How Gym Training Can Improve Your Swing and Increase Ball Speed
It’s no secret to the discerning golfer that club head speed and ball speed are the names of the game when it comes to longer drives.
But how do you actually get the club swinging faster and the ball going farther? That’s where there is much less consensus…
Many will tell you that you need to hit the gym and get stronger, while others will talk about technique and issues that are best left to a golf pro. To top it off, there are a lot of people who stand to make a lot of money selling you equipment that promise to increase your driving distance.
The real answer is a classic one in training and performance circles: it depends.
It depends on many factors, but for the purposes of this article, and my own scope as a professional, let’s discuss where strength and conditioning and exercise more broadly can affect swing speed and, by extension, how fast the ball travels.
Strength Alone Isn’t the Answer…
I’m sorry to disappoint fellow meatheads like myself, but simply developing more strength as a means of increasing your driving distance is not likely to help all that much, and that’s because your acceleration and velocity matter far more than the force you apply to the driver and the ball itself.
“Speed training is built on a stronger, healthy body.”
Unless you are still going through puberty, or you’re significantly undersized and out of shape, increasing your strength alone probably won’t affect your clubhead or ball speed too much.
However, increasing your athleticism and understanding of speed most certainly do.
What do I mean by that?
Let’s first explore strength and why that doesn’t translate as a 1-to-1 total winner when it comes to increasing driving distance.
Strength Explained
In performance and strength & conditioning circles, strength is defined as the ability to produce force. In simple physics terms, force (f) is equal to mass (m) x acceleration (a), or:
f = ma
More mass can translate to more force production (or strength), and often is the main focus in strength sports or sports that require the movement of heavy weights or people. Think olympic weightlifting, powerlifting, or wrestling.
But in golf, there isn’t much strength required to hit a ball. We all know that hitting the ball too slowly doesn’t do very much. Imagine a very large person hitting a golf ball very slow, like a gentle tap. That golf ball will not travel far at all.
This means the golfer needs to focus far more on the “a” in the f = ma equation, or in other words, the acceleration.
Acceleration and Velocity
Pardon the physics lesson, but it is important in understanding where the gym helps our golf game.
If we go back to the force equation, f = ma, we know that our acceleration of the club matters far more to producing a good hit on the golf ball than our mass alone does. This is also why clubs don’t weigh a ton. It’s easier to move something faster when it’s lighter.
We know this is the case, because typically heavier clubs (like a 2, 3, or 4-iron) aren’t often found in the bags of golfers with low swing speeds. This is because these golfers cannot swing the club fast enough to get maximum distance out of these heavier irons.
Acceleration, however, is not as easily measured as mass (or weight). You need to know the velocity and the time it takes to to do so.
Acceleration is defined as change of velocity (v) ÷ time (t), or
a = velocity / time
Now stay with me here…
Velocity is simply a measure of distance and time, or distance divided by time, to be exact (v= d/t).
For the purposes of golf, this is defined by how fast you can bring the club to make contact with the ball, or manipulating your total swing time to match the distance you’re looking for.
To bring it all back to golf, this is why the distance your balls travels is tied to your ability to manipulate the tempo of your swing, or how fast you can move the club as a byproduct of the efficiency of your swing— NOT your ability to hit the ball as hard as you can.
We all know what happens when you hit the ball as hard as you can and don’t necessarily hit the sweet spot of the club— it goes haywire and you probably just took a penalty stroke for a lost ball. That’s why most people hold back a little on their drives: they are looking to control them and keep them from going off the rails.
It’s also a mistake in thinking just because you hit a ball hard, that you hit it fast. Trackman and simulators can show you evidence there.
Ask any golf pro and instructor and they’ll tell you the tempo and efficiency of your swing will go way farther in increasing your club head and ball speed than simply hitting it as hard as you can.
So if that’s the case, where does the gym come into all this? How can you be using the gym and increasing your fitness in order to hit the ball farther?
Learning to be more athletic
Because of easily stereotyped images of big muscles and people’s own history in the gym, it’s easy to forget that the gym and professionals in it exist for more than getting you big biceps or losing weight: the right pros can help you be a better athlete. That’s ultimately why you use the gym for performance, and why DiSalvo Performance Training exists.
Good athletes understand not only how to be strong, but when to be strong, when to be fast, and how to temper and manage their effort. There is a concept in sports science that helps us explain and train general athleticism, and it is a part of every sport, not just golf. It is known as “the stretch shortening cycle,” and it’s the reason we are able to move at max velocities and speeds.
Rather than put you through another physics lesson, I encourage you to watch this video of Bryson DeChambeau giving YouTuber Rick Shiels a taste of his speed training for long driving. You can watch the entire video, but I particularly want to focus on the section I’ve linked here.
If you watch it, you’ll hear Bryson tell Rick that he likes to give a slight hesitation at the very top of the back swing in order to “feel” the power he’s built, and then he simply reverses it into the ball.
Whether or not he realizes it, Bryson just explained the stretch shortening cycle beautifully and gave us one of the most real world applications I’ve ever seen.
The stretch shortening cycle simply refers to your ability to recruit, store, and quickly reapply tension to a muscle in a reflexive manner. The kicker is, the force produced by a proper SSC movement is far more than you could create from scratch. This is measurable too, by the way.
So if you think back to the first half of this article, it should make even more sense why acceleration and how making yourself a better athlete (via your recruitment of the SSC) are far bigger drivers of club and ball speed.
How to Train Athleticism
StrengthI know I just spent the first half of this article explaining why strength alone won’t get you swinging the club faster, but the kicker here is that any qualified strength and conditioning coach will tell you that to be fast, you also need to be strong.
This is because speed works on the infrastructure that is your body. If you hope to transfer force and do it repeatedly, you need requisite strength, but also strength to stay healthy and mobile.
One of my early mentors, Charles Poliquin, often liked to say, “You can’t shoot a cannon out of a canoe.” I think the above sentiments are pretty well explained in that euphemism. Your body can’t be a noodle and without substance to actually produce force. Speed training is built on a stronger, healthy body.
However, strength alone won’t make you swing the golf club faster!
Speed TrainingI am sure that there are plenty of qualified golf pros and instructors who can easily list off ways of speed training with a club in your hand, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. Speed training in the gym is best expressed and done through plyometrics.
Plyometrics are a form of explosive training that usually involves jumping, landing, or doing a movement quickly that also has a rebounding effect that you must decelerate quickly.
Common plyometrics are jump training (like a box jump, or broad jump), bounding (a form of single leg jumping and landing), or, for the upper body, med ball throwing and tosses.
The body adapts to plyometric training by contracting muscles faster via the growth and production of more fast twitch muscle fibers. These fibers are the first to go as you age (a condition known as sarcopenia), so training them is a good way to help fight off the natural effects of aging and gaining some speed in the process.
Its important to note that the amount of these specific fast twitch muscle fibers seems somewhat genetic, but that does not mean you can’t train to be faster.
It’s also important to note that the physical performance of plyometrics can help you gain speed and apply to your swing speed, but the real lesson is in the feeling you get from plyometric adaptations and skill and relating it back to your swing. Think of these like drills to teach you how your body moves. You can then work on applying those lessons to your clubs.
MobilityI wrote an article on staying injury-free as a newer golfer, but the hip mobility sequence in that article is a good example of a solid practice to ensure you’re feeling limber and staying healthy. Don’t neglect the shoulders either, which is something that’s well covered here and on our YouTube channel.
Conclusion
This article serves as a primer and jumping off point for how you can apply these sports science concepts to yourself to get you swinging the club faster and finding your ball speeds and carry distances increase. However, plyometrics and training for athleticism are best done with a watchful eye. We recommend that you reach out to us and our team of trainers to help you with your journey here, as getting off on the right foot can set you up for a lifetime of success.
About the Author: Mark DiSalvo, CSCS
Mark is the founder and owner of DiSalvo Performance Training. He brings over a decade of experience training clients and athletes of all backgrounds and is the strength and conditioning coach to athletes of all levels and disciplines, from youth to professional and Olympic-level. He is an enthusiastic golfer and currently a purple belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, with over 10 years of experience grappling. You can read more about him here.
A graduate of Northeastern University, he’s an NSCA Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) and Sports Performance Expert. He’s also a Steve Maxwell Certified Kettlebell Instructor (Levels 1 & 2).
