Should you be strength training for golf?

If you're looking to add 10,20 or 30 yards to your drive, the answer is yes. 

Surprisingly, more hours at the driving range may be a waste of your time. While technique is important, most golfers will be surprised to hear that strength is often a major limiting factor when you tee off.

Increasingly, athletes from many different sports are turning to the weights room to take their sporting performance to the next level. Olympic swimmers have known for a while that as you get older, it’s time in the gym, not in the pool that is what counts.

You might have immaculate technique, but if your ability to produce force where it counts is poor, you’ll find you hit a glass ceiling with your training.

So as a golfer, what can you do to improve your strength on the course?

Well, strength training for golf has two focusses. You can develop whole-body strength so that you are using your legs and torso properly in the swing, and you can develop the explosive “snap” in the upper body and arms that translates to a fast club speed. Let’s start by considering two important concepts, strength and power.

Strength Training for Golf: Strength vs. Power

Strength is defined as your capacity to exert a force. The more force you can exert, the more weight you can lift. As a golfer however, what we’re really looking for is club head speed. The faster you can get the head of the club moving, the faster the ball will go when you strike it, and thus the further it will go before it lands.

A high level of strength won’t necessarily mean you can hit the ball faster. Being strong is likely to help, but it’s not the whole story. You also want to develop is the capacity to generate power. Power is your ability to generate a force explosively, i.e. in a short period of time.

So strength training for golf actually has two focuses. We aim to develop core strength in the hips, glutes and abdominal core. This increases stabilisation in the golf swing and increases the force transmission from the lower to upper body.

The second goal is to develop power in the swing – i.e. to increase the speed at which you can move the golf club through the air.

So, which bodyparts do you need to train, and how?

Strength Training for Golf: The Legs

The best leg weight lifting exercises not only work the muscles of your thighs, but work your whole body in unison, including your hips and abdominal core.

By far the best choice in this respect is the barbell squat. If you do one exercise in the gym, it should be this one.

After a few weeks of barbell squats you will have vastly improved your leg, hip and ab strength. This means more force transmitted from your lower to upper body on the driving range and fairway – which means greater swing speed.

Strength Training for Golf: The Upper Body

The golf swing motion is a complex one. The basic action is that of bringing the club down, and across your body, then up and away. If we consider what each arm is doing, we can see which major muscles are involved, and thus which muscles to train.

The leading arm is pulled down and across your body by the muscles of your upper back – primarily by the latissimus dorsi. That’s the large “wingspan” muscle found on your back, covering your shoulder blade.

The second arm is brought down and across your body, but it’s being pulled in front rather than behind. The primary muscle involved is your pectoral, i.e. your chest. The lats are also involved to a lesser extent.

The “up and away” portion of the swing is driven again by your upper back for your leading arm, and by the shoulder muscle of the following arm.

So the upper-body motion is driven by your lats, pectorals and shoulders. These are the important muscles to train for that explosiveness in the swing.

The absolute best exercise you can do for your upper back is the pull up. It hits the lats like no other. If you aren’t strong enough to do a pull up, then other options are available to you.

I’d recommend that you read the pull up article and learn about how you can build your strength up to do pull ups, although if you prefer, you can do lat pulldowns. However these aren’t nearly as good at building strength and power in the upper body.

For the chest and shoulders, the barbell bench press is the obvious choice. This is a multi-joint compound exercise that targets the pectorals, deltoids and triceps.

Strength Training for Golf: The Workout

Remember, our goal is strength in the lower body and power in the upper body.

To this end, the squat should be performed for 6-10 reps at a medium pace. The goal is to add some weight every workout to realise strength gains in the long term. Read about squat technique here.

The pullup and bench press, however, should be trained slightly differently for optimal results. Since you’re training your upper body for explosiveness, the idea isn’t to be lifting extremely heavy weights slowly.

To develop power in the weights room, you should aim to lift a moderate weight as quickly as possible. Something like 50% of your 1-rep max is ideal. Perform a couple of warm-ups, then aim to go quickly on your working weight, for 3 sets of 8-10 reps.

If you can’t go particularly quickly on pull ups, or if you can’t do enough, then the lat pulldown is a decent alternative. It’s definitely worth building up to pull ups however.

If you engage in strength training for golf twice a week, within a month you’ll notice improvements, and within 8-10 weeks you will have significantly increased your capacity for strength and power in the golf swing. As a result, you’ll rotate your hips more quickly, and snap the golf club with more explosiveness, adding yards to your drive.



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