matter of you can't just out effort it
completely. There's a degree if you have to
learn how to coordinate at faster speeds than you're used
to and build the skill of using your body efficiently and
reaching that point of being slightly uncomfortable, but
learning how to coordinate over time, there's this kind of like
skillful expression of what you have.
I think you did a really good job of kind of dialing that in
of I kind of view it as a guided exploration of movement in a way
when you're talking about these kind of speed training sessions.
But it may also explain why even though you weren't training
really frequently, you were still making gains because just
you're giving yourself opportunities to learn what
works for you, learn ways that kind of help you move that
needle in the right direction from a speed perspective.
But then you even acknowledge some of the maybe potential
limitations in your video of you weren't really focused on the
fitness side quite as much. You didn't dip as much into the
kind of consistent speed training sessions where you're
really trying to maximize everything with kind of
consistent exposure to that high speed.
And then some of the tools like speed sticks, which I think are
not the only way to gain speed, but in my opinion can be a very
useful tool, both from like a technical standpoint, but also
just a way of forcing you to have to move faster than you're
used to and some of the kind of processes that come along with
that. So yeah, I think there's
definitely a few opportunities and the fact that you were able
to get to 180 plus with with kind of the bare minimum of,
hey, I've got a driver and I've got some feedback and let's get
after it. Like that's obviously a really
good start, but excited to keep tabs on the the 190 mile per
hour. Well, I, OK, I want to get to
speed sticks. I want to get to some of your
research recommendations. But I guess maybe just for
context, I'd be curious, like is anything come to mind when I
ask, like what's the best story or like case study you've had of
someone that you have seen gain speed?
Does anything come to mind of like, hey, this person started
here, they did this, this and this, and then two years later
they got to this or anything. Does anything come to mind?
Yeah, there's a few I'd save myself as a really interesting
case study to start with. So for some kind of context, I
was a Division One college golfer, a kind of a failed
aspiring tour pro. Wanted to turn professional and
play 1. Compete for a living.
Realized pretty quickly that my game wasn't there so decide grad
school is a better route and kind of fell in love with
learning about how high performers do what they do.
So went on to kind of the exercise Physiology piece first
thinking I'll learn about kind of the fitness side.
And then over the years it's kind of expanded a bit to some
of the bio mechanics and using data and technology to help that
process. But I essentially started
working out a lot just as kind of an experiment to see I'm
learning all these things after I can stop competing and through
a lot of trial and error and kind of playing around with
different strategies. First, from kind of a gym based
perspective, I did slowly gain probably about 8 to 10 miles an
hour of speed. I didn't do a whole lot of kind
of formal speed training in the way I would now, but there were
some I'm going to go out and swing really hard once in a
while and see where I'm at. Then I essentially just burnt
out from golf and I've been doing a lot of research working
with golfers. I'm still in the golf space for
the last 10-12 years or so, but played and practiced very little
myself. And it was probably the last
year when I kind of got the bug to see like, I wonder what my
speeds AT and I was swinging something like 1/13, 1:14, but
had the physical tools in place where I'd been working out
consistently. I knew a lot about what my swing
needed to look like to swing faster just from studying the
bio mechanics and occasionally using myself as kind of a
example of how I'd analyze a golf swing.
And so within about 3-4 months of kind of couple times a week,
some high effort work for speed sticks, some more kind of
technical work, I was able to gain about 12 to 14 miles an
hour swing speed probably over a winter, so November to January
type deal. And then it did slow down from
there. But I was, I'm pretty
consistently swinging the 1:20 to high one Tees now when even
at college I was probably a Max out at about 1:11, 1/12.
So that's probably a less common example of someone that
completely took a break from the game, built the physical tools,
but then came back to it and applied that to as kind of a
fresh slate. But more recently, what I see a
lot of is especially kind of golfers that are prioritized,
maybe accuracy and distance are very short game specialists that
have never really swung fast before.
They'll have this really quick initial gain of four 5-6 miles
an hour within even a couple sessions because for the first
time ever, they allow themselves to take some swings where the
goal is just focused on making that speed number go up and not
having to worry about also making solid contact and where
is the ball going to go. And so they go from this kind of
constrained, maybe very simple and stable swing pattern to
suddenly allowing themselves to use the ground a little
differently and rotate a little more and a little faster.
And then they kind of surprise themselves when the number jumps
up within a few seconds sessions and take some of that and apply
it to their own game. So even relatively good golfers,
former college players, a few many tour guys that you know
would start at 1:10 and we'd get them up to 115 fairly quickly.
They're going to plateau from there.
It doesn't continue to go up, but there is.
It is fun to see someone that's never really tried to move in a
way like that where they kind of glass shattering moment of I
could swing faster if I just leveraged bio mechanics a little
more efficiently. Yeah, no, I think that most of
us grew up without ever trying to swing hard.
And so there are immediate gains you can pick up just by trying
to do that. But then you're right, that
plateau comes and then you have to work through that.
And I'm guessing that's where a lot of your research is, is come
into play of like, how do we breakthrough plateaus that
people run into? And so maybe walk through some
of your, you've got some crazy diagrams going that I've seen on
your Instagram. You've got some really good,
really good articles and and your newsletter kind of on speed
and stuff that you're doing there.
So what path do you want to take us here when?
I. Talk.
Talk to those folks who have hit plateaus because I know in these
days it feels like a lot of people have at least tried to
gain speed. Yeah, I think recently, so for a
long time, I've always been kind of frustrated by, it's not just
golf, but a lot of sports, a lot of areas becomes very siloed
over time where you kind of have your fitness specialists, you
have your swing specialists, and that's always going to be the
case. It's hard to be an expert in
everything at once, but I've always kind of gravitated
towards trying to how do we bring these pieces together?
And I have kind of specialties in certain areas.
I'm a certified strength coach. I've done a lot of research in
the strength and conditioning area.
But I realized very quickly that to really maximize performance
or even work with a coach together with a player, I need
to be able to kind of understand their perspective a bit.
So that was kind of when I became interested in speed, I
immediately tried to kind of think about where do all these
pieces fit together? And some of it stems from Sasha
Mckenzie's work as well with he had that paper a few years ago
with like energy transfer to the swing with amateur golfers.
And I started creating kind of my own framework of, of speed
from there. But this idea of essentially to
swing faster, you need to do one of a few things and it's you
need to perform more work on the club in a way that's going to
accelerate it into the ball with with higher speed.
And like from his research, he took it from kind of a work
energy perspective of essentially it comes down to
either producing more force or torque to the club during the
downswing in a useful way, usually along the hand path.
That's kind of how he describes it.
Or you need to create more time or distance to produce that
force. And so that could be creating a
bigger hand path or rotating more, giving yourself more
opportunity to apply more total force or do more work on the
club during that downswing. And So what ends up happening is
there's a few ways you can go about attacking that with the
most direct way being improving your technique.
And so that initial gain a lot of the time is when you have
people that have never swung fast before, they start to allow
themselves to explore different ways of moving.
And you you'll naturally, if you focus all of your efforts on
just making the speed go up and especially if you remove the
ball or use something like a foam ball.
Like I know Luke Benoit's been on here kind of shows or your
videos before, but I kind of took that idea from him.
For speed training specifically, you'll notice people start to
kind of try to use the ground move a little differently.
And then that feedback kind of allows you to find the movement
patterns that work. So a lot of people, especially
when they're starting at a low baseline, have never swung fast
before. They'll have that initial spike
within the first few weeks and that's very exciting.
But the reality is there's only so far you can go with those
quick games. From there, it's going to be
this more subtle refinements of your technique to get better at
applying forces to the club and moving your body in a way that's
going to be biomechanically efficient.
And then there's also going to be the slow, more progressive
adaptations to the body if you approach it from a physical
side. And it's kind of then this more
very subtle improvements. And then you'll have these
occasional breakthroughs when it all comes together.
So it becomes much more of a very slow nonlinear up and down,
and then maybe breakthrough for a few miles an hour and then
plateau again. What I tell people is if you
understand where and why that happens, then you can expect it
and you're not going to get discouraged when you have this
initial response and then you're going to plateau.
But it's all part of the process as you're kind of gradually
building out the pieces to make that next jump.
Yeah, So I love you said we broke it down really simply.
There's two ways that you're going to swing faster is 1.
You can apply more force over a longer period of time.
I think I got that right. So that that just means like
that longer backswing kind of queue, right?
Like if that's that's why these long drive guys are really large
and their hands are super high, right?
And just like way up there and as far back as they can go.
And then the other thing if you want to hit it swing faster is
you have to apply more force in the swing, right.
I think most people should start with trying to create a longer
hand path to be able to apply more force.
Right. Like that's such low hanging
fruit for most people. Yeah, absolutely.
And the reality is a lot of the kind of cues or feels that a lot
of people kind of use to swing faster will hit one, if not both
of those pieces in different ways.
So like the fast and dynamic backswing occasionally will
allow people to get kind of that bigger hand path, but it's also
going to have this secondary advantage of basically allowing
the muscles to be more active as you're kind of changing
direction at the top. So it's very similar.
I use the example of vertical jumps.
One of the reasons you jump higher when you allow yourself
to squat down first, especially kind of a quick transition out
of the bottom, is that by forcing yourself to have to
break out of the bottom to kind of decelerate before you re
accelerate up, your muscles have to start activating sooner.
And it kind of takes some of the slack at perhaps those kind of
contractile machinery so that as soon as you're ready to go back
up, they're already kind of firing.
The second piece on top of that is you have that kind of stretch
shortening cycle, which a lot of people probably heard about, But
this idea if you're going to have this kind of rapid stretch
and store elastic energy, and if you use that properly and you
have the right kind of combination of physical tools in
place, you can use that to actually produce more force.
So something as simple as like learning how to swing faster, as
long as you're able to sequence it efficiently, which is where
some of that skill learning kind of comes into place.
And there's going to be a bit of a no one-size-fits-all type
solution that'll work better for some people than others.
You can actually hit kind of both of those pieces very
quickly and that's usually one of the kind of early cues a lot
of people will find successful in those kind of first few
weeks. Got it.
OK, we're we're talking plateaus.
I'm going to share my screen with you.
And this is my spreadsheet that I have of the last started in
May of 2024, right. So I had already I guess been
trying. I'd already seen my probably
biggest jump when I first tried to swing harder, right.
So this is pretty much all plateau land, but over the
course of, you know, a year I went from my top being, you
know, kind of one 22174 kind of stayed kind of the club head
speed stayed pretty similar, but I was able to probably organize
my body a little bit better and and get better contact right
over over time. And then this year, now that I,
I went and worked with Colby 2 yay.
And he kind of like I was like, I, I was just pretty, I had
never done anything. I not a not a gym guy, not of a
workout guy. And and so he kind of opened the
eyes of like, Oh yeah, you just like a really weak.
So I was like, oh, OK. And so that has helped and it
was able to get to, you know, like mid 1 upper one 20s now.
Yeah, the other day we did a video, actually this was with
because I hurt my knees. So I was with the PT buddy and
was in his garage and we were working got up to 129 was the
highest club at speed, right? So now it's it feels like this
is just this is a grind at this point, right?
Is that, is that accurate in what you've seen And like what
you've researched is like it's just, is this just work from
here on out? Just a lot of hard work.
Yeah, so a lot of it is also trying to tease out like you're
you're kind of slowly teasing it out just through kind of natural
exploration and talking with people.
But what is kind of the next adaptation you need to make the
next jump? So early on it could be those
kind of low hanging fruit from a technical standpoint where
you're just you have the, you know, you're not using the
physical tools you already have very efficiently.
And so early on, it looks like you'd kind of probably maybe had
a spike in club head speed early on, just which naturally kind of
happens when you start to try to swim faster.
And it looks like for a while it was actually like the thing you
needed was to learn how to swing fast, but also strike the ball
fairly well. So that's where that kind of
translation of ball speed comes up.
And after you kind of get those low hanging fruit, it's
essentially you can continue to try to refine and find those
little margins from a technical perspective.
And there are ways you could continue to kind of push the
lever little bits at a time. But if the low hanging fruit are
gone and you're pretty close to like, hey, I've gotten all I can
get out of my existing body, then I'm upgrading kind of the
engine size and allowing, I kind of refer to the physical side as
more indirect way of gaining speed, but it gives you more
opportunities. So if you have a mobility
limitation, just stretching or just improve and that's not
going to necessarily guarantee that your club head speeds going
to spike up. But what it does is it gives you
more options that you can then apply to your swing.
So if you couldn't rotate before and you get a little more mobile
and a little more flexible, you then have more kind of movement
opportunities or movement strategies at your disposal that
you can play around with. Maybe I can get a little more of
that hand path length now and I have to go back and practice
that. What we'll see a lot of the time
is when someone goes from fairly weak on the force side and they
add a little bit of that extra force.
That can usually be a pretty quick transfer of a few mph
because you just basically could use the same movement fuel or
feels or cues, but you just have a little more force capacity at
your disposal. So you can be a little more
aggressive pushing off the ground.
You can rotate or kind of produce force through the upper
body and through the chain a bit better.
What I'll see a lot of people is kind of underappreciated piece
of the swing, if you're swinging really fast is going to be the
transfer of momentum or energy through the trunk.
And if you're really weak, that can be a really kind of energy
leak for a lot of people is even if they're pushing into the
ground with a lot of force. If you're not getting that
momentum up to the club very efficiently, then you may be
losing a few mph. But as soon as someone gets
stronger kind of throughout the muscles, the hips, the trunk,
the upper extremity, then that kind of whole kinetic chain can
get a bit more efficient. So from there it's then, you
know, gaining you can start to maximize kind of the speed
related adaptations of certain muscles that have to act at
really high speeds during the swing.
So a lot of the upper extremity tends to have to produce force
really quickly and move very quickly while kind of continuing
to build out the lower supports what you're trying to do from a
technical perspectives. Well, you, you nailed it.
That is so when I was with Mark Blackburn, we we were on the
force plate and so I was able to apply as like 210% or something
of vertical force. It was too late, right.
So it never got to the the club. So that doesn't really matter.
And then we're doing the, you know, some of the TPI test with
the Med ball. You know, just I'm below was
below average on the lay down, the lay down and you get up and,
you know, Chuck it over your head one.
So like your spot on there. That is like a very accurate
thing. And I'm guessing I'm pretty
common in that like I, I would, I would assume that they're
probably a lot of people that have that same kind of thing
going on. Yeah, absolutely.
So I mean it's very common, especially in the golf space.
Well, not even necessarily just in the golf space, but even the
people that have a bit of training experience, they're not
always training in a performance related way.
Like maybe they kind of grab a program and it's kind of your
bodybuilder inspired, high volume type physique related
type training. And the reality is when someone
first starts doing any sort of fitness, like the easiest and
biggest gains you can make from a fitness and health perspective
is going from doing nothing to doing something.
So most general programs will work pretty well for a while.
Once you're trying to really maximize kind of your
performance potential from like a swing speed perspective, then
it's time to start thinking about how the body performs, not
just kind of your general physique related type training.
And a lot of people don't train in a way that's really efficient
for kind of producing high levels of force, for one, but
then definitely learning to transfer energy through the
body. And that's essentially.
What the golf swing is, is you can get a lot of speed out of a
relatively small body if you're really good at transferring
energy through the system. But then when you combine that
with a big engine too, that's when you're going to have a very
large ceiling or really high ceiling for speed when you
combine it with good technique. What, what are some of those
things that you've seen have a big correlation from a fitness
perspective to speed then? Yeah.
So from a lot of the research we've done both kind of formal
academic research, but then I've just tested a lot of golfers
over the years and continue to do so with some of kind of my
current jobs. The by far the strongest
correlation from a physical perspective is what we call
vertical jump impulse. And impulse essentially is like
the total amount of force you produce over a given amount of
time. So going back to kind of the
mechanics of swing speed, Sasha kind of went from like a work
energy perspective of how much work you can form during the
downswing, which is basically force over a given amount of
distance. You can look at it in a very
similar way with impulsive momentum of like I'm trying to
build my momentum into the club, and that's dependent on how much
force I produced basically during the time of the
downswing. So it's a similar concept,
slightly different mechanical terms, but essentially it's how
much vertical force you can produce during this kind of
movement jump during specific phases of it.
There's probably a couple of reasons for that being a really
strong correlation. One, I mean, we know the lower
body plays a really important role where ground reaction force
is, is very important in terms of being able to build up and
transfer that momentum through the body gives you
opportunities. If you're really powerful from a
lower body perspective, as long as you can time it up correctly,
you have the raw capacity of putting force into the ground if
you need to. The second piece is probably
pretty simple that people that are pretty athletic and pretty
good across the board tend to also be good at jumping.
So it's usually a pretty easy process Oxy if just overall
athleticism in my opinion, but there are other are other
pieces. So we've seen that upper body we
call like ballistic strength or thinking less so the maximum
weight you can lift, but kind of fast application of force from
the upper body tends to correlate really well.
So your medicine ball throws like you mentioned before, tend
to be pretty easy field based tests of this.
And some of the labs will use something like force plates.
So we'll have like an isometric bench press or a a test of how
fast you can apply force into a force play for example is kind
of a measure of this like fast dynamic force or or this
ballistic capabilities of the upper body.
So those tend to be really good ones where pretty predictive of
how much of an engine you have for kind of producing speed
within the swing. And then kind of the secondary
factors will be some of the kind of mobility pieces of do you
have an obvious mobility limitation of if you're
incredibly immobile in the trunk and hips, then there can be some
low hanging fruit there as well. Tell me about the SO the
vertical vertical jump impulse. What was the?
Yeah. So it's usually a counter
movement jump, which is essentially what most people
think of as your traditional vertical jump that we usually do
hands on the hips to just kind of isolate the lower body
specifically. So jump height for a long time
is used as kind of the primary. It's the easiest kind of lower
body power metric if you can kind of just about everyone has
probably done a vertical jump test at some point, especially
if they participate in any sort of sport.
The only issue, and it's that it by itself is a good predictor of
kind of club head speed potential.
The only down side of it is that it is biased against heavier
golfers where being a bit bigger and especially if you're big and
strong can actually have advantages within the golf swing
because it's a sport where you're not actually having to
like displace yourself through the air quite as much as you
would if you're jumping or sprinting in another sport.
There's advantages to being able to kind of maintain contact with
the ground. So it's more about the total
force you're putting into the ground, less so than how much
you get your body to explode off the ground.
So impulse is essentially just a measure of like if you think
about basically from the bottom of the squat during a vertical
jump until you leave the ground or just measuring the total
amount of force you put into the ground during that time.
And it sounds fancy, but it's it's essentially just how much
force did you put into the ground to make yourself go up?
And we can actually estimate it really accurately if even if you
don't have a force plate, I'll actually just measure jump
height if I don't have a force plate.
And if you know the person's body mass, so how much they
weigh in kilograms, there's actually equations to really
accurately estimate how much force they would have had to put
that into the ground to make themselves go that high off the
ground. It sounds like a fancy metric.
It's essentially just jump height, taking into account how
heavy you weigh. Got it.
OK, so V1 just sent me over pressure plate and I was dinking
around with it and they have a they have a jump height test.
So let's say I go measure myself and the jump and I'll I'll have
to, I'll have to message you what it was.
And you tell me if that's good or bad.
But like, let's say somebody's like, oh man, this, this is not
good. I need to, this is a problem for
me. I can tell it's under where, you
know, my average is just give us the minute spiel on like how,
how would you help someone improve that?
Can they improve that? Yeah.
So generally, yeah, you absolutely can't improve it for
one. But generally, if kind of that
vertical impulse or whatever you want to call it, your kind of
jump performance test is low, or especially if you do a couple
other tests and it seems like they're pretty low on the force
side across the board. The generally the first thing
we'll try to figure out is if it's kind of a strength or kind
of peak force issue, or is it that they have some strength,
but they're not good at expressing it quickly.
So that'll usually kind of be the follow up.
In a lot of cases, if it's someone that doesn't have much
training experience, it's usually going to be starting
with building up kind of strength, their ability to
produce a lot of force quickly or a lot of force first.
So think of it building up the engine or the foundation.
And the reason for that is when you get stronger, there's a lot
of things that happen that generally set the stage for
future kind of speed related gains down the road.
So it's generally better to kind of build up that foundation of
just being able to produce force in the 1st place before you try
to learn how to use force really, really quickly.
The second piece is a lot of the like strength training, the type
of training that you use for building up strength also tends
to come with some beneficial things from like injury and
general well-being standpoint of that kind of higher force output
will be beneficial for kind of adapting some of the connective
tissues. And the number one thing we can
do for someone from a fitness perspective, if you're working
with a competitive golfer, is making it so that they can
tolerate the demands their sport more often and be able to
practice and play as much as they want to play without having
to worry quite as much about injury.
So that strength training perspective is usually the
starting point because it builds the engine while also kind of
building that robustness or the resilience against stress.
Then the next piece from there as you layer on kind of the
speed related side of it's not enough to just produce a lot of
force. The golf swing tends to be fast
and dynamic. We're going to start moving to
things like jumps, medicine ball throws, things where you have to
load the ground quick and learn how to transfer energy through
the body. And that's essentially formula.
A lot of it is just programming. And then in a way that we're
balancing, we're really getting a really strong stimulus so that
the body's going to adapt, but without overdoing it, where
they're going to be fatigued and it's going to affect the other
stuff they're trying to do, which in golf they tend to play
a lot. They want to be able to play in
practice a lot. So we don't want them incredibly
sore or unable to recover between workouts.
So that really is more the art of working with golfers is how
navigate their schedules more set than the training itself.
How important is is this jump aspect?
Like is it often that you're saying like this, you have to go
and prove this like and this is the number one thing you got to
go do is, is that frequent that that's when you when you talk to
players that that's the thing. It's I kind of think of it is
it's not probably jumping specifically that matters as
much as jumping brings a lot of valuable things with it in terms
of what it does in terms of your ability to use the ground.
So during the golf swing like even things like could be think
about a vertical jump. One of the reasons those outputs
from kind of those vertical jumps probably correlate pretty
well is it is actually a decent proxy for how we use the ground
within the swing. It's lacking the kind of
rotational component, but really fast golfers tend to kind of
upload during the backswing. So their center mass will move
up just a little bit and then they kind of on wait and they
kind of fall into their lead side and then they explode out
of it. And some people will still stay
relatively grounded and some people literally almost kind of
jump to kind of clear out space and rotate around that lead
regardless. It's almost like a less
exaggerated vertical jump in terms of how the body's kind of
going up. You're on waiting, breaking
hard, and then kind of accelerating out of it in terms
of rotating around that lead leg.
And so people that can train the body to get really good at doing
that in a more extreme fashion. So things like jumps or loaded
jumps, they're going to build up that capability of having the
raw ability from a neuromuscular standpoint to then apply that to
the golf swing. So my goal from a fitness
perspective is if I can get you really good at jumping and if I
can get you really powerful from a lower body perspective, then
you have the tools in place where now it's time to learn how
to kind of time that up and sequence it within the kind of
swing motion itself. And that's where more the
specific technical work or speed training work comes into play.
The other piece is that a lot of good things just happen across
the body with just really good lower body training.
It's kind of the foundation of a good strength and performance
training program is, you know, a lot of good adaptations happen
in terms of both the strength component, the power component,
as well as kind of the building up the tissues that are going
to, you know, allow you to practice often and and not get
hurt. Vertical jumps tend to be a
pretty good foundational piece of those programs.
Got it. So what?
What would you expect? My jump to me?
So I'm 6 feet tall. How much do I weigh?
180 lbs? Something like that?
Like is that enough to guess? Like what?
What am I going to go see, do you think?
And what would be good? Or bad?
Yeah. That's why you're on the spot.
The first piece, being a technology guy, is it's going to
depend a bit on how you measure it.
So from like if you do hands on hips, strict form, the other
piece will be kind of which tool you use to measure it.
So there's like forest flights are kind of considered the gold
standard, but there's contact mats and all sorts of different
options. I can use a smartphone app
that's really actually pretty accurate for vertical jump.
I generally measure it in centimeters mainly because
that's a lot of the kind of formulas are built around that.
And your size. If you're jumping probably in
the kind of like 35 to 40cm range with like that hands on
hips, which I'd have to do the math to convert it.
That's probably going to put you in a pretty good spot from that
like impulse measurement where we have kind of normative data
based off of what we see from golfers of different levels.
Anywhere from kind of your pro golfers have tested a few long
drivers and they tend to even be on the higher level.
And I'll even often like the people are really trying to push
speed. There's pretty good normative
data out there from like Major League Baseball.
I tend to use like if you're really serious about this, we're
not going to just stop at what other pros are doing.
We're going to push for the kind of next level up, which a lot of
your baseball batters tend to have a lot of the same physical
attributes that would be really useful from a golf perspective
as well. OK, I'm going to go do it.
I've got. Yeah, I've got the pressure, the
sensor mats. I'll send you a video.
I'll post a video. Here's.
The and give you a score. How about that?
Yes, yes, OK. So we've got the jump aspect and
then you talked about the second aspect was, sorry, ballistic.
Upper body power, but the ability to accelerate the upper
body really fast. There's, there's going to be
more pieces on top of that. But in terms of like basic proxy
test, things like a seated chest pass for distance with a
medicine ball throw is a really easy test to do.
So I think that's part of the TPI testing as well.
I've done it quite a bit. And when I was doing kind of
formal research or if I'm just testing a golfer, it's a very
quick and easy way of we take away the lower body body.
Can that upper body just generate a lot of Ford that I
usually like to do something rotational in nature as well.
So rotational medicine, Paul throat works really well as kind
of a secondary 1 to see. Can they translate that into
kind of a rotational pattern? So those three right off the
bat, can they put a lot of force into the ground quickly?
Can they produce a lot of force quickly from the upper body?
Can they do it kind of rotationally?
That's already going to tell me if someone's good across all
three of those. That gives me a lot of
information. If someone is really poor across
all three of those, we know there's there's some workers,
there's I guess spinning in a positive light with a little bit
of work on the physical side, they probably have a lot of
potential to gain speed. Yep.
OK. So we've covered those aspects.
I want to know your thoughts on speed sticks.
I was reading a bit some of your stuff that you've talked about
them and it's kind of interesting you're using more of
like how to change a swing versus swing faster almost is
what it sounds like a little bit of the mindset behind them.
Yes, I think there's a few ways that they work.
One, I think they fall really nicely into kind of the previous
conversation of when you think about when you're normally
practicing or playing, you have all this different feedback that
you're kind of tuning into and you're going to tend to
prioritize some or the over the other.
Think about probably the thing that overrides everything is how
did I hit it and where did the ball go?
Essentially that kind of outcome related type feedback when
you're playing or practicing, it could be really hard to kind of
explore new ways of moving when you're also really concerned
when you're going to hit it poorly.
So Speed 6IN a way are actually really kind of extreme way of
what we talked about before where you're basically focusing
all your feedback and just swinging fast.
And so we're taking away the ball, we're taking away feedback
about how you strike it, where the ball is going, how the ball
is flying. And we're giving you a radar and
here's your speed. You have the stick swinging
faster. And a lot of people, especially
in the short term, if they're not used to moving really
athletically or dynamically within the swing, will find that
they tend to use the ground a bit differently.
You rotate a little differently when they just have a speed
stick and a swing radar and nothing else.
So I think that's the first piece.
It's a lot of people will almost immediately gain a few mph if
they have pretty efficient or inefficient swings at baseline
or they haven't really ever swung fast before.
Because it just sets up the environment for like, okay, it's
kind of a safe environment to try moving differently because I
don't have to worry about hitting it 100 yards, right, or
hitting it out of bounds. Yeah.
The second piece is, I think there are some interesting
things that happen when you take something that's close enough to
a Golf Club and modify it in some ways.
So I kind of view it as really like a skill acquisition tool,
which I think in the future, like really good coaches will
learn how to promote specific movements in the swing using
speed sticks as kind of a constraint on what they're
trying to do. And good coaches already do this
with different tools already. But for example, one of the
issues I had when I started this new speed journey was that I was
realizing I was kind of whipping the club away with my hands.
And, you know, I wasn't kind of moving off the ball really
efficiently. I wasn't loading the ground to
kind of create that backswing momentum.
And when I started swinging the heavier speed stick, even if I
wasn't trying to swing it all out because my goal wasn't
necessarily like make this number go as high as possible.
What I realized is when it's a little heavier than you're used
to, I was being forced to kind of to push off the ground and
kind of load the trunk a little more dynamically to get that
momentum going because there's a bit more inertia to overcome.
And then in transition, I had to kind of sequence a little
differently. I had to kind of lead with the
hips a bit better and use more of that proximal to distal
sequencing because otherwise it kind of pulled me out of
position and it's hard to just like arm swing it down.
And so I started working it into, it's just kind of like a
drill where I'd use like the slightly heavier speed stick and
just kind of focus on like these using the big muscles to kind of
drive the momentum and then transferring it up the chain.
And it kind of was a nice way to kind of promote some of those
movements I was looking for in the swing.
And then with the faster of the light ones, it's really a great
way to challenge, like, can I apply that at faster than normal
speeds? And one of the first adaptations
that happens, whether it's the gym or something technical like
the golf swing, is that when you add a new challenge, a new
movement challenge to the mix, your body's going to try to
figure out how to coordinate things differently to accomplish
your task around that challenge. So in this case, you force your
body to move a little bit faster than you're normally used to
move in, and your body has to kind of go through this process
of how can I move to make that number continue to go up while
swinging something that's a little wider than I'm used to.
So I don't think it's anything necessarily magical, but I think
just things happen. It's kind of this, you learn to
explore different ways of moving when you make these slight
changes to the weight of the club and then you have feedback
to kind of guide that exploration.
But I do think overtime, there's probably a degree of the
overspeed. It's a very good way to get some
degree of kind of speed related adaptations in terms of moving
certain body parts faster than they're used to training.
And there are kind of neural adaptations that can occur
overtime with learning how to activate those muscles quicker
than usual. So there's probably a degree of
that as well, but that's going to be more your slower burn
where some of the kind of quick coordination movement related
stuff, it's going to be kind of those quick jump since.
Got it. How much is some of these jumps
like is I think about the plateau that I'm on right now
and kind of the small gains. How much do you think is fitness
related, getting stronger and improving the body?
And how much do you think is like neurological of just like
learning to adapt to these new forces because a lot of it
feels, you know, out of control and wild when you're speed
training. Like what do you think the
balance is between kind of those factors?
Like how do you think about that?
Yeah, I think a very simple way of thinking of it is kind of the
physical side is going to be kind of raising your ceiling and
then the kind of skill speed training type stuff is going to
be how close to that ceiling you are.
So it's kind of this progressive.
Let's take a couple examples. You may have someone that has
like a very poor engine, so they're relatively weak, maybe
they're pretty small. They may have this kind of
initial jump, but they run into that ceiling really quickly.
So they kind of Max out. At some point they need to be
able to produce more force and produce it quicker.
Or they have some just you can only make a old, you know, old
car with a bad engine move so fast.
Even if you put the best driver in the world behind the wheel,
at some point you got to upgrade the engine to actually kind of
learn to drive faster in that case.
I won't take this personally, That's fine.
The other example is like, especially if you think about
someone that maybe like picks up long drive after being like a
professional baseball player or a talking with like Martin
Borgmeyer. He has this pretty extensive
history of being a really good athlete playing basketball.
And he probably had a lot of those physical tools in place.
So he probably had this massive kind of opportunity to benefit
from the technical and the more speed training specific side of
things where he credits a lot of the more technique or and kind
of focus speed training work in kind of getting up to those 141
fifties swing speed, two 25230 ball speed.
So in his case, it's like he probably had this massive,
almost all of it came from technical work.
It's he had already laid that foundation over many years and
then. The fitness side can continue to
build up that potential over time or maybe you kind of morph
what that fitness work looks like.
So if you're plenty strong, you're probably going to focus
more on the speed side or maybe it's just making sure you don't
get hurt so that you can practice more of the speed
related stuff more often. But the short answer is like, I
think for most people, it's going to be this case and you're
bridging that gap, you're running into that ceiling and
then you need to take some time to build up that ceiling higher
and then you can make those those leaps again.
So it's building the engine and then the the speed training side
or the technical size, learning to express what you have and so
that they kind of go hand in hand, if that makes sense.
Got it. All right.
Two more questions. One grip strength.
Any thoughts on that? Does that matter?
Do you care any any research on on that?
It's a great question and I love seeing both sides of the
equation. So on.
It's more complicated than people think, but the reality is
1 when we talk about correlations between grip
strength and swing speed, there's a couple factors at
play. The first that makes it really
tricky to actually run those analysis is that grip strength
is a really good proxy for overall strength.
So they use it in longevity research as a quick and easy way
to measure just overall strength of a person because people that
have really strong grips tend to be really strong throughout the
body. So that's the first piece where
it's not necessarily an indicator of something golf
specific. It's just that strong people
tend to have strong grips and being strong tends to be good
for a lot of things, including a swinging a Golf Club.
That being said, I think there are some specific benefits of
having good grip strength. So for example, argument that I
think that if you have plenty of grip strength, you're able to
put enough force into the grip without it being excessive
effort. I think there's a lot of benefit
to that. Whether you get that by just
being strong in general, that that's one thing more
specifically, like a piece that I've become really fascinated by
is this idea of kind of centrifugal force in the swing.
Or you can think about it of having to put force into the
club to like basically carve out its path as you approach
impacts. But someone that's swinging
fairly fast, so that you have someone swinging 115 a 120 miles
an hour just to keep that club moving and it's kind of
semicircular path and release into the ball, you're going to
have to be putting basically pulling on that shaft with well
over £100 worth of force. So you're going to have to be
really pulling on that club to keep it from flying straight
into the ground, actually get it to curve up into the ball.
And so you'll kind of talk about some people kind of pulling up
through impact. If you have a lot of grip
strength, that can help, you can get around that by just
basically using the other big muscles efficiently too.
So you kind of think about that. I think in my opinion, one of
the roles of the vertical force is that if you're able to post
up really powerfully on that lead leg, you can kind of
perform that pole with basically your whole body versus just
having to pull with your hands specifically.
But the last length of that chain is going to be the grip.
So if you don't have the ability to put force into the grip of
the club, you're probably going to get limited in terms of how
fast you can swing, or at least your ability to control a fast
moving swing. That makes sense.
Good, good answer. I guess last, last question,
just like what's your ideal speed session?
So I guess just for context, like the things that I track and
what I've done, just whether it works or not, it's just like I
found, hey, 3045 minutes in the gym beforehand is like, we'll do
wonders for for your speed. And then just like hitting 40 to
70 golf balls, taking some time in there to just use the crap
out of video so you can actually see what you're doing, working
on a few different cues that you need to work on.
That's been the formula that I've just, it's typically like
an hour and a half, right? Like it just takes a long time
when you add the gym component in and all that crap.
What's your perfect speed training session I look like?
It's a bit bit tricky. I'll, I'll give it a single
answer, but part of it is I kind of have sessions that are built
out for different purposes. So during certain parts of the
year, like early offseason, for example, if I've got a golfer
that really needs to increase their speed, we're going to push
kind of the pure club head speed potential a little harder early
on on. And then we're going to
gradually transition and more and more focus on learning how
to strike the ball at speed. I say launch a bit more of the
kind of transfer work and getting it to actually apply to
the course. But if we're kind of focused on,
just like let's say my goal in a session is increasing ball speed
or club head speed, almost always going to have at least
20. Obviously the 2030 minutes would
be great for kind of the physical side.
But it's going to basically go through a process of getting the
heart rate up, getting some blood flow, getting really from
like a physiological perspective as getting the muscle
temperature and blood flow kind of increased because that
actually puts it in a much better position to produce force
and speed. So you're literally warming up
as part of the process. We're going to do some dynamic
mobility to kind of just get the key joints moving and make sure
that the joints are prepared to move in the way we want to.
I'm going to finish up the physical side with something
intense and it's low volume. It's not going to be anything
that wears you out and things like vertical jumps, something
kind of explosive, One, because it feels good.
You feel like you're about ready to move fast and I think the
psychological components important for speed work.
But two, it's doing some things in terms of making sure those
muscles are warm and kind of primed.
Then I'll have kind of a call specific, I call it a warm up,
but I essentially I'll do some things like I call them opening
up the backswing and opening up the downswing.
So with club in hand, I'm kind of working into progressively
bigger ranges, this kind of a golf specific dynamic mobility.
And then I have ramp up swings essentially where I'll start at
fairly low effort and I'm progressively increasing the
effort as kind of an extension of my warm up until I'm hitting
pretty close to kind of my expected, you know, training
speed. One thing I have started working
in is before I get into the Max effort stuff like driving
speeds, I do like to sandwich that at the start and the end
with like gamer swings or hitting a ball, but I'm trying
to swing fast but efficiently as well.
So trying to make speed feel easy just because I've found
that it becomes less an adjustment when I then I have to
go back and learn how to swing fast and strike a ball well as
it's well. So kind of building up kind of
the skill component and bringing the focus back at the end to
like, all right, it's not just making this number go up, it's
also striking a ball efficiently and it's striking it well.
And then the middle of the session is going to be, you
know, I have a few different kind of structures of what it
looks like, but it's generally going to be trying to push the
speed to pretty high levels. And sometimes I'll mix in where
I do a couple swings with a speed stick and then kind of
immediately go into my driver swings, especially if I'm
looking for a very specific type of movement in my swing.
Or sometimes when I just whip the lightspeed stick around, it
just kind of gets me amped up for actually taking the driver
and swinging fast right afterwards.
So that's essentially the structure sometimes, sometimes
I'll make it quick, but an ideal ones probably 45 minutes to an
hour. Once speed starts to drop off
then then I call it quits and I focus more on the kind of like
gamer swings at the end. How many balls are you hitting
do you think? I've tried to more and more fine
tune my warm up where I can get in and out quickly.
It's probably going to be somewhere if you ignore the ramp
up swings that I kind of consider a warm up.
I'm usually trying to shoot for somewhere in the like 25 to 30
Max effort. You definitely could go more
than that, but I've I've tried more and more to make it so that
I feel like I can get to those Max speeds as quick as I can.
One, just to get in and out and not have to spend all day doing
it. But two, just from a workload
perspective, I like the idea of if I can develop sessions where
we can get the same stimulus but with less total work and less
total kind of loading the joints, then that's usually a
good thing when you're working with golf as well.
Yeah, no, it's interesting. I mean, there are clips of
Bryson saying, you know, his speed sessions are 120 balls,
you know, just like massive amounts of of shots.
So it's, it's interesting to hear different thoughts of that.
And I like yours because, yeah, deficiency is huge.
Trying to not take two hours to do to get faster.
Yeah, I mean, I'd say a big part of that is is going to be you
can work up to that. Like what I'd recommend is
Bryson's probably built up to that and same thing.
A lot of the long drive competitors, they've built up to
that ability to do it over the course of months where their
bodies are so used to swinging fast.
And it's a lot of it too. It's like an easy way that I've
found is a lot of people when they first start, they may not
need much more than 15 or 20 balls before their speed starts
to drop off. And then maybe you up that here
more depending on how much time you want to spend.
I'll generally use kind of speed drop offs as a way to tell me
when to stop. So if if speed is plateauing and
dropping off and it's not coming back up, if I give myself a
little extra rest, that's usually kind of a sign to call
it quits and and live to fight another day.
Got it, got it. Do you care at all about like
how fast you're like, do you care if you're just like 1 after
the other go, go or do you feel like you're hit OK, stop back,
recover, OK, hit again. Like, does that matter to you at
all? I've played around with
different ones. I'd be lying if I said I had the
perfect solution. I think there's probably a
balance between. You can get into a rhythm, you
can keep the muscles a bit warmer and it feels better to
hit a few in quick succession. What I'm trying to avoid though
is if having like heart rate just spite people really high
for long periods of time. So I'll usually kind of have
quick succession and then let things kind of ease back in and
then get back into it. A lot of it is just from like a
physiological perspective. Fatigue definitely can disrupt
both the coordination piece if you're trying to think about
building like better patterns at speed, not just like massive
speed. I don't care how how I
definitely from like a speed related from like how fast the
muscle fibers are contracting, how fast you can send signals
down to the muscles to activate them.
Fatigue can very quickly effects that.
So I generally don't want it to be where I'm like completely out
of breath and just fighting through it.
So it's kind of soon as the heart rate's starting to get up
there and I'm a little out of breath, I ease it back down and
then kind of ramp it back up. So a bit of both I'd say.
But I'm definitely open to some people say that they love that
kind of like they need 2030 balls back-to-back to back to
kind of get up to speed. So could be of an individual
piece as well. Well, this is fun.
There are a bunch of other questions I want to ask.
I feel like we're just getting started.
But you are great to follow on Instagram.
You've always got some interesting stuff you're posting
there. I guess get give folks that will
do the intro at the end here, but give give folks the rundown
of kind of like you've talked a lot about speed and the research
work you do. What do you do?
What's some of your background? Yeah, we're just, we reverse
things around here. It's exciting.
Intro at the end. Yeah, I'd say the the rundown is
I essentially was a lifelong golfer.
I wanted that to be some part of what I do, regardless of kind of
where life and my occupation takes me.
I'm a sports scientist by trade. So essentially I'm a Masters in
exercise Physiology, a pH. D In human movement sciences, I
spent some time in the academic world, so I have something like
25 peer reviewed publications with probably now fifteen of
those being golf related in some capacity across kind of strength
and conditioning. We have some like launch monitor
validation type papers, did some early papers on warm ups and
things like that for golf, still publish quite a bit.
So I still work with some kind of academics in that world.
But essentially I kind of consult with golfers.
I try to put out educational material through social media
and and then I also do kind of the peer reviewed research side.
So my day job is working with a flywheel training company called
Xerfly, kind of the applied sports science side.
But then I also generally have some kind of private
consultation clients in the golf world working on either speed
fitness, some combination of those.
And then I've currently the director of golf Sports science
for a new Golf performance facility called PGA Frisco or
Sports Academy PGA Frisco, which is housed within the PGA of
America Coaching Center. So I'm helping them with a lot
of the physical assessments, using technology and data to
kind of improve the fitness process with golfers.
Love it. And you've got a newsletter.
I've I've read through your, your newsletter articles and
stuff are are we are we doing those regularly?
Do do we need some motivation to keep you going on those or what?
What's what's happening there? I need to get back to it.
If anyone has good topics, suggestions I'm happy to dive
back into it yet. The plan is to get back into do
it semi regularly. What I found was the last few
took a lot out of me in terms of the amount of work to fit
together. So.
But yeah I'm trying to get back into a normal routine.
I'll probably try to post every either every two weeks or once a
month or something like that depending on how big of a top.
OK, we'll link those up, then we'll link those up when this
comes out. And then, hey, you let me know
when you got more coming out and we'll link those up too.
We'll we'll keep keep blasting those.
But Alex, it was it was super fun to to learn from you here
and dive into some more and we'll do it again because you
always I should just hit you up every interesting Instagram post
and just say, tell me more about this.
Sounds good, always happy too.