Episode 28: Fit for Golf (Feat. Mike Carroll)

So for anyone who doesn't know, strength and conditioning is basically the same thing as personal training, except rather than trying to help the general population, you know, get you know, maybe a little bit leaner and in better general shape, strength and conditioning is how you can help athletes improve

their physical conditioning for particular sport. So I have a background in bolt which is definitely helpful, and after a while just decided that I'd try and pursue it down the Gulf Avenue because it was pretty interesting, pretty niche, and it wasn't really i guess, being done from what I could see to a particularly high level, and just sort of kind of gathered momentum from there.

of frustration more than anything else. But I was also playing a lot of other sports, so I concentrated on one of them in particular, called Gaelic football through my last year in high school, and I played it through college a little bit with the college, but more with kind of my home club. And then when I finished

my studies, I started playing golf again. I was now working full time and you know, didn't have say, studies taking up my time, so I started playing a little bit of golf again after about a five year break, and what was kind of really cool is that even though I hadn't been playing golf at all, I'd been training really hard in the gym, Like I put on about twenty five or thirty pounds in college through strength training, And as soon as I got back playing, it was,

you know, really noticeable, like how much more speed and power was there even though I hadn't really been trying. And then when I started working with basically more people, some of them just happened to be recreational golfers, and I started thinking this is something that I'd like to sort of push a bit more. And then kind of the I guess the big turning point there was really two of them. In twenty fourteen, I did the TPI Level one education course. I traveled to the Belfry in England,

actually with Simon Keealen, whose shamous power is Caddy. He's a friend of mine home And when I came back from that, that's when I set up the brand name Fit for Golf, started marketing basically training services for golfers, and about a year and a half later I moved to California to take up a job with Mike Hanson, who owns a facility called Hanson fitness for golf in Irvine, California, And funnily enough, it was on Twitter where I saw he listed a job that TPI retweeted for him, and

I got in touch with him and told him I'd be interested in Long story short, In October of twenty sixteen, I moved over to California from Cork in Ireland and started working for him.

What's the number one thing you feel like golfers maybe miss or don't focus on in terms of their fitness that you feel like is the most important thing golfers should spend their time on when they're trying to maybe get better or maybe improve their overall well being.

So then when you come back out as the weather gets a bit better, which is typically Master's weekend for most people, you could have five or six months or whatever of not swinging a club. So even if you've stayed in generally good shape from you know, whatever type of workouts you've been doing, it's not the same. You'll be in a much better state than if you hadn't

been doing anything. But that would be my big thing to people is try and find some way to keep swinging the club, even a couple of times per week.

I know that's challenging in certain locations where you know there's snow on the ground outside or whatever, but even if it means a shortened club inside, or even if you need to maybe simulate it, you know, holding basically anything like a light medicine ball or like I have a cut down you know, really old club that I've brought with me traveling a couple of times if I know I'm not going to be you know, on a range or playing golf. And it definitely, definitely is the number one thing.

the stack system. I mean a lot of this stuff kind of coming together at the right time makes a lot of sense for somebody like you in this business because I think twenty years ago, if you'd have been floating around some ideas of you need to swing it faster, you would have got instructors coming around going no, no, no, no, no, you got to hit fairways, you got to get the ball in play. Those are the important aspects of golf, and it feels like that's changed a bit.

you know, really debate about the value of it. And I think before that it was really easy for people just to have strong opinions and they could, you know, bring up examples of well this player doesn't hit it long and x. But once you know, doctor Brody was able to put numerical value. And then also when the PGA Tour got shot link, so now we have like ball speed metrics, distance metrics, strokes gained off the team. Well that's really when things you know, you now you

can give like objective feedback to players. Hey, look at these guys' ball speeds, look at their earnings. Look at these guys ball speeds, look at their earnings. And when you can almost like show a player. Hey, this is like potentially what x amount of ball speed is worth in dollars per year. That obviously gets people interested.

work with a couple. You work with a couple of our our tour players Mackenzie who Seamous Power, Stephan Yager. How do you approach those three players in creating their individual training programs? And what are some of the different priorities that you've you've placed with the three of them. Is it kind of a you know, core strength, is it speed improvement, injury prevention, injury recover, recovery, maybe a mix of all three. How have you tackled those three individual players?

going on here? That's a slightly different, let's say job essentially to someone who says, Mike, I'm not one seventy I need to get to one seventy six or I can't get to where I want in the world rankings, Yeah, there's usually a little bit of overlap, like with those three guys. With McKenzie, it was pretty straightforward in that

he didn't have any injury concerns. He had a pretty good understanding and background and training, but he felt he wasn't getting as much out of his training as he should. He wanted to make sure that the effort he was putting in to his physical training was going to show up in speed potential. With Seamus, he is a guy who had a lot of speed. He contacted me really because he felt like he was possibly doing too much training and it was starting to interfere with how much

energy he had for practice and play. It's something that you need to be careful with as a trainer because you want to feel like that what you're doing is making a difference, and it's easier for you to demonstrate that with improvements in physical training metrics. But if it's not enhancing the player's scale or their scores, like you're in trouble. You know, the training needs to stay as a supplement to their golf practice and play. It can't

take over. And Steven was actually probably the most interesting one because when I started working with him, he was two hundred and ten in strokes gained off the team. He was losing a full stroke around and he probably won't mind me saying it, but on our first phone call, I can remember him saying to me, Mike, I'm short and crooked, which is no good out here. He said, I might as well try and hit it further and if I stay crooked, it's better. But Marty, is you

kind of you know? I think would be in agreement with And I've noticed with players of different skill levels oftentimes when players are short and crooked. There's a lot of constraining going on. There's maybe some mental baggage where players are. You know, if it starts going sideways, we can start to rein it back in because we're worried about where it's going. And it's almost like a vicious cycle because it can get worse the more and more

kind of scared you get. So his big thing was like, I want to try and get faster and how do I do this? So what was interesting with Steven is that I would say that the let's say Jim side of things that we did was way less important than just the practice he did with driver, focusing on essentially getting into the mindset of I'm not holding back and

I'm going to hit it further. And like we talked about the value of metrics, like if you're practicing with the launch monitor and you're getting feedback on literally every single drive in terms of strokes gained from your rounds very quickly, you can see how the trends are going.

And what's been amazing with him And this wouldn't happen with every case for sure, but he's about one point one strokes per round better off the tee since we started working together and he's he's gained about five miles an hour in ball speed and he's actually hitting slightly more fairwis And as I said, it wouldn't happen with everybody, but it was literally a case of let's start swinging

faster because I'm already crooked. And I think it was because there was you know, some probably like mental baggage maybe when things aren't going well. Then as he started swinging faster, started hitting it straighter, then a confidence goes up. You start swinging harder again because you're like, man, this is awesome. And that was a big turnaround for him.

And then with McKenzie and Seamus, like gaines haven't been as sudden and as big, which is more what you'd expect because Stevens example was you know, pretty kind of I would say exceptional in terms of how quickly it went up. With McKenzie, what's been interesting is we've had some kind of like valleys and lows where there's been periods where the speed has been going really good and

then it might come back down. And that's where it's a little bit say tough as a trainer, because you don't want to be overstepping bounds in terms of like what type of input you're giving because you're kind of getting away from the physical training realm. But what you're kind of trying to make sure of I guess is are they in the place physically where they want to be.

And the two big ones there are that they're comfortable with where there, let's say speed is, and also that they have plenty of energy to practice and play and they're not dealing with aches and pains. And that's probably the most I would say stressful or challenging part of the job is if players are picking up aches and pains and injuries. That's almost it's part and parcel of pro golf because they practice and play so much. But that's when you feel like that you might be failing

at your job. Like if I'd much prefer for one of the players to say, Mike, my speed is down three miles an hour, what's going on? Like are you sure this is the right training program for me? That's fine, Like you'll be able to kind of tweak things there, have a discussion through it. But if one of the players is telling me, like hey, like man, my shoulder or my hip is sore, like I can't practice. You know, that's when you feel like, okay, this is this is

not where we want to be. Let let's review here, Mike.

might be a psychiatrist. I mean, this is a lot of things that you're having to kind of deal with when you're kind of taken on a high level athlete like this to figure out the perfect setup for that person, because not every setup, not every plan, you know, not everything you're writing out is going to be the same player to player.

coaches or whatever. And something that I kind of brought up a couple of times is that, like, let's say, if you come out of college as an exceptionally good baseball or basketball or football player, and you sign a professional contract with whatever franchise, like you're brought into the ecosystem of that franchise where like somebody's job is going to be let's say, high performance manager, where they're monitoring like, Okay, what's Shane doing like this week in terms of on

field practice, gym practice. Is he going sitting down with the sports psychologists or whatever? You know? But if you turn pro in golf and you get a PGA Tour card, like there's there's no necessity or there's no let's say set system that all these players follow.

smaller margins make, you know, become much more important. So kind of what I've noticed maybe that's lacking in even at the PGA tour level is almost just like organization and management. For example, Like let's just say if a player gets injured, it's like who is he going to

for advice? Like, like who's whose job is it to make sure that like he's sent to let's just say, the right people for an examination and diagnosis, Because like an example is like there's a there's a physio truck on the tour, right, So like these guys are great, but like they're busy. They've got one hundred and fifty six players in an event. And if Marty you go into them on a Tuesday and you're like, hey, you know, tom My back is sore, they might be thinking like,

I've never met Marty before. I don't know if he's going to come back. All I know is that he wants to tee it up on Thursday. Whereas if you have, you know, a manager that you're reporting this to, and their job is okay, like what are we going through here to make sure all the right protocols are ticked? And I think you can apply that to basically, like

every element of performance. If you get back to, like Shane, what you were saying about, you know, the NBA franchise having these different departments where basically things are monitored and

managed at a pretty big level. Because you need to remember, like these golfers are like the world's best at what they do, and if something means even slight improvement, or it means that an injury doesn't take quite as long to recover from, or they're not out for quite as long you know, that's more chance to say, playing events

where you can build up FedEx points. And you know, we know from watching a golf season how granular at the end of a year things can be in terms of different cutoffs for keeping cards or getting into particular events.

You know, it's been dragging on for too long. Now you need to go and see a specialist in this area, like find out where in your city who the best guy to go to is, or I find out who that person is and try and send them there basically, but that wouldn't happen if I was working for a basketball organization. You know, that would be all in house and taken care of. So I think that's where things might, you know, have room to improve over time. Mike.

Tell us a little bit about what that looks like in terms of, you know, your your golf community that has had success training with your app. What are some differences there between training the tour player, which we just talked about in the everyday golfer. You know, they don't have as much time available. How much time do they need to get on one of your programs? What's the minimum amount of time per week? What does that look like?

individual differences, there's a lot of similarities. And if you're trying to work with people in person all the time, I'm like, you can't. You can't deal with you know,

thousands of people. So sort of my idea was, why don't I build out these templates that I tend to work off day in and day out for the last number of years, and try and make them accessible to basically thousands of golfers that they can use in their own time because a lot of these golfers they don't have access to, you know, a professional in their area that can basically provide them with that service, and to

be honest, if they do, it's often very expensive. So how I started was essentially just I would write a program and for each exercise in the program, just trying to think of regressions and progressions. So, like Shane Menson say, like squatting earlier as an offseason exercise, like it's that's something that I would say is pretty universally good for

people to do. Barrings some you know, a major injury that doesn't allow them to do so I'm probably gonna want most golfers I work with to squat or something similar because it's really good for lower body strength and power, which is beneficial for producing speed and potentially reducing injury.

If I have somebody who's never worked out before, is maybe carrying a lot of excess weight and they have some reservations about exercising, they might be doing a squat where they're holding onto a countertop to assist them going down where they can use their arms to offload themselves a little bit. Or you might see people doing it holding like a TRX strap or something like that, so like they're not even squatting against all of their body weight.

Whereas if it is a D one college golfer who's just had four years of working with a strength and conditioning staff and they're like, Mike, I'm at one fifteen speed, but I think if I can get to one to

twenty one, like I'm gonna have a huge advantage. Well, now you're starting to deal with things where you know, you might be squeezing the sponge a little bit more dry, and you're probably still going to have them do some sort of squat, but their squat might turn into like they might be doing a squat jump, holding fifty pounds, dumbels or something like that. You know, so very similar movement pattern, very similar let's say adaptation you're looking for,

but you just meet them where they are. I guess, kind of like club fitting Marty. You know, it's like I have a kind of picture of what I want this person to be able to do, but like this driver is going to work for you know, your kid that's just after finishing college, whereas this might be for grandad kind of thing. You know, it's basically the same

idea and just just scaling from there. And I think where people especially I would say, like with it's hypocritical because like my business is on social media and my job is to try and garner people's attention so I

can sell my programs. But I think it's become more common to try and convince people that they might have problems that are unique to them that other people don't have, and as a solution, there's some very highly specialized exercise or program that's perfect for them, which I just don't really agree is the case. Even if you go through as thorough a screening or assessment protocol as you want, like training is still really a little bit of trial

and error getting started. You basically just start on the conservative side with something you think is probably a little bit too easy. Was that okay, yeah, perfect, Okay, let's try the next level? Was that okay, okay great? And after doing that a couple of times, it's sort of like a Goldilocks principle. You get into the sweet spot where you want to be, and then from there it's

just slowly progressing. And then what's been a big part of it is like literally replying to people's questions that they send in through the app, like hey, like, how do I modify this exercise because I fell skiing last week and my knee is killing me? Or this where I work out doesn't have this piece of equipment, like what can I do instead? You know, That's that's kind of where I would say, like the individual individualization has come as just answering questions for people.

you're gonna get healing achilles pain. I promise you, like, go go on a hiking trip unprepared or a long walking trip unprepared, and the most basic of activities you will start to pick up an injury. It's the same with weaight training. But we know from like as much research as you want to look at, it's one of the best things that we can do for maintaining or

improving our physical function as we age. And to be honest, like, yeah, I love helping golfers improve their speed, but most let's say recreational golfers, like who really cares if they're at ninety eight versus one oh one miles an hour to a certain extent, but if they're able to be in way better health and physical condition long term, maybe they can maintain that ninety eight miles longer for seven or eight years more in their golfing life. And that's where

like strength resistance training becomes really important. And then the other one is probably that like strength training or lifting weights is going to lead to reduced flexibility. And people have you know, the image of the gigantic bodybuilder in their head, bulging with muscles, saying that you know that guy couldn't rotate or couldn't scratch his back, which if you ask them so, they actually probably could. It just

doesn't look that way. But there's that like if you think of doing a let's say, strength training exercise through as big a range of motion as you can in that particular movement that's essentially a loaded stretch, like you you can improve your mobility and strength at the same time with resistance training. And they're the two I would say that people are most worried about is that, no, I don't want to get stronger, I just want to

get more flexible. Any adult that doesn't lift weights, I would say actually probably does need to think about getting stronger, because if you're not, you're just gradually losing muscle mass and that ends up catastrophic for health over the course of decades. And the added bonus is that you can do both at the same time. You can improve flexibility and strength through strength training. And in terms of the other one getting hurt. Sure, you can get hurt lifting weights.

You can get hurt from doing anything, and you can get hurt from doing nothing. People wake up with aches and pains, or they hurt themselves picking up the kids' school bag or whatever. You know, they're probably the two biggest ones. There's some more that you could dig into.

It's a long list, and to be honest, I think the reason it's a long list is something that you touched on earlier is that this is quite new in terms of being a thing in golf, and it makes it quite interesting for say, trying to research and learn from people who are more experienced and let's say, smarter

than you. And I'm by no means saying that I'm the smartest or most experienced or best trainer in golf, but there's very few people have been doing it for a long time or have really been applying like their

whole careers to it. So we almost need to go and look for other look to other sports for guidance, and I think in golf by far the best places we can go our track and field because those sports, the coach's job is they're given feedback by a tape measure or a stopwatch, and those sports were also in

the Olympics. And if a sport is in the Olympics, it's major political bragging rights, which sounds kind of off course, but it means that there's tons of resources pumped into them by countries governments, which means that you get exceptionally

good coaches, you get lots of research and studies. And if you combine that with the fact that the athletes are getting objective feedback about hey, how much further did you throw the javelin from this from this training program or what exercises had the biggest correlation with this jump height, there are things that can be really really informative, whereas when you go into field sports or sports that have a lot of let's say more external and variable factors involved,

it gets really tough. Like even for example, the NFL combine does a bad job of finding which players are going to be the best on the field because there's just there's just so much more to sports where there's millions of things going on. You can't boil down to you know, jumping and you know, sprinting around cones and

things like that. But if we take the main thing, I would say that you can improve in golf as a trainer, Like it's I think I think for performance why it's like if you take away like, Okay, we don't want them to be injured, we want them to be able to make the swings that them and their coaches want to do. But after that, it's really like how much speed do you have? Like it really is

the way things are going. And when that's the case, well, then like we're using speed as our feedback test, and now how are our training programs basically enhancing that as long as we're keeping the other things lined up?

dramatically and I feel great. What are some other exercises there that you can take to end range to improve your flexibility that you like?

to happen to to a great extent. And usually what's more commonly the reason for a range of motion being restricted is it's something from your brain nervous system saying hey, I'm not comfortable here, Like let's put on the brakes here. This doesn't feel so good. I've never been here before, I have no strength here before. And don't even think about asking me to do it at high force or

high speed, because that's not going to go help. So if you're trying to improve range of motion in a certain area, I would say, try and do things as much as possible where you are actively moving through that

range of motion. So, for example, one a simple one that I think that I think is great, like is one of the biggest, let's say, complaints you get from golfers is that they're losing flexibility as they get a little bit older and their swing is getting shorter, and they show you these various stretches they're doing, maybe lying on the ground, they might have a towel pulled over a certain part of their leg or something like that.

Whereas something that I think is perfect for that is give them a club or a weighted club and tell them, Okay, you've got sixty seconds on the clock, and gradually, I want you to make practice swings where you go longer

and longer each time. I want you to get uncomfortably slightly uncomfortably longer with how far you're turning, how far your hands are going, And all of a sudden it's like, okay, this is way more specific to the demands of the activity that I'm actually trying to get better at, and your brain is also involved, like you have to contract the muscles that you need to contract to get back to those positions, You need to be in control of all the various joints that are involved, and you're also

just getting more comfortable doing it. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with doing static stretching at all. It'd kind of never discourage someone from any form of exercise, But all choices we make in training basically are a

series of trade offs. Like we have a limited amount of time, and as soon as we have a specific let's say goal or activity that we're trying to work on, then just the question as well, how much is this transferring to what I'm trying to improve based on my opportunity cost basically based on the other things I can be doing. And if you think of what the golf

swing is, it's a one second activity. It's standing on our feet, it's happening very quickly, like static stretching is is tough to give let's say, a lot of recommendation for when we consider some of the other options that we have, like even something as simple as like if you stand and uprate let's say, in like baseball posture or something and hold a four or six pounds medicine

ball at arm's length in front of you. Practice rotating as far as you can in each direction, do something like ten or twelve reps each side, trying to go as far as you can do that a couple of times. Like, I think that's going to be way better than you know. We see the classic stretch of kind of somebody putting their foot up on a bench and trying to touch their toes or you know, dragging their arm across their chest. It's like, hold on a second here, like that's that's great.

I know it's what everybody has done forever. But let's actually think about what we're what we're trying to improve here, you know.

And I feel like, now it is a lot more of that. I'm going to bend over, touch my toes and try to get ready. Do you have things people could do when they only have ten to fifteen minutes to prepare for a tea time and they can't go to the range and hit sixty golf balls.

toe touches, but all for reps, no holding positions. Gradually tried to go a bit further getting warmed up, and then they'll finish their warm up with some what I would call like explosive or powerwork. For example, they might do a series like three sets of five vertical jumps eight medicine ball slams and eight medicine ball throws off a wall or something like that, and they feel like that when they go down to the range they could take out driver and be at full speed on their

first swing. The other reason I like that is if they're playing let's say five rounds a week, when you include practice rounds or whatever in pro ams, that's also a little bit of mobility and power work before every round. That adds up over the course of months and over course of seasons. Recreational golfers don't have time to do that. What I do I play first thing in the morning, so like first light, I'm not going to the course

early to hit balls. I do like a ten minute mobility routine at home where I basically go through what I just said there. I'm doing some like hip mobility, some spy mobility, some like squats lunges, some torso twists, and then I take honestly about twenty practice swings on the first tee with my driver, like two sets of ten.

I might do a set at ten that's pretty easy, then I do a set at ten that's pretty hard, and then I'll take like you know, I'll make sure that I have, say like a minute or two to get heart rate back down to normal. Then I'll take like one or two let's say, normal practice swings when it's my turn to hit, and like, honestly, that feels fine, Like I get more out of those swings than I think I would do in like any stretches on the first t to be perfectly.

some like helvis twists, some Torso twists. Yeah. The most important thing I would say for like a good quality warm up is think about think about moving like gradually moving through the activity you're about to do, less less thinking about stretching out, and more thinking about moving through the movement that you're about to do, gradually building up

the speed. Like, for example, if you're going to do a forty yard dash, I don't want to see you standing on the side of the track stretching your hamstring. I want to see you do fifteen forty yard runs going from slow to medium to fast like. That's how you prepare for it.

they have very quickly. And if you look at those two things, it gets pretty simple why you want to have let's say heavy strength training and light load speed training. When we're lifting heavy weights, let's say a weight that we could lift for five reps or less, doesn't matter what the exercise is, because that weight is challenging relative to our strength level. We recruit all of our muscle fibers. There's none that we don't use because we need them all to kick in to help us move the weight.

The harder we try and accelerate the weight, the more of our fastwitched fibers that we recruit. And one of the beneficial adaptations to heavy resistance training is that we get better at recruiting these fastwitch fibers. And one of the biggest elements of maximum strength is the size of our muscle fibers. So with heavy strength training, we learn how to recruit our fastwitch fibers, we learn how to produce more maximum force, and these fibers also get bigger.

With speed training, something that we get a lot better at is how quickly we can send the signal from our brain to the muscles and get those muscles to contract. And that's why having the balance of both of them is very very ben official. The kind of ven diagram of what you want to be really good at is you want to have big strong muscles from heavy strength training,

particularly big fast twitch muscle fibers. But they're the ones that tend to grow from strength training anyway, and we want to be really really good at our muscles applying that force very quickly, which is why, honestly, the most important ones to do for golf are specific like speed training with swings, because that motor unit firing frequency or ray coding, I think is quite specific to a task,

to a movement pattern. So if we can do it through swinging, are things that are similar to swinging, it's definitely beneficial. And then kind of over time what gets important is that when people start strength training, they'll notice, like all al most a linear increase to clubhead speed. Like if you get someone and you get them in the gym and they just start like squatting, benching, pull ups, whatever, the usual stuff like the five by five programs that

are super common and things like that. One hundred percent those people, as their muscles are getting bigger and stronger, and just as importantly, they're getting better at recruiting these fast twitch fibers. They'll be at the range and they'll be like, man, this is sweet. I'm going to be ten miles an hour faster in no time. I'm only lifting three weeks and I'm like four miles an hour up. This is awesome. Then all of a sudden, the lifting gains stop or massively slow down, and so does the

transfer to speed. And one of the reasons why that happens is that there is what's called a specicificy element to strength training, and what that means is that the transfer that we get from one activity to the other

isn't perfect. Something's transfer more, something's transfer less. And as are let's say, percentage of our potential changes and we get closer to our genetic potential, the amount of transfer we get from things starts to slow down, and that's when training kind of needs to change a little bit

if we want to keep improving. Yeah, Like let's just say, Martie, like you've been told the hexperre deadlift, Like you said, I know you've done a lot is really good for helping increase speed potential, but you're af forgetting to a point where you can. You've spent years developing it. It's hard for you to get stronger at it. And let's say your max is four hundred pounds, Like, think of how much time and effort and fatigue you'd pick up

to bring that to like four forty. That might take six months, and during that period you're never really going to be fresh where you can do speed training sessions or high higher speed exercises that are more similar to

the swing and might have higher transfer. And if we just said, Marty, this strength for now is fine, good enough, we've noticed that, like it's not really causing much transfer, but hey, you've spent very little of your training time working on things like swinging your driver as fast as you can for x number of reps three times per week.

And that's a shift in training that like, I guess I've been seeing more of or trying to think about more of lately, because what's become clear is that like the training that works at first does not work forever. And also if you're as you get more advanced, you

can't improve at everything. At the same time, the beginner can crush themselves trying to get better at let's say they're heavy strength training, and they can also get better at their faster light stuff but then, if you know, go to the other end of the spectrum where it's

somebody who's been training for five or ten years. This is where like the term say like periodization gets important because I don't want anybody to listen and be like, no, Mike, say that we should stop working on strength, we should work on speed. Well, like no, maybe where you are in your training, let's say career, you should keep working at both of them. And that's what a lot of

beginners need to do. But let's, for example, you and Shane are like, Okay, you've just played a golf season, and this happens with the pros and amateurs all the time. So both of your strength levels are probably down relative to where they have been in the past because you've been busy practicing and playing. But now your off season just started, so I might say, hey, Marty, we can get your strength levels back up to where they were in like six weeks. No panic, So let's prioritize strength

for six weeks. We'll still keep working on your speed so that you're not completely getting away from it. But then for the six weeks before the season when you want to be getting faster because you don't care how strong you are in season, you care how what your ball speed is.

And then what we're hoping is, if I'm working with you for two, three, four seasons, is that we're on like a stepways progression where you are now starting next season's off season at a slightly higher point than you were for the same time last year, and we're just building on it. And then when we go into your speed stuff, you're at a slightly higher level hopefully than you were at that time last year, and that's kind of the goal you're looking for.

app is also called the Fit for Golf App. Something important about the app is that for the last seven or eight months, I've been getting a new app built that will be released in January, so there'll be some changes coming there, but anyone who signs up to the current app will transfer to the new one if they if they.