Brooks Koepka just became the first golfer to win back to back U.S. Opens since Curtis Strange pulled off the feat in 1989.
You may notice that Brooks is pretty buff. He spends a good bit of time in the gym, and I’m not talking about spending that time on the Stair Master. He pumps some serious iron.
And, he even does it BEFORE he heads out to play. Check out this article showing him in the gym, doing bench press, before he won the U.S. Open last year.
Koepka has been doing this for a while though, and so has Dustin Johnson. In fact, they both work with golf fitness guru Joey Diovisalvi. Koepka was featured in Mens Health magazine back in 2015.
In other words, neither golfer has seriously changed their body like Tiger Woods did over a decade ago, and like Rory McIlroy did in more recent years.
DJ and Brooks are slightly more buff than they were, but not enormously so.
Therein lies my general point about weight training for golfers.
Golf is a game that requires excellent rhythm and timing. When a player loses their rhythm, they start to hit poor shots.
This happens to most tour players when they get near the top of the leaderboard heading into the final round. They get tense, lose their rhythm, and generally do not play as well.
To overcome that, they simply need to keep putting themselves in position, unless they are just born winners like Tiger Woods.
So, one the worst things a golfer can do is change their bodies significantly in the off season. Whether it is losing weight or adding 20 pounds of muscle (or both), the end result is often a loss of rhythm and timing.
A few years ago, prior to the 2014 season, Darren Clarke lost a significant amount of weight through diet and a new fitness regimen. He’d been on a bit of a party binge for several years after winning the Open Championship in 2011.
He played 15 events on the PGA Tour in 2014 and made only five cuts. His best finish on the European tour was a T18. In 2015 he played six events on the PGA Tour and only made one cut. On the European Tour, he played 20 events and made 12 cuts with a high finish of T15.
Clarke, now 49, has essentially given up on playing competitively at the highest level, and has since gained all his weight back and then some.
I remember a few years back Swedish golfer Carl Pettersson lost a good bit of weight in the off season and he struggled with his game.
In 2008 he had one of his best years, and then decided to lose some weight, dropping 30 pounds in the offseason. 2009 was then one of his worst years on tour.
So, Pettersson went back to his old ways, gained back the weight he lost and then some, and was back in the winner’s circle in 2010.
I would venture to say that Rory McIlroy is not the player he once was. McIlroy’s last major win occurred in 2014. He still played fairly well through 2015, but he has just one victory in the last two years.
It seems that his beautiful rhythm is more elusive, and he has struggled quite a bit with the putter.
With all this in mind, a golfer who wants to continue to improve their game should NOT look to the weight room as the answer.
Improving overall fitness is an excellent idea, but it should be done gradually with a longer term view. Weight training may allow you to hit the ball further, and allow you to be more durable, but it must be combined with sufficient mobility and flexibility training.
Also, massive gains in strength or weight loss in a short period of time WILL disrupt your rhythm and timing. It may also have a negative impact on your touch and feel for the short shots and putting.
Therefore, it’s best to actually get started within any new fitness routine during the golf season.
Some soreness and tightness will naturally occur any time you undertake a new strength training regimen, or any fitness routine where you are training differently than you have before.
However, that will go away fairly quickly, and your rhythm, timing, touch and feel should return.
Then, it is just a matter of sticking with the routine and work toward making incremental gains in your fitness, whether that involves weight loss, increased strength, or both.
Just my two cents. Now get to work!
