- Hello and welcome everybody.
If you've clicked on this video,
it means you're asking me
the one question I hear more than any other.
How is it that I can increase my club head speed for golf?
Well, before we jump into that,
I wanna let you know that I'm the Digital Golf Doc.
I'm a researcher, educator, licensed physical therapist,
and strength and performance coach,
and I spend all my time
helping golfers optimize their performance
and avoid getting injury.
So although there are a lot of ways
to increase your club head speed,
getting fitted for new clubs, taking lessons,
working on technique,
or just getting stronger and more mobile,
I particularly focus on one of those,
and that's that strength and mobility spectrum.
What's really cool
is we actually have research that tells us
how amateurs generate club head speed.
You did hear that correctly.
There are literally people out there
whose job is to conduct research on making golfers better.
And the first and foremost person
that comes to my mind with that is one Sasho MacKenzie.
He performed a research study
and it found that golfers developed speed
in two primary ways.
I'm gonna teach you both of those ways
so you can implement 'em into your golf game and practice.
The first way to increase club head speed
is to increase your hand path.
Hand path is the distance from your hands
at the top of the backswing to the golf ball.
You could take a picture and draw a straight line,
and that's your hand path.
So you can think of it like a runway,
and the longer that is,
the more speed you can develop.
And the reason is acceleration.
So to use an analogy, take a car,
and I'm gonna tell you what I need you to do
is to put that car at maximum speed.
And the two options for you are
to use a 50-yard track or runway
or a hundred yard runway
and whatever the top speed is, that's the option that wins.
I'm very confident
you're gonna say the hundred yard runway
because it gives you twice as much time
to accelerate to your maximum speed.
And when this is simplified to a physics equation,
your golf swing is no different.
Increase hand path, longer time to generate speed,
higher club head speed.
And again, that was shown in an official research study
by a bio-mechanist named Sasho MacKenzie.
The second thing this research study found
about increasing club head speed
was the amount of force that you pulled down
on the club with.
So essentially how much force can you exert
throughout your entire body
to yank that club down toward the ball?
Now I know some of you may think
that all you need to do now is go out
and focus on ripping your hands down as fast as possible
and you're gonna increase your club head speed.
While that may be true,
if you're able to keep all parameters equal,
it doesn't mean you neglect the rest of your body.
In fact, the best way to generate club head speed
is really through how far,
how hard your legs push into the ground.
So when you drive into the ground
and create that rotation at your hips,
that actually changes the force
of which you pull your arms down.
So if you can time and sequence these things correctly
to drive from your hips, use your abdominals,
the rest of your core muscles,
and the muscles of your arm to yank down,
that's how you're gonna get maximum force
pulled through the club and maximum club head speed.
After covering these two things with golfers,
they usually look at me and say,
what the heck am I supposed to do with that?
How can I apply this
and actually increase my club head speed?
Which is why I'm gonna end this video
by showing you five different tests you can do
to find out if you're limiting your maximum club head speed
through a lack of mobility to get in the position,
or a lack of force production to pull down
as hard as you need to.
About this time into the explanation,
I start getting looks and questions like,
okay, great information, but what should I do with it?
And I'm glad you asked, because I wanna end this video
by showing you five tests you can do
to find out if you're limiting your club head speed
through one of these two factors.
Some of these tests will be,
do you have enough mobility to get in a position
of a nice long runway or hand path,
and the other test you're gonna look at,
do you have enough strength
to pull down with a lot of force
once you've reached that position?
So I'm gonna walk you through one of those.
I want you to stick with the details.
You should be able to test these all at home.
Some of 'em might be easier with a partner
but as soon as you find that you have a certain deficit,
you wanna work on that.
and then, once you improve it,
your ability to increase club head speed is gonna go up.
This stuff works.
I cannot emphasize enough, this stuff works.
I've had division one golfers, professional golfers,
high schools, amateurs just playing for fun
implement exercises to target these deficits
and see their club head speed higher after a week or two.
So let's jump into these tests,
and then once you know what your deficits are,
check out some of my other videos,
because I teach you how to fix them.
Test number one is gonna be for lower body strength.
It's very important in the golf swing
that you can create ground reaction force
by pushing off the ground
and leverage that to turn it
into rotational velocity or speed.
I have a simple test for this that anyone can do at home
with either no or minimal equipment.
It's simply gonna be a split squat isometric hold.
To perform this test, you're gonna put one foot out front
and one foot behind.
You wanna squat down
until your thigh is parallel to the ground.
I like to set something on there
like a book or a weight to confirm that it's parallel,
because if I come up too high, it'll slide off.
We wanna maintain that parallel position for 20 seconds.
That's a good amount of leg strength.
30 seconds, you're doing great
and you clear this with flying colors.
Now the test can be hard.
You can really struggle to get to 20 seconds,
but as long as you can cross off
that you're able to complete it,
then you can give yourself a passing score for that test.
Again, this is the split squat for leg strength
that we can apply during the golf swing.
The second test I'll give golfers
to see if they have ability to get into the right positions
is multi-segmental rotation.
Instead of trying to tease out the difference
between rotation at the hips, the back and the shoulders,
which definitely has a time and place,
I'm gonna combine those all together,
'cause it gives me a very quick look
if the athlete has what I need to work with
to complete that swing
or whether we need to dig deeper into it.
For multi-segmental rotation
you're gonna put your feet together.
I like to take a club
and put it on my shoulders to use as a visual,
and then I'm gonna rotate as far as I can
without my feet coming off the ground.
The goal here is to achieve 90 total degrees of rotation.
So when we're talking about the backswing
and getting into our top position,
we're looking at every professional golfer
having much more than 90 degrees.
So even amateurs that wanna maximize their potential
should be able to get to 90 degrees.
This is a great one to film yourself,
especially if you have the visual aid,
because you'll be able to see
if that gets all the way around to 90.
if you're short, or maybe you're way beyond.
Again, this is the multi-segmental rotation test
to see if you have enough rotation
to get to the top of the golf swing.
The third test we're gonna complete is for a wrist hinge.
If you're a golfer,
I don't have to spend a long time telling you,
because you probably already know,
that the golf swing requires a certain amount
of wrist hinge-ability to create lag in the club
and maximize club head speed.
I have a very simple test for this.
You're gonna take a seven iron,
because it's gonna have the type of line angle we need,
and you're gonna set the club on the ground
so this flat surface is flat on the ground.
So we don't want it tilted one way or the other.
And you're gonna see some type of natural angle
that the shaft sits.
You're simply gonna place your hand on the club,
and you're gonna hinge up without moving anything else,
so just the wrist joint.
You don't wanna move your shoulder or your elbow.
We wanna isolate the movement to the wrist.
And as long as when we isolate this movement,
we can get the shaft to reach parallel to the ground,
we clear that test and we likely have all the wrist mobility
that's needed to perform a proper wrist hinge.
Don't forget, you do wanna complete this
on both sides of your body
as they are both required to hinge in the golf swing.
The next test we wanna complete
to see if have the ability
to move through the golf swing correctly
is for shoulder mobility,
specifically shoulder external rotation.
When we go to the top of the backswing
this is called shoulder external rotation.
It's a very simple test.
All you have to do is stand straight up and down,
bring your arm out to the side,
so that your elbow's at the same height as your shoulder,
and you're gonna rotate back,
and we're looking for the forearm
to become perpendicular to the ground.
If we are short, we probably have difficulty
getting to the very top of the golf backswing.
If we have excess, that just means
we have a little bit more room to play with,
but it does mean we need to make sure
that we have the shoulder stability
to control that extra range of motion
so we don't end up with an injury from that.
The fifth and final test is for core strength and stability.
This is far and away the area I get the most questions about
in my profession when I'm working with golfers.
So I'd make sure to pay attention here.
What we want to do is see the strength of our abs
and our oblique muscles.
So what we're gonna do is
we're gonna set up in a traditional plank position.
We'll put our forearms down.
We wanna make sure our elbow is directly under our shoulder.
And then we're gonna lift our hips off the ground,
and you want a relatively straight line
down your entire body.
If your hips dip, I would consider that a failure.
If your hips get too high,
I would also consider that a failure of the test.
You wanna maintain right in this position
with a good ab and glute contraction for 30 seconds.
If you're unable to maintain that position,
it makes it really hard to complete the golf swing
and compress your spine at the finish.
You watch slow motion golf swings,
what you'll see is this position at impact,
and that spine is here supported,
ready to create power and take the impact.
And that's why it's so important
to make sure we have optimal core strength and stability.
That's gonna do it for my five favorite quick easy tests
to see if you have the physical capabilities
to make the golf swing you need to make.
If you passed all these tests, awesome, you're doing great
and you can most likely spend most of your time
focused on technique, getting a little bit stronger,
and dialing other parts of your game.
If you missed even one of these tests,
I really suggest you figure out how to address a deficiency.
Because the golf swing is such a full body movement
and requires every segment start to finish,
if you have a deficit in one area,
it often carries over into other areas.
Where you make an adjustment
because you lack shoulder mobility, for example,
and that adjustment might result in back pain
and might result in inconsistent swing.
Might result in a whole lot of things you don't want.
So I really suggest you iron out the deficiencies
as fast as you can.
Now on my YouTube page at the Digital Golf Doc,
I have tons of exercises and videos
for every one of the deficiencies I covered.
So feel free to take a look there
as you look for resources to improve your golf game.
If you have any questions
please leave them in the comments below this video.
You can also feel free to email me questions,
or if you want me to take a look
at your assessment on video,
I can help point out some things you might be missing.
If you wanna do that,
just send me an email at digital golf doc at gmail.com.
I thank you for spending some time with me today,
and I hope you have your best golf season yet.
Thanks.
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