Sport-specific Training

[Jordan Feigenbaum]

Thanks Jordan. Have you tried swing sticks yourself?

I have them, but I don't use them personally. My swing speed w a 45.5" driver ranges between 118-125 ish depending on the day and how hard I'm going at it. Highest I've ever seen on trackman is 129, so I'm working on other things at the moment.

Do you think strength training would have an effect on things like fatigue as the swinging the club is less stressful to someone trained? This makes sense to me in theory but then I know some 70+ year old, overweight, undertrained guys who would happily play 36 holes every day, a feat I couldn't manage at half their age.

I think that while specific data on this topic is sparse, the data from other sports suggests that improving strength and conditioning aid with fatigue, club head speed (max and sustained values), injury risk reduction, etc. I also think there's obviously golf-specific and environmental adaptations that cannot really be trained in the gym.

In any case, I hope it warms up soon for you!

[Torsten]

See Loenneke et al 2019 for more here. That said, I do think the totality of the book is useful for sports-specific training applications.

Wow, that was almost a grotesque read .

The notion that muscle growth is neither necessary nor sufficient for exercise induced strength gains seems intuitively correct and is something I know all too well from my own experience. But that it might not even be contributory is too much to wrap my head around and as a physicist who obtained a Ph.D. in the field of theoretical nuclear physics I have been able to wrap my head around very strange concepts before, e.g. like that of a broken symmetry leading to a massless particle which then lends masses to a certain set of elementary particle who otherwise should me massless.

So, if one day the fact that exercise induced hypertrophy does not contribute to exercise induced strength will be scientifically as well established as the Higgs-mechanism I will follow our nation’s favorite bodybuilder’s advice:

“... Bodybuilding is a sport you have to learn (…) There is no science crap (…) There is only training, hard work and muscle-mind connection [Markus Rühl, translated from German]

Just kidding , thanks for the hint!

[Jordan Feigenbaum]

It may be that hypertrophy is a natural consequence of the training that produces strength gains in most, but not all, real-world scenarios. Or it may be that the relationship is stronger than what is shown by the existing evidence. Neither of these things may be true as well. In any case, it is interesting to think about!