If you're trying to gain speed, we're going to cover some really good topics today. We're talking speed gains today. Things like how do you speed sticks? What is the ideal speed training session look like? What are the key determining factors of if you have speed or not? And what are some, you know, speed journeys that you might expect to be going through? I'm going to share some of what I've been learning and we have an awesome guest, doctor Alex Ehlert today.
He is spent a long time researching and looking at speed, fit, fitness, the body, how all these correlate together. We had a great conversation. He is awesome to follow on Instagram is always pulling out these interesting insights and ideas that are research back data back. So love to follow that. Yeah, let's get let's get right into it. Let's let's talk about speed. OK, so well, I sent over the a video and kind of have told you a little bit about my speed
journey. So I guess like what things have I left on the table that I could try or what do you think are like some of what you've been seeing with with distance gains that that you would want to ask or learn about to see if for maxing it out? Yeah, First off, there's a lot I liked in there. So you kind of brought up a lot of the ways that you kind of explore different strategies and you're using feedback to kind of drive that prosper.
Designing sessions where the feedbacks help pushing you in the direction you want is such a powerful tool when it comes to speed training. I don't think many people appreciate how much of a skill it is. It's not just a matter of you can't just out effort it
completely. There's a degree if you have to learn how to coordinate at faster speeds than you're used to and build the skill of using your body efficiently and reaching that point of being slightly uncomfortable, but learning how to coordinate over time, there's this kind of like skillful expression of what you have.
I think you did a really good job of kind of dialing that in of I kind of view it as a guided exploration of movement in a way when you're talking about these kind of speed training sessions. But it may also explain why even though you weren't training really frequently, you were still making gains because just you're giving yourself opportunities to learn what works for you, learn ways that kind of help you move that needle in the right direction from a speed perspective.
But then you even acknowledge some of the maybe potential limitations in your video of you weren't really focused on the fitness side quite as much. You didn't dip as much into the kind of consistent speed training sessions where you're really trying to maximize everything with kind of consistent exposure to that high speed.
And then some of the tools like speed sticks, which I think are not the only way to gain speed, but in my opinion can be a very useful tool, both from like a technical standpoint, but also just a way of forcing you to have to move faster than you're used to and some of the kind of processes that come along with
that. So yeah, I think there's definitely a few opportunities and the fact that you were able to get to 180 plus with with kind of the bare minimum of, hey, I've got a driver and I've got some feedback and let's get after it. Like that's obviously a really good start, but excited to keep tabs on the the 190 mile per hour. Well, I, OK, I want to get to speed sticks. I want to get to some of your
research recommendations. But I guess maybe just for context, I'd be curious, like is anything come to mind when I ask, like what's the best story or like case study you've had of someone that you have seen gain speed? Does anything come to mind of like, hey, this person started here, they did this, this and this, and then two years later they got to this or anything. Does anything come to mind? Yeah, there's a few I'd save myself as a really interesting
case study to start with. So for some kind of context, I was a Division One college golfer, a kind of a failed aspiring tour pro. Wanted to turn professional and play 1. Compete for a living. Realized pretty quickly that my game wasn't there so decide grad school is a better route and kind of fell in love with learning about how high performers do what they do. So went on to kind of the exercise Physiology piece first thinking I'll learn about kind of the fitness side.
And then over the years it's kind of expanded a bit to some of the bio mechanics and using data and technology to help that process. But I essentially started working out a lot just as kind of an experiment to see I'm learning all these things after I can stop competing and through a lot of trial and error and kind of playing around with different strategies. First, from kind of a gym based perspective, I did slowly gain probably about 8 to 10 miles an
hour of speed. I didn't do a whole lot of kind of formal speed training in the way I would now, but there were some I'm going to go out and swing really hard once in a while and see where I'm at. Then I essentially just burnt out from golf and I've been doing a lot of research working with golfers. I'm still in the golf space for the last 10-12 years or so, but played and practiced very little
myself. And it was probably the last year when I kind of got the bug to see like, I wonder what my speeds AT and I was swinging something like 1/13, 1:14, but had the physical tools in place where I'd been working out consistently. I knew a lot about what my swing needed to look like to swing faster just from studying the bio mechanics and occasionally using myself as kind of a example of how I'd analyze a golf swing.
And so within about 3-4 months of kind of couple times a week, some high effort work for speed sticks, some more kind of technical work, I was able to gain about 12 to 14 miles an hour swing speed probably over a winter, so November to January type deal. And then it did slow down from there. But I was, I'm pretty consistently swinging the 1:20 to high one Tees now when even at college I was probably a Max out at about 1:11, 1/12.
So that's probably a less common example of someone that completely took a break from the game, built the physical tools, but then came back to it and applied that to as kind of a fresh slate. But more recently, what I see a lot of is especially kind of golfers that are prioritized, maybe accuracy and distance are very short game specialists that have never really swung fast before.
They'll have this really quick initial gain of four 5-6 miles an hour within even a couple sessions because for the first time ever, they allow themselves to take some swings where the goal is just focused on making that speed number go up and not having to worry about also making solid contact and where is the ball going to go. And so they go from this kind of constrained, maybe very simple and stable swing pattern to suddenly allowing themselves to use the ground a little
differently and rotate a little more and a little faster. And then they kind of surprise themselves when the number jumps up within a few seconds sessions and take some of that and apply it to their own game. So even relatively good golfers, former college players, a few many tour guys that you know would start at 1:10 and we'd get them up to 115 fairly quickly. They're going to plateau from there. It doesn't continue to go up, but there is.
It is fun to see someone that's never really tried to move in a way like that where they kind of glass shattering moment of I could swing faster if I just leveraged bio mechanics a little more efficiently. Yeah, no, I think that most of us grew up without ever trying to swing hard. And so there are immediate gains you can pick up just by trying to do that. But then you're right, that plateau comes and then you have to work through that.
And I'm guessing that's where a lot of your research is, is come into play of like, how do we breakthrough plateaus that people run into? And so maybe walk through some of your, you've got some crazy diagrams going that I've seen on your Instagram. You've got some really good, really good articles and and your newsletter kind of on speed and stuff that you're doing there. So what path do you want to take us here when?
I. Talk. Talk to those folks who have hit plateaus because I know in these days it feels like a lot of people have at least tried to gain speed. Yeah, I think recently, so for a long time, I've always been kind of frustrated by, it's not just golf, but a lot of sports, a lot of areas becomes very siloed over time where you kind of have your fitness specialists, you have your swing specialists, and that's always going to be the
case. It's hard to be an expert in everything at once, but I've always kind of gravitated towards trying to how do we bring these pieces together? And I have kind of specialties in certain areas. I'm a certified strength coach. I've done a lot of research in the strength and conditioning area. But I realized very quickly that to really maximize performance or even work with a coach together with a player, I need to be able to kind of understand their perspective a bit.
So that was kind of when I became interested in speed, I immediately tried to kind of think about where do all these pieces fit together? And some of it stems from Sasha Mckenzie's work as well with he had that paper a few years ago with like energy transfer to the swing with amateur golfers. And I started creating kind of my own framework of, of speed
from there. But this idea of essentially to swing faster, you need to do one of a few things and it's you need to perform more work on the club in a way that's going to accelerate it into the ball with with higher speed. And like from his research, he took it from kind of a work energy perspective of essentially it comes down to either producing more force or torque to the club during the downswing in a useful way, usually along the hand path. That's kind of how he describes it.
Or you need to create more time or distance to produce that force. And so that could be creating a bigger hand path or rotating more, giving yourself more opportunity to apply more total force or do more work on the club during that downswing. And So what ends up happening is there's a few ways you can go about attacking that with the most direct way being improving your technique.
And so that initial gain a lot of the time is when you have people that have never swung fast before, they start to allow themselves to explore different ways of moving. And you you'll naturally, if you focus all of your efforts on just making the speed go up and especially if you remove the ball or use something like a foam ball. Like I know Luke Benoit's been on here kind of shows or your videos before, but I kind of took that idea from him.
For speed training specifically, you'll notice people start to kind of try to use the ground move a little differently. And then that feedback kind of allows you to find the movement patterns that work. So a lot of people, especially when they're starting at a low baseline, have never swung fast before. They'll have that initial spike within the first few weeks and that's very exciting. But the reality is there's only so far you can go with those
quick games. From there, it's going to be this more subtle refinements of your technique to get better at applying forces to the club and moving your body in a way that's going to be biomechanically efficient. And then there's also going to be the slow, more progressive adaptations to the body if you approach it from a physical side. And it's kind of then this more very subtle improvements. And then you'll have these occasional breakthroughs when it all comes together.
So it becomes much more of a very slow nonlinear up and down, and then maybe breakthrough for a few miles an hour and then plateau again. What I tell people is if you understand where and why that happens, then you can expect it and you're not going to get discouraged when you have this initial response and then you're going to plateau. But it's all part of the process as you're kind of gradually building out the pieces to make that next jump.
Yeah, So I love you said we broke it down really simply. There's two ways that you're going to swing faster is 1. You can apply more force over a longer period of time. I think I got that right. So that that just means like that longer backswing kind of queue, right? Like if that's that's why these long drive guys are really large and their hands are super high, right? And just like way up there and as far back as they can go.
And then the other thing if you want to hit it swing faster is you have to apply more force in the swing, right. I think most people should start with trying to create a longer hand path to be able to apply more force. Right. Like that's such low hanging fruit for most people. Yeah, absolutely. And the reality is a lot of the kind of cues or feels that a lot of people kind of use to swing faster will hit one, if not both of those pieces in different ways.
So like the fast and dynamic backswing occasionally will allow people to get kind of that bigger hand path, but it's also going to have this secondary advantage of basically allowing the muscles to be more active as you're kind of changing direction at the top. So it's very similar. I use the example of vertical jumps.
One of the reasons you jump higher when you allow yourself to squat down first, especially kind of a quick transition out of the bottom, is that by forcing yourself to have to break out of the bottom to kind of decelerate before you re accelerate up, your muscles have to start activating sooner. And it kind of takes some of the slack at perhaps those kind of contractile machinery so that as soon as you're ready to go back up, they're already kind of firing.
The second piece on top of that is you have that kind of stretch shortening cycle, which a lot of people probably heard about, But this idea if you're going to have this kind of rapid stretch and store elastic energy, and if you use that properly and you have the right kind of combination of physical tools in place, you can use that to actually produce more force.
So something as simple as like learning how to swing faster, as long as you're able to sequence it efficiently, which is where some of that skill learning kind of comes into place. And there's going to be a bit of a no one-size-fits-all type solution that'll work better for some people than others. You can actually hit kind of both of those pieces very quickly and that's usually one of the kind of early cues a lot of people will find successful in those kind of first few weeks. Got it.
OK, we're we're talking plateaus. I'm going to share my screen with you. And this is my spreadsheet that I have of the last started in May of 2024, right. So I had already I guess been trying. I'd already seen my probably biggest jump when I first tried to swing harder, right.
So this is pretty much all plateau land, but over the course of, you know, a year I went from my top being, you know, kind of one 22174 kind of stayed kind of the club head speed stayed pretty similar, but I was able to probably organize my body a little bit better and and get better contact right over over time. And then this year, now that I, I went and worked with Colby 2 yay. And he kind of like I was like, I, I was just pretty, I had
never done anything. I not a not a gym guy, not of a workout guy. And and so he kind of opened the eyes of like, Oh yeah, you just like a really weak. So I was like, oh, OK. And so that has helped and it was able to get to, you know, like mid 1 upper one 20s now. Yeah, the other day we did a video, actually this was with because I hurt my knees. So I was with the PT buddy and was in his garage and we were working got up to 129 was the
highest club at speed, right? So now it's it feels like this is just this is a grind at this point, right? Is that, is that accurate in what you've seen And like what you've researched is like it's just, is this just work from here on out? Just a lot of hard work. Yeah, so a lot of it is also trying to tease out like you're you're kind of slowly teasing it out just through kind of natural exploration and talking with people. But what is kind of the next adaptation you need to make the
next jump? So early on it could be those kind of low hanging fruit from a technical standpoint where you're just you have the, you know, you're not using the physical tools you already have very efficiently. And so early on, it looks like you'd kind of probably maybe had a spike in club head speed early on, just which naturally kind of happens when you start to try to swim faster.
And it looks like for a while it was actually like the thing you needed was to learn how to swing fast, but also strike the ball fairly well. So that's where that kind of translation of ball speed comes up. And after you kind of get those low hanging fruit, it's essentially you can continue to try to refine and find those little margins from a technical perspective. And there are ways you could continue to kind of push the
lever little bits at a time. But if the low hanging fruit are gone and you're pretty close to like, hey, I've gotten all I can get out of my existing body, then I'm upgrading kind of the engine size and allowing, I kind of refer to the physical side as more indirect way of gaining speed, but it gives you more
opportunities. So if you have a mobility limitation, just stretching or just improve and that's not going to necessarily guarantee that your club head speeds going to spike up. But what it does is it gives you more options that you can then apply to your swing. So if you couldn't rotate before and you get a little more mobile and a little more flexible, you then have more kind of movement opportunities or movement strategies at your disposal that
you can play around with. Maybe I can get a little more of that hand path length now and I have to go back and practice that. What we'll see a lot of the time is when someone goes from fairly weak on the force side and they add a little bit of that extra force. That can usually be a pretty quick transfer of a few mph because you just basically could use the same movement fuel or feels or cues, but you just have a little more force capacity at
your disposal. So you can be a little more aggressive pushing off the ground. You can rotate or kind of produce force through the upper body and through the chain a bit better. What I'll see a lot of people is kind of underappreciated piece of the swing, if you're swinging really fast is going to be the transfer of momentum or energy through the trunk. And if you're really weak, that can be a really kind of energy leak for a lot of people is even if they're pushing into the
ground with a lot of force. If you're not getting that momentum up to the club very efficiently, then you may be losing a few mph. But as soon as someone gets stronger kind of throughout the muscles, the hips, the trunk, the upper extremity, then that kind of whole kinetic chain can
get a bit more efficient. So from there it's then, you know, gaining you can start to maximize kind of the speed related adaptations of certain muscles that have to act at really high speeds during the swing. So a lot of the upper extremity tends to have to produce force really quickly and move very quickly while kind of continuing to build out the lower supports what you're trying to do from a technical perspectives. Well, you, you nailed it.
That is so when I was with Mark Blackburn, we we were on the force plate and so I was able to apply as like 210% or something of vertical force. It was too late, right. So it never got to the the club. So that doesn't really matter. And then we're doing the, you know, some of the TPI test with the Med ball. You know, just I'm below was below average on the lay down, the lay down and you get up and, you know, Chuck it over your head one.
So like your spot on there. That is like a very accurate thing. And I'm guessing I'm pretty common in that like I, I would, I would assume that they're probably a lot of people that have that same kind of thing going on. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean it's very common, especially in the golf space. Well, not even necessarily just in the golf space, but even the people that have a bit of training experience, they're not always training in a performance related way.
Like maybe they kind of grab a program and it's kind of your bodybuilder inspired, high volume type physique related type training. And the reality is when someone first starts doing any sort of fitness, like the easiest and biggest gains you can make from a fitness and health perspective is going from doing nothing to doing something. So most general programs will work pretty well for a while.
Once you're trying to really maximize kind of your performance potential from like a swing speed perspective, then it's time to start thinking about how the body performs, not just kind of your general physique related type training. And a lot of people don't train in a way that's really efficient for kind of producing high levels of force, for one, but then definitely learning to transfer energy through the body. And that's essentially.
What the golf swing is, is you can get a lot of speed out of a relatively small body if you're really good at transferring energy through the system. But then when you combine that with a big engine too, that's when you're going to have a very large ceiling or really high ceiling for speed when you combine it with good technique. What, what are some of those things that you've seen have a big correlation from a fitness
perspective to speed then? Yeah. So from a lot of the research we've done both kind of formal academic research, but then I've just tested a lot of golfers over the years and continue to do so with some of kind of my current jobs. The by far the strongest correlation from a physical perspective is what we call vertical jump impulse. And impulse essentially is like the total amount of force you produce over a given amount of
time. So going back to kind of the mechanics of swing speed, Sasha kind of went from like a work energy perspective of how much work you can form during the downswing, which is basically force over a given amount of distance. You can look at it in a very similar way with impulsive momentum of like I'm trying to build my momentum into the club, and that's dependent on how much force I produced basically during the time of the
downswing. So it's a similar concept, slightly different mechanical terms, but essentially it's how much vertical force you can produce during this kind of movement jump during specific phases of it. There's probably a couple of reasons for that being a really strong correlation. One, I mean, we know the lower body plays a really important role where ground reaction force is, is very important in terms of being able to build up and transfer that momentum through the body gives you
opportunities. If you're really powerful from a lower body perspective, as long as you can time it up correctly, you have the raw capacity of putting force into the ground if you need to. The second piece is probably pretty simple that people that are pretty athletic and pretty good across the board tend to also be good at jumping. So it's usually a pretty easy process Oxy if just overall athleticism in my opinion, but there are other are other
pieces. So we've seen that upper body we call like ballistic strength or thinking less so the maximum weight you can lift, but kind of fast application of force from the upper body tends to correlate really well. So your medicine ball throws like you mentioned before, tend to be pretty easy field based tests of this. And some of the labs will use something like force plates.
So we'll have like an isometric bench press or a a test of how fast you can apply force into a force play for example is kind of a measure of this like fast dynamic force or or this ballistic capabilities of the upper body. So those tend to be really good ones where pretty predictive of how much of an engine you have for kind of producing speed
within the swing. And then kind of the secondary factors will be some of the kind of mobility pieces of do you have an obvious mobility limitation of if you're incredibly immobile in the trunk and hips, then there can be some low hanging fruit there as well. Tell me about the SO the vertical vertical jump impulse. What was the?
Yeah. So it's usually a counter movement jump, which is essentially what most people think of as your traditional vertical jump that we usually do hands on the hips to just kind of isolate the lower body specifically. So jump height for a long time is used as kind of the primary. It's the easiest kind of lower body power metric if you can kind of just about everyone has probably done a vertical jump test at some point, especially if they participate in any sort of sport.
The only issue, and it's that it by itself is a good predictor of kind of club head speed potential. The only down side of it is that it is biased against heavier golfers where being a bit bigger and especially if you're big and strong can actually have advantages within the golf swing because it's a sport where you're not actually having to like displace yourself through the air quite as much as you would if you're jumping or sprinting in another sport.
There's advantages to being able to kind of maintain contact with the ground. So it's more about the total force you're putting into the ground, less so than how much you get your body to explode off the ground. So impulse is essentially just a measure of like if you think about basically from the bottom of the squat during a vertical jump until you leave the ground or just measuring the total amount of force you put into the ground during that time.
And it sounds fancy, but it's it's essentially just how much force did you put into the ground to make yourself go up? And we can actually estimate it really accurately if even if you don't have a force plate, I'll actually just measure jump height if I don't have a force plate.
And if you know the person's body mass, so how much they weigh in kilograms, there's actually equations to really accurately estimate how much force they would have had to put that into the ground to make themselves go that high off the ground. It sounds like a fancy metric. It's essentially just jump height, taking into account how heavy you weigh. Got it. OK, so V1 just sent me over pressure plate and I was dinking around with it and they have a they have a jump height test.
So let's say I go measure myself and the jump and I'll I'll have to, I'll have to message you what it was. And you tell me if that's good or bad. But like, let's say somebody's like, oh man, this, this is not good. I need to, this is a problem for me. I can tell it's under where, you know, my average is just give us the minute spiel on like how, how would you help someone improve that? Can they improve that? Yeah. So generally, yeah, you absolutely can't improve it for
one. But generally, if kind of that vertical impulse or whatever you want to call it, your kind of jump performance test is low, or especially if you do a couple other tests and it seems like they're pretty low on the force side across the board. The generally the first thing we'll try to figure out is if it's kind of a strength or kind of peak force issue, or is it that they have some strength, but they're not good at expressing it quickly. So that'll usually kind of be the follow up.
In a lot of cases, if it's someone that doesn't have much training experience, it's usually going to be starting with building up kind of strength, their ability to produce a lot of force quickly or a lot of force first. So think of it building up the engine or the foundation. And the reason for that is when you get stronger, there's a lot of things that happen that generally set the stage for future kind of speed related gains down the road.
So it's generally better to kind of build up that foundation of just being able to produce force in the 1st place before you try to learn how to use force really, really quickly. The second piece is a lot of the like strength training, the type of training that you use for building up strength also tends to come with some beneficial things from like injury and general well-being standpoint of that kind of higher force output will be beneficial for kind of adapting some of the connective
tissues. And the number one thing we can do for someone from a fitness perspective, if you're working with a competitive golfer, is making it so that they can tolerate the demands their sport more often and be able to practice and play as much as they want to play without having to worry quite as much about injury. So that strength training perspective is usually the starting point because it builds the engine while also kind of building that robustness or the resilience against stress.
Then the next piece from there as you layer on kind of the speed related side of it's not enough to just produce a lot of force. The golf swing tends to be fast and dynamic. We're going to start moving to things like jumps, medicine ball throws, things where you have to load the ground quick and learn how to transfer energy through the body. And that's essentially formula.
A lot of it is just programming. And then in a way that we're balancing, we're really getting a really strong stimulus so that the body's going to adapt, but without overdoing it, where they're going to be fatigued and it's going to affect the other stuff they're trying to do, which in golf they tend to play a lot. They want to be able to play in practice a lot. So we don't want them incredibly sore or unable to recover between workouts.
So that really is more the art of working with golfers is how navigate their schedules more set than the training itself. How important is is this jump aspect? Like is it often that you're saying like this, you have to go and prove this like and this is the number one thing you got to go do is, is that frequent that that's when you when you talk to
players that that's the thing. It's I kind of think of it is it's not probably jumping specifically that matters as much as jumping brings a lot of valuable things with it in terms of what it does in terms of your ability to use the ground. So during the golf swing like even things like could be think about a vertical jump. One of the reasons those outputs from kind of those vertical jumps probably correlate pretty well is it is actually a decent proxy for how we use the ground
within the swing. It's lacking the kind of rotational component, but really fast golfers tend to kind of upload during the backswing. So their center mass will move up just a little bit and then they kind of on wait and they kind of fall into their lead side and then they explode out of it. And some people will still stay relatively grounded and some people literally almost kind of jump to kind of clear out space and rotate around that lead
regardless. It's almost like a less exaggerated vertical jump in terms of how the body's kind of going up. You're on waiting, breaking hard, and then kind of accelerating out of it in terms of rotating around that lead leg. And so people that can train the body to get really good at doing that in a more extreme fashion. So things like jumps or loaded jumps, they're going to build up that capability of having the raw ability from a neuromuscular standpoint to then apply that to
the golf swing. So my goal from a fitness perspective is if I can get you really good at jumping and if I can get you really powerful from a lower body perspective, then you have the tools in place where now it's time to learn how to kind of time that up and sequence it within the kind of swing motion itself. And that's where more the specific technical work or speed training work comes into play.
The other piece is that a lot of good things just happen across the body with just really good lower body training. It's kind of the foundation of a good strength and performance training program is, you know, a lot of good adaptations happen in terms of both the strength component, the power component, as well as kind of the building up the tissues that are going to, you know, allow you to practice often and and not get
hurt. Vertical jumps tend to be a pretty good foundational piece of those programs. Got it. So what? What would you expect? My jump to me? So I'm 6 feet tall. How much do I weigh? 180 lbs? Something like that? Like is that enough to guess? Like what? What am I going to go see, do you think? And what would be good? Or bad? Yeah. That's why you're on the spot. The first piece, being a technology guy, is it's going to depend a bit on how you measure it.
So from like if you do hands on hips, strict form, the other piece will be kind of which tool you use to measure it. So there's like forest flights are kind of considered the gold standard, but there's contact mats and all sorts of different options. I can use a smartphone app that's really actually pretty accurate for vertical jump. I generally measure it in centimeters mainly because that's a lot of the kind of formulas are built around that.
And your size. If you're jumping probably in the kind of like 35 to 40cm range with like that hands on hips, which I'd have to do the math to convert it. That's probably going to put you in a pretty good spot from that like impulse measurement where we have kind of normative data based off of what we see from golfers of different levels. Anywhere from kind of your pro golfers have tested a few long drivers and they tend to even be on the higher level.
And I'll even often like the people are really trying to push speed. There's pretty good normative data out there from like Major League Baseball. I tend to use like if you're really serious about this, we're not going to just stop at what other pros are doing. We're going to push for the kind of next level up, which a lot of your baseball batters tend to have a lot of the same physical attributes that would be really useful from a golf perspective as well. OK, I'm going to go do it.
I've got. Yeah, I've got the pressure, the sensor mats. I'll send you a video. I'll post a video. Here's. The and give you a score. How about that? Yes, yes, OK. So we've got the jump aspect and then you talked about the second aspect was, sorry, ballistic. Upper body power, but the ability to accelerate the upper body really fast. There's, there's going to be
more pieces on top of that. But in terms of like basic proxy test, things like a seated chest pass for distance with a medicine ball throw is a really easy test to do. So I think that's part of the TPI testing as well. I've done it quite a bit. And when I was doing kind of formal research or if I'm just testing a golfer, it's a very quick and easy way of we take away the lower body body.
Can that upper body just generate a lot of Ford that I usually like to do something rotational in nature as well. So rotational medicine, Paul throat works really well as kind of a secondary 1 to see. Can they translate that into kind of a rotational pattern? So those three right off the bat, can they put a lot of force into the ground quickly? Can they produce a lot of force quickly from the upper body? Can they do it kind of rotationally?
That's already going to tell me if someone's good across all three of those. That gives me a lot of information. If someone is really poor across all three of those, we know there's there's some workers, there's I guess spinning in a positive light with a little bit of work on the physical side, they probably have a lot of potential to gain speed. Yep. OK. So we've covered those aspects. I want to know your thoughts on speed sticks.
I was reading a bit some of your stuff that you've talked about them and it's kind of interesting you're using more of like how to change a swing versus swing faster almost is what it sounds like a little bit of the mindset behind them. Yes, I think there's a few ways that they work.
One, I think they fall really nicely into kind of the previous conversation of when you think about when you're normally practicing or playing, you have all this different feedback that you're kind of tuning into and you're going to tend to prioritize some or the over the other. Think about probably the thing that overrides everything is how did I hit it and where did the ball go?
Essentially that kind of outcome related type feedback when you're playing or practicing, it could be really hard to kind of explore new ways of moving when you're also really concerned when you're going to hit it poorly. So Speed 6IN a way are actually really kind of extreme way of what we talked about before where you're basically focusing all your feedback and just swinging fast.
And so we're taking away the ball, we're taking away feedback about how you strike it, where the ball is going, how the ball is flying. And we're giving you a radar and here's your speed. You have the stick swinging faster. And a lot of people, especially in the short term, if they're not used to moving really athletically or dynamically within the swing, will find that they tend to use the ground a bit differently.
You rotate a little differently when they just have a speed stick and a swing radar and nothing else. So I think that's the first piece. It's a lot of people will almost immediately gain a few mph if they have pretty efficient or inefficient swings at baseline or they haven't really ever swung fast before. Because it just sets up the environment for like, okay, it's kind of a safe environment to try moving differently because I don't have to worry about hitting it 100 yards, right, or
hitting it out of bounds. Yeah. The second piece is, I think there are some interesting things that happen when you take something that's close enough to a Golf Club and modify it in some ways. So I kind of view it as really like a skill acquisition tool, which I think in the future, like really good coaches will learn how to promote specific movements in the swing using speed sticks as kind of a constraint on what they're trying to do. And good coaches already do this
with different tools already. But for example, one of the issues I had when I started this new speed journey was that I was realizing I was kind of whipping the club away with my hands. And, you know, I wasn't kind of moving off the ball really efficiently. I wasn't loading the ground to kind of create that backswing momentum.
And when I started swinging the heavier speed stick, even if I wasn't trying to swing it all out because my goal wasn't necessarily like make this number go as high as possible. What I realized is when it's a little heavier than you're used to, I was being forced to kind of to push off the ground and kind of load the trunk a little more dynamically to get that momentum going because there's a bit more inertia to overcome. And then in transition, I had to kind of sequence a little
differently. I had to kind of lead with the hips a bit better and use more of that proximal to distal sequencing because otherwise it kind of pulled me out of position and it's hard to just like arm swing it down. And so I started working it into, it's just kind of like a drill where I'd use like the slightly heavier speed stick and just kind of focus on like these using the big muscles to kind of drive the momentum and then transferring it up the chain.
And it kind of was a nice way to kind of promote some of those movements I was looking for in the swing. And then with the faster of the light ones, it's really a great way to challenge, like, can I apply that at faster than normal
speeds? And one of the first adaptations that happens, whether it's the gym or something technical like the golf swing, is that when you add a new challenge, a new movement challenge to the mix, your body's going to try to figure out how to coordinate things differently to accomplish
your task around that challenge. So in this case, you force your body to move a little bit faster than you're normally used to move in, and your body has to kind of go through this process of how can I move to make that number continue to go up while swinging something that's a little wider than I'm used to. So I don't think it's anything necessarily magical, but I think
just things happen. It's kind of this, you learn to explore different ways of moving when you make these slight changes to the weight of the club and then you have feedback to kind of guide that exploration. But I do think overtime, there's probably a degree of the overspeed. It's a very good way to get some degree of kind of speed related adaptations in terms of moving certain body parts faster than they're used to training.
And there are kind of neural adaptations that can occur overtime with learning how to activate those muscles quicker than usual. So there's probably a degree of that as well, but that's going to be more your slower burn where some of the kind of quick coordination movement related stuff, it's going to be kind of those quick jump since. Got it. How much is some of these jumps like is I think about the plateau that I'm on right now
and kind of the small gains. How much do you think is fitness related, getting stronger and improving the body? And how much do you think is like neurological of just like learning to adapt to these new forces because a lot of it feels, you know, out of control and wild when you're speed training. Like what do you think the balance is between kind of those factors? Like how do you think about that?
Yeah, I think a very simple way of thinking of it is kind of the physical side is going to be kind of raising your ceiling and then the kind of skill speed training type stuff is going to be how close to that ceiling you are. So it's kind of this progressive. Let's take a couple examples. You may have someone that has like a very poor engine, so they're relatively weak, maybe they're pretty small. They may have this kind of initial jump, but they run into that ceiling really quickly.
So they kind of Max out. At some point they need to be able to produce more force and produce it quicker. Or they have some just you can only make a old, you know, old car with a bad engine move so fast. Even if you put the best driver in the world behind the wheel, at some point you got to upgrade the engine to actually kind of learn to drive faster in that case. I won't take this personally, That's fine.
The other example is like, especially if you think about someone that maybe like picks up long drive after being like a professional baseball player or a talking with like Martin Borgmeyer. He has this pretty extensive history of being a really good athlete playing basketball. And he probably had a lot of those physical tools in place.
So he probably had this massive kind of opportunity to benefit from the technical and the more speed training specific side of things where he credits a lot of the more technique or and kind of focus speed training work in kind of getting up to those 141 fifties swing speed, two 25230 ball speed. So in his case, it's like he probably had this massive, almost all of it came from technical work. It's he had already laid that foundation over many years and
then. The fitness side can continue to build up that potential over time or maybe you kind of morph what that fitness work looks like. So if you're plenty strong, you're probably going to focus more on the speed side or maybe it's just making sure you don't get hurt so that you can practice more of the speed
related stuff more often. But the short answer is like, I think for most people, it's going to be this case and you're bridging that gap, you're running into that ceiling and then you need to take some time to build up that ceiling higher and then you can make those those leaps again. So it's building the engine and then the the speed training side or the technical size, learning to express what you have and so that they kind of go hand in hand, if that makes sense. Got it. All right.
Two more questions. One grip strength. Any thoughts on that? Does that matter? Do you care any any research on on that? It's a great question and I love seeing both sides of the equation. So on. It's more complicated than people think, but the reality is 1 when we talk about correlations between grip strength and swing speed, there's a couple factors at
play. The first that makes it really tricky to actually run those analysis is that grip strength is a really good proxy for overall strength. So they use it in longevity research as a quick and easy way to measure just overall strength of a person because people that have really strong grips tend to be really strong throughout the body. So that's the first piece where it's not necessarily an indicator of something golf
specific. It's just that strong people tend to have strong grips and being strong tends to be good for a lot of things, including a swinging a Golf Club. That being said, I think there are some specific benefits of having good grip strength. So for example, argument that I think that if you have plenty of grip strength, you're able to put enough force into the grip without it being excessive effort. I think there's a lot of benefit
to that. Whether you get that by just being strong in general, that that's one thing more specifically, like a piece that I've become really fascinated by is this idea of kind of centrifugal force in the swing. Or you can think about it of having to put force into the club to like basically carve out its path as you approach
impacts. But someone that's swinging fairly fast, so that you have someone swinging 115 a 120 miles an hour just to keep that club moving and it's kind of semicircular path and release into the ball, you're going to have to be putting basically pulling on that shaft with well over £100 worth of force. So you're going to have to be really pulling on that club to keep it from flying straight into the ground, actually get it to curve up into the ball.
And so you'll kind of talk about some people kind of pulling up through impact. If you have a lot of grip strength, that can help, you can get around that by just basically using the other big muscles efficiently too.
So you kind of think about that. I think in my opinion, one of the roles of the vertical force is that if you're able to post up really powerfully on that lead leg, you can kind of perform that pole with basically your whole body versus just having to pull with your hands specifically. But the last length of that chain is going to be the grip.
So if you don't have the ability to put force into the grip of the club, you're probably going to get limited in terms of how fast you can swing, or at least your ability to control a fast moving swing. That makes sense. Good, good answer. I guess last, last question, just like what's your ideal speed session?
So I guess just for context, like the things that I track and what I've done, just whether it works or not, it's just like I found, hey, 3045 minutes in the gym beforehand is like, we'll do wonders for for your speed. And then just like hitting 40 to 70 golf balls, taking some time in there to just use the crap out of video so you can actually see what you're doing, working on a few different cues that you need to work on. That's been the formula that I've just, it's typically like
an hour and a half, right? Like it just takes a long time when you add the gym component in and all that crap. What's your perfect speed training session I look like? It's a bit bit tricky. I'll, I'll give it a single answer, but part of it is I kind of have sessions that are built
out for different purposes. So during certain parts of the year, like early offseason, for example, if I've got a golfer that really needs to increase their speed, we're going to push kind of the pure club head speed potential a little harder early on on. And then we're going to gradually transition and more and more focus on learning how to strike the ball at speed. I say launch a bit more of the kind of transfer work and getting it to actually apply to
the course. But if we're kind of focused on, just like let's say my goal in a session is increasing ball speed or club head speed, almost always going to have at least 20. Obviously the 2030 minutes would be great for kind of the physical side.
But it's going to basically go through a process of getting the heart rate up, getting some blood flow, getting really from like a physiological perspective as getting the muscle temperature and blood flow kind of increased because that actually puts it in a much better position to produce force and speed. So you're literally warming up
as part of the process. We're going to do some dynamic mobility to kind of just get the key joints moving and make sure that the joints are prepared to move in the way we want to. I'm going to finish up the physical side with something intense and it's low volume. It's not going to be anything that wears you out and things like vertical jumps, something kind of explosive, One, because it feels good.
You feel like you're about ready to move fast and I think the psychological components important for speed work. But two, it's doing some things in terms of making sure those muscles are warm and kind of primed. Then I'll have kind of a call specific, I call it a warm up, but I essentially I'll do some things like I call them opening up the backswing and opening up the downswing.
So with club in hand, I'm kind of working into progressively bigger ranges, this kind of a golf specific dynamic mobility. And then I have ramp up swings essentially where I'll start at fairly low effort and I'm progressively increasing the effort as kind of an extension of my warm up until I'm hitting pretty close to kind of my expected, you know, training
speed. One thing I have started working in is before I get into the Max effort stuff like driving speeds, I do like to sandwich that at the start and the end with like gamer swings or hitting a ball, but I'm trying to swing fast but efficiently as well. So trying to make speed feel easy just because I've found that it becomes less an adjustment when I then I have to go back and learn how to swing fast and strike a ball well as
it's well. So kind of building up kind of the skill component and bringing the focus back at the end to like, all right, it's not just making this number go up, it's also striking a ball efficiently and it's striking it well. And then the middle of the session is going to be, you know, I have a few different kind of structures of what it looks like, but it's generally going to be trying to push the
speed to pretty high levels. And sometimes I'll mix in where I do a couple swings with a speed stick and then kind of immediately go into my driver swings, especially if I'm looking for a very specific type of movement in my swing. Or sometimes when I just whip the lightspeed stick around, it just kind of gets me amped up for actually taking the driver and swinging fast right afterwards.
So that's essentially the structure sometimes, sometimes I'll make it quick, but an ideal ones probably 45 minutes to an hour. Once speed starts to drop off then then I call it quits and I focus more on the kind of like gamer swings at the end. How many balls are you hitting do you think? I've tried to more and more fine tune my warm up where I can get in and out quickly. It's probably going to be somewhere if you ignore the ramp up swings that I kind of consider a warm up.
I'm usually trying to shoot for somewhere in the like 25 to 30 Max effort. You definitely could go more than that, but I've I've tried more and more to make it so that I feel like I can get to those Max speeds as quick as I can.
One, just to get in and out and not have to spend all day doing it. But two, just from a workload perspective, I like the idea of if I can develop sessions where we can get the same stimulus but with less total work and less total kind of loading the joints, then that's usually a good thing when you're working with golf as well.
Yeah, no, it's interesting. I mean, there are clips of Bryson saying, you know, his speed sessions are 120 balls, you know, just like massive amounts of of shots. So it's, it's interesting to hear different thoughts of that. And I like yours because, yeah, deficiency is huge. Trying to not take two hours to do to get faster. Yeah, I mean, I'd say a big part of that is is going to be you can work up to that. Like what I'd recommend is Bryson's probably built up to that and same thing.
A lot of the long drive competitors, they've built up to that ability to do it over the course of months where their bodies are so used to swinging fast. And it's a lot of it too. It's like an easy way that I've found is a lot of people when they first start, they may not need much more than 15 or 20 balls before their speed starts to drop off. And then maybe you up that here more depending on how much time you want to spend. I'll generally use kind of speed drop offs as a way to tell me
when to stop. So if if speed is plateauing and dropping off and it's not coming back up, if I give myself a little extra rest, that's usually kind of a sign to call it quits and and live to fight another day. Got it, got it. Do you care at all about like how fast you're like, do you care if you're just like 1 after the other go, go or do you feel like you're hit OK, stop back, recover, OK, hit again. Like, does that matter to you at all? I've played around with
different ones. I'd be lying if I said I had the perfect solution. I think there's probably a balance between. You can get into a rhythm, you can keep the muscles a bit warmer and it feels better to hit a few in quick succession. What I'm trying to avoid though is if having like heart rate just spite people really high
for long periods of time. So I'll usually kind of have quick succession and then let things kind of ease back in and then get back into it. A lot of it is just from like a physiological perspective. Fatigue definitely can disrupt both the coordination piece if you're trying to think about building like better patterns at speed, not just like massive
speed. I don't care how how I definitely from like a speed related from like how fast the muscle fibers are contracting, how fast you can send signals down to the muscles to activate them. Fatigue can very quickly effects that. So I generally don't want it to be where I'm like completely out of breath and just fighting through it.
So it's kind of soon as the heart rate's starting to get up there and I'm a little out of breath, I ease it back down and then kind of ramp it back up. So a bit of both I'd say. But I'm definitely open to some people say that they love that kind of like they need 2030 balls back-to-back to back to kind of get up to speed. So could be of an individual piece as well. Well, this is fun. There are a bunch of other questions I want to ask. I feel like we're just getting started.
But you are great to follow on Instagram. You've always got some interesting stuff you're posting there. I guess get give folks that will do the intro at the end here, but give give folks the rundown of kind of like you've talked a lot about speed and the research work you do. What do you do? What's some of your background? Yeah, we're just, we reverse things around here. It's exciting. Intro at the end. Yeah, I'd say the the rundown is I essentially was a lifelong golfer.
I wanted that to be some part of what I do, regardless of kind of where life and my occupation takes me. I'm a sports scientist by trade. So essentially I'm a Masters in exercise Physiology, a pH. D In human movement sciences, I spent some time in the academic world, so I have something like 25 peer reviewed publications with probably now fifteen of those being golf related in some capacity across kind of strength
and conditioning. We have some like launch monitor validation type papers, did some early papers on warm ups and things like that for golf, still publish quite a bit. So I still work with some kind of academics in that world. But essentially I kind of consult with golfers. I try to put out educational material through social media and and then I also do kind of the peer reviewed research side.
So my day job is working with a flywheel training company called Xerfly, kind of the applied sports science side. But then I also generally have some kind of private consultation clients in the golf world working on either speed fitness, some combination of those.
And then I've currently the director of golf Sports science for a new Golf performance facility called PGA Frisco or Sports Academy PGA Frisco, which is housed within the PGA of America Coaching Center. So I'm helping them with a lot of the physical assessments, using technology and data to kind of improve the fitness process with golfers. Love it. And you've got a newsletter. I've I've read through your, your newsletter articles and stuff are are we are we doing those regularly?
Do do we need some motivation to keep you going on those or what? What's what's happening there? I need to get back to it. If anyone has good topics, suggestions I'm happy to dive back into it yet. The plan is to get back into do it semi regularly. What I found was the last few took a lot out of me in terms of the amount of work to fit together. So. But yeah I'm trying to get back into a normal routine.
I'll probably try to post every either every two weeks or once a month or something like that depending on how big of a top. OK, we'll link those up, then we'll link those up when this comes out. And then, hey, you let me know when you got more coming out and we'll link those up too. We'll we'll keep keep blasting those.
But Alex, it was it was super fun to to learn from you here and dive into some more and we'll do it again because you always I should just hit you up every interesting Instagram post and just say, tell me more about this. Sounds good, always happy too.