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And you can feel free to call them directly and their team of experts can help you with just about any budget. Once again, that's shopindorgolf.com and tell them the sweet spot sent you. Welcome back to another episode of the sweet spot. This is John Sherman from the four foundations of golf. And as always, I'm joined by Adam from Adam E. Golf. So today we're going to revisit a topic that we like to cover on this show, which is I guess we can call it golf fitness, getting your body healthier, stronger, ability with stand injury, swinging faster, more mobile, all that stuff. So with that, we have someone who I believe is an expert in this category. He's been doing it for a long time, built up a nice following in a nice business around it. We have Chris Finn from par for success. Chris, welcome to the sweet spot. Nice guys. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah. So we want to get your, we've spoken to multiple fitness experts over the years. And I think everyone has a little bit of a different spin on things. And you have some interesting research you've done over the years with your clients. And we'll get into some of that research in the episode. So before we get into that, why don't you just give a quick introduction. You know, how long you've been doing this, what you guys do? Yeah, for sure. So I was a strength coach to I paid my way through physio school and I'm a physical therapist as well. And then basically came out, I guess, an hour, a little over 15, because I'm old. Yeah, definitely 15 years. Been doing this. Basically within the first year or so, realized I just kind of wanted to do my own thing and love golf and got into this whole space. So par for success is really kind of just evolved from the back of my car to we were in a shed to fast forward 15 years later. We've helped our database at this point is well over 15,000. And we've got a beautiful HQ here in Raleigh and work with people on five different continents and all over the world remotely. So it's been quite the journey. But I think the genesis of all of that was when I got into the games, probably, in 2010ish, you said, kind of everybody has their own spin. That's literally all there was was kind of spins or ideas or yeah, I joke, this is back in the day. Like now you can people know what the heck golf is. Back then I had to sell them on what the heck golf in this was and that it would actually help them and then be sudden like, Hey, and you should work with me. So this is like people didn't even know what it was. And but it's come so far in the last decade and a half, two decades. And really it's what we do has been all the genesis of, I think this works. So let's, let's prove it. And I think that's kind of really been the basis of our data driven approach to try to always make sure we're only doing things with people that we know is going to work. Yeah. I still think personally, like, I know it's come a long way and I still think there's a long way to go in terms of educating everyday golfers. The interaction I always get with people, whenever I mention lifting weights or stuff, like people get so overwhelmed or like, where do I start? Because again, there are so many resources and you're like, well, did you do that? Do this program or this program? And unfortunately with fitness, like many other things, when you get overwhelmed, you just don't do it. You just like, I can't do this. This is too much. I mean, the same thing with all construction too, right? It's like, well, do I need equipment? Do I? Is it something wrong with my hands? Like, there's just so many entry points of information. It's just no different in fitness and obviously with the explosion of social media in the last decade plus. I mean, if you click on one fitness thing, now you're getting 20 different approaches to something and you're getting exercise. I mean, you guys know, like, there's thousands of drills. And if a golfer doesn't know what the hell they're supposed to be doing, which of the thousand do they pick, right? And so it's no different. So how do you guys handle it? Do you take the, I know you work directly with golfers, one on one, and I'm sure you have more, quote unquote, generic info. But what's your 40,000 foot view on like the basic goals of golf fitness? Yeah, I think you pretty much hit it. The basic goals when you did the intro, right? Most people want to play the game longer. They want to do so without pain. Nobody likes hitting it shorter than they ever did. And most guys still want to hit it farther, even if they're hitting it the farthest they ever have. So there's usually a distance component. There's definitely a longevity component. And that's different depending on the stage people are in. If you're collegiate player, longevity for use, making it to the pros. If you're a 55 year old guy, you're trying to play into your 60, 70s and 80s, right? So those are very universal tenants that we see of goals of the fitness and obviously the pain. And so I think that's back pain, elbow pain, like nobody, nobody's playing golf if they're hurting. How do you accomplish longevity while hitting it farther and do so without pain? I think that in a nutshell, as wide people will pursue a fitness to help their golf side of things. What is the distance drop off or I should say club speed drop off over ages? When does it start to decline? Because I'm hitting 42 in a couple of months. And my speed is OK. But I'm just waiting for it to happen. And I suppose that you've got two answers to this. It's like, OK, what's the club drop off if you do nothing versus? If you actually train and do things. Yeah. So I think when we look at our population data, we look at our data set of basically everybody comes in and basically looking at it as who has not trained with us. Like, that's how we kind of define it. And what we look at when we basically speeds will go up, we look at decades, 10 to 20, 20, 30. It definitely starts to drop 30s versus their 20s. But the big kind of drop really is right around 41. It coincidentally enough for you. I'm here in the map. You are here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're at that point. But yeah, obviously it's different for everybody. This is looking at tens of thousands of people. Some people are fine till they're 45 or 50. Other people start to see it significantly in their 30s. I think ultimately it comes down to, you know, we take all of the data. The reason we do all the research is to try to simplify it so that my 12 year old son could understand it. And it's basically, do you have the mobility required in the four, I'll say the three most important areas for rotation? Do you have the strength relative to the speed that you're wanting to swing? And can you produce that strength as quick as possible, right? So it's your power. Basically, if you look at those three metrics from the physical side, we at this point can very cleanly say, hey, your safe, quote, unquote, safes predicted top end clubhead speed where your body is likely to not break down is X based on these metrics. And unfortunately, most players who are good golfers when I get to 41 are so optimized technique and equipment wise that they actually outpace what their body can do. And so you're able to hold that for a long enough time. You see it in tour guys where they start to break down like as I'll tourists or you have JT. And the guys aren't massive. Their bodies start to kind of break down. And I think for the average human who's not swinging 120 plus on tour and traveling all over the place, that definitely tends to happen in the early 40s for sure. But my 100 mile an hour club speed's not doing too much damage to my body then probably you're okay for now. You probably that you bring up a good point, obviously in jest, but if you're 41 40, say you're 41 42, right? And you're swinging 120 miles an hour versus a guy who's swinging 100 versus a guy who's swinging 90. Right. The guy who's 90 could have terrible mobility can just suck at everything strength. And power is probably not going to hurt you back because he's not driving the car real fast. But it 120 has a much smaller margin of error and a lot higher likelihood of being hurt, assuming that the physical capabilities were all the same. So it is relative. I think a lot of people ask always like based on age. The cool thing that we've done in our databases, not only can we look at how do you compare based on your age, but also you're swinging 100, you want to go to 110. What are the physical requirements that are necessary to get there? And what's where we at now? And what's the delta? And let's design something to kind of cover that delta. It's for somebody that may be mobility and someone else that may be strength or power, whatever, maybe. So the kind of the three things that I've speaking to multiple people at this point doing the training. So it's range of motion or mobility. How strong you are, which is kind of like the engine of the car, what it's capable of. And then how explosive can you be? And then all three of those things kind of relate to different exercises where mobility would be like doing the 90, 90 hip stuff and thoracic spine. That's lifting weights and explosiveness is like those vertical jumps and rotational forces that the basics of it as you see it. Yeah. I love the car analogy. I think you hit it right on the head with strength. That's how big is your engine. I always think of power as you can have a massive engine. But if you don't know how to drive stick shift, your transmission sucks. You're not going to drive very fast. You do see I've been around massive men who are I'm only 58 and 155. I'm strong for my size, I lift weights and I can see these massive guys were a million times stronger than you can't hit it far because they're not moving their bodies optimally. They're not like optimized in their strength, but their upsides probably way higher than mine if they got there. Yes, I call those guys caged gorillas. Yeah. If we get the cage off of them whether and that cage could be they don't have the mobility. Let's say hip mobility mentioned like 90, 90s or thoracic, right? And there's obviously there's tissue work to unlock and then there's mobility like movement Right training. There's some guys who actually are great with that.
they're super strong. They just have no idea how to move their body, right? And that's where the instructional side comes in of using the ground for, you know, first, shifting weight, right? And I think that's, I think where we really overlap a lot on the fitness side to the instructional side is being able to have those conversations and identify, hey, is the body the limitation or is this person just a motor more on in a way where they just don't know how to move and so we need to help them move better? Let's try and we'll go through some of these studies that you sent our way. I think the main one that I wanted to start with is kind of like, I think your biggest study, there's hundreds of golfers in there like what actually correlates with club head speed. I think you did some different measurements with chess passes and vertical jump by different ages. So walk us through like the basics. It sounds like it's ongoing research you've been doing on what correlates. It sounds like it's different by age level. I'm assuming you know, males and females as well. Yeah. So one of the first studies we started to look at, I think when I got into this space, there was obviously TPI, they have their big assessment. They use, there's lots of other assessment tools out there, right? The challenge that we had is we were working with commercial golf in a commercial setting and to do every single test out there would take two and a half hours. Yeah, yeah. Nobody's going to pay for that. So it was like, hey, how can we identify the 20% of the tests that account for 80% or more of the impact? And so that's where we came up and that study in particular, we identified from a power perspective because you hit it on the head, John, he said like, massive humans don't necessarily swing fast. Powerful humans, well, that's going to be what will connect to speed because club at speed is essentially the, in my opinion, the only thing that we can directly impact fitness wise. I'm not going to, hey, do squats and you'll hit it more center club face. That ain't going to happen. I can make your club go faster, which if you can hit it center face would help ball speed. But that's where we got to really looking at initially we started looking at seated chest pass and sitting in chair with the medicine ball and launching it as far as you could vertical leap. So just standing in place, jumping as high as you could and then there was a sit up and throw is the other popular one from TPI. When we started looking through all of the data, what we started to see is that all three of them had very high correlations or our values. Right. So they were all north of like point eight. So very strong correlation. Ultimately, what we care about those causation, right. Just because somebody's bigger doesn't mean that they're going to hit it far there, although it is correlated that bigger humans tend to hit it farther. Right. So you were measuring this in conjunction with their club head speed. Yeah. You were tracking that exactly. So the entire testing protocol was they would all go through all the mobility testing. Which is time we were doing hip internal rotation, which is rotating into your trail side and then rotating into your lead side and your hips. But we would actually using goniometers and measuring all that. We were looking at shoulder action, which we think of like a football player, a football player, a football player, they caught their own back. And we looked at thoracic rotation among others. But those ended up being the big three that were predictive of things or correlated to things. And then we looked at strength numbers, so we could squat, bench, dead lifts and pulls her rows. And then the power metrics we looked at were sit up and throw. We did a shot put. So I think I'm holding a medicine ball on one side doing a shot put. We looked at seated just pass and vertical leaves. So that's kind of like we started with all of those. And then we basically willed it down. So on the power side. And oh, and we also obviously did clubhead speeds. So we did gamer speed. So the queuing was you're on a par five, long par five. You have to keep it in play. But it's a 600 yard par five. So you had it out there. Let it go. Yeah. And then there was all out like, Hey, we don't care where the ball goes. Just how fast can you swing the club? That was kind of the initial we were just like, all right, let's just collect a ton of data and see what shows up. And so that's where we got started to see. Initially, you can see correlations. So statistically, you'll get the R values. Ultimately, what we care about is causation. And so that's where I think the cool part of our databases, people stay. We have some people to build us for over 15 years. So we can look at their change data. So we can implement a, hey, this is where you're testing out. We're going to implement this intervention. And then let's see what happens. And so what we started to see was in particular, the shot put, the seated chest pass and the vertical leap has clubhead speed one up. All of those tended to go up. But what was interesting is if vertical and chest pass did not go up, clubhead speed didn't move. So shot put could go up. But if chest pass and vertical didn't also go up, it didn't matter. Right. So fast forward 15 years to the point we are now, I know that if you were the four pound medicine ball, for every eight inches, you can throw it farther. That's a mile an hour of capability. It should be right assuming that you deliver it with the club correctly. We know that for every just under four inches of vertical leap that you can add, we know that that's going to be six yards. Now we have causational where hey, we can go up by X amount. We're going to see these types of improvements speed wise. That's awesome. I've always wondered that. I know there are things out they're like, oh, grip strength. That's what I was going to bring up. Yeah. Yeah. Distance. And I'm like, well, yeah, but if you increase grip strength, does it make you hit it farther? It could just be that someone with super strong grip has a super strong body everywhere else. It's the other things that make them hit it farther. It's such an important thing to look for the listeners. Here's, I think this is becoming marketing. Unfortunately, stats has become marketing and people, oh, it correlates. Who cares? Yes. If you have strong grip strength, let's just think about this as like a common sense human being. Higher grip strength probably means you can lift heavier things. So if you lift heavier weights, your grip strength is probably going to go up. That's where I think then we start looking at our database and we say, well, yeah, if you can deadlift 1.75 times your body weight, that's kind of the point of diminishing return. We're getting stronger and a deadlift isn't really going to transfer over to clubhead speed. Can it? Sure. But there's probably higher returns on your time investment that are available to you. So naturally, if you can deadlift, if you're 200 pound guy and you can deadlift and hold 300 pounds, your grip strength's probably pretty strong. Is it because your grip is strong or is it because you've been training and lifting to have your loads? I don't know if you guys have seen the stuff with basically the core, quote, force plates in the grips now, where they're starting to look at those. We've talked about that before. You're on the cool because they've got it. They had the show. Exactly. So when you look at torque players, they actually are lighter grip pressure, usually in the beginning than amateurs. Their peak pressure or pre-grip pressure is at that transition. And then, where's an amateur like locks down at impact? The fast guy in the world, we're kind of letting go. Yeah. William Muklo was on our show last year and that was really interesting hearing that the exact opposite. So I guess the question I have, so with the seated chess pass and the vertical jump, when you saw that, so were you saying like, okay, we need to emphasize this more in our training. What did it look like when you saw that stuff? Like how are you changing training programs for golfers based on that? Yeah. So I think if we go through kind of the history of the studies we did, that was kind of like the first thing that we saw, right? Yeah. I think I sent already guys like we did. So then we're like, all right, let's do another study. So I think we did six great weeks. We're going to have one group who strength, mobility, everything stays the same in terms of these groups. We have three groups that I believe and like one group is going to do all exercises that work to improve vertical leap and seated chess passes. So basically push power with the upper body and vertical with the lower body. That wouldn't be them just doing that actual exercise. They'd be doing chess presses and like strengthening their upper body. Exactly. So what we looked at doing with that group is like, could you do different variations of explosive pushing? So whether it's a single arm driving a med ball into the ground, not one that bounces in the face, but just in case anyone wants to go and try that after listening to this. I put a hole in the wall once in my base game with a med ball. I learned that lesson the hard way. I've done it with a golf ball. I was bouncing a golf ball. That's how concrete did that straight in the eye. I just saw this massive lump come down as horrendous. I think one of the funniest messages I've gotten on social is someone must have been filming them where they were doing like a slam. They're like, hey, I heard thanks so much for the tip. They were being kind of a smart about it. They're like, now I got a bloody nose. So they were using a rubber ball and they slammed it. It came back up and just nailed them in the face. I was like, no, you got to use a ball that like sand ball that hits and doesn't come down. Stamp in and blow. Hilarious video. But anyway, so like, yes, the training for that group was going to be like jumps explosive work there and then obviously explosive pushing stuff. So whether it was repeated med ball work on the wall or cables, whatever it may be, we compared that to a group who did all rotary stuff. So all the golf stuff, quote unquote, right? The UCN social media. Look at all these different bands and the rotations and everything that they do is that's the ideas that that would be what produce power. Then we have kind of control group who didn't really do either. They just did like a traditional training that we had always already been doing, right? So they just kind of kept down the same path. I mean, the results were stupid. How much better the vertical and the push group did, particularly compared to the rotary group. It was like, okay, we're going to continue to do more of that in fast forward five, six, seven years. That just continues that whole. I really wouldn't think that if you made me gas, I would say the rotation work would have been better, but to hear the verticals. So that was then the other question in my mind because I'm like, all right, there's a lot of smart people in this one. They're all doing rotary stuff. There has to be some element of rotary that's important. In that time, we had done another study where we had looked at what's called tri-phasic training, looking at squatting and hinging and pressing and pulling traditionally like when people would start. They would do their first four to six weeks, maybe 10 or 12 reps and three sets, right? So they do higher reps with not as much weight, obviously. And then their next phase, they would drop from 10 or 12 reps to five to eight reps. And then they would go the last phase towards maybe only two to three reps. So each phase, they would do more
weight. So it was heavier weight, but they would do it for less repetitions, obviously. The idea being that you're training your body to be more explosive and powerful as you go. There's a tri-phasic training is same three phases, but the instead of focusing on doing a lot of reps, you're actually focusing, you think of a squat, the lowering phase of the squat is the eccentric phase. So there's three phases of all movements, all right? So we actually, you'd focus on like going down for seven seconds. So it's like incredibly slow. And then you'd stand up, right? So you're training on your ability to absorb force. And there's lots of literature and research that that's one of the best ways to get hypertrophy or increase just general muscle strength. Then we would transition second phase, you'd go down, like normal pace, like normal speed, but then you'd hold it at the bottom five to seven seconds, right? The isometric phase, your ability to maintain that and then exploit it as you would stand up, which is the last phase, which is called concentric. So the third phase was we call it like a conversion to power phase. So you'd go down like normal, you wouldn't pause, but you would just focus on like exploding up as hard as you could. Bench pressure, you'd go down and explode up as hard as you could, almost like a velocity-based training idea. And the idea of that you're nervous system in those first two phases is kind of moving slow. So we were like, well, I wouldn't be surprised if speeds dropped, which club that speeds do drop during those two phases. But then you get to this third phase and then you'd see the speeds skyrocket up. And it was interesting that the eccentric side had a massively more valuable return in terms of clubhead speed gain than traditional training for adults. I was actually flipped with kids, which was weird, but like the lowering phase of a bench press. But then so the concentric part, the exploding up, sorry, I'm lost a little with that. Ecentric had a bigger effect on club speed. So that combination of those three things together, right? So what happens is the eccentric phase is where I think it was like you're just really building up, you're going to create a lot more muscle damage, you're going to build more muscular charts, your strength numbers are going to go up. Isometric, think of it like if somebody puts like a ton of sand in your hands, the more you can hold to like before you're going to then you have to like throw it into the air, right? So let's say you get like a pound of sand in your hands, so the bigger your hands are, the more you can store, right? As you're going down. Then the isometric is like can I hold it at the before I throw it for a long time without it all falling through my fingers? And then as much as is possibly left is the concentric I can throw it up over my head, right? So the eccentric is trying to build a bigger bowl to hold it. The isometric is can I hold everything without losing it? So I don't lose power. And then concentric is how hard can I explode it all that up and move it forward? So when it looked different if someone is optimizing for speed, versus like just general, hey, I just want to protect my body, be able to move well, or they kind of accomplish the same goal. Like does it look different based on like the assessment you give a golfer, meaning like, hey, we think you should do more of this speed related stuff versus, okay, let's get you more mobile and just stronger. It's a great question. So it's actually age dependent. So basically on that study, what we saw was kids do better with the first method I was saying, it's more your traditional start high reps, low weight, right? And that's just movement wise, they're just learning how to do the movement. Their bodies responded better, particularly for a golfer as it related to clubhead speed by like 30 plus percent or something. It was some stupid. How much better they did there versus the tri-phasic? Tri-phasic, I love for 40 plus because number one, if you can imagine, if you have to hold weight for seven seconds on the way down, it's obviously not going to be as heavy as you could possibly do, right? Yeah. So it's actually a lighter load, but your time under tension is increased. And you're going so slow that the ability to learn the form and the technique actually has an injury risk reducing element to it. And we saw for the adults that, obviously, it produced a much better return on clubhead speed than anything else we had ever seen before. So if we have an adult coming in, I love tri-phasic to start with people. Number one, because it's helps with the learning curve. Number two, we don't need heavy weight and we can obviously just focus a lot on technique and forms. That first phase, they're just, they're moving super slow. And then as we get to that third phase, now they're comfortable with the moves and now they're working on progressing to speed. They have a good base and then that's where we can then kind of move that forward. So I'd say it's more, obviously, training age and how long somebody has been training will impact kind of what we recommend from a strength perspective. But for an adult, if you're a golfer, eccentric training, like statistically is way better. And then that obviously would lead to, you know, that also applies to rotary, which is what we saw as well. So would you say, correct if I'm wrong, but the eccentric phase is like building the capacity. And then the concentric phase is like, okay, can I reach that capacity now? Correct. Yes. So the eccentric helps to make the engine bigger, right? Yeah. The isometrics making sure we're not leaking anything out of the engine. And then we can actually maintain everything we built. And then the concentric is how fast can I explode all that out? So the natural question because this form of training is so popular with swing speed and another study you did was overspeed training and you were kind of exploring. Are people just doing literally too much volume? Is it helping them? So before we get into the findings of that study, like the bottom line is like people don't have endless capacity to lift weights, do mobility, do overspeed training. Like it's a lot to ask someone who has a normal career and family obligations to be like, yeah, I want you to do overspeed training on your off days and straight, like it's just that's tour player type stuff or someone who's just like really into fitness. So that's hard to get our tour players to do everything too. Yeah, I'm sure because they have other obligations as well. And they got to let their bodies rest at times. So looking back before we get into that, like, is there preferred method on your end at this point where you say, like, hey, we like you to do what you just talked about all the tri phase, all that stuff versus like, you can do the sticks, but only do them once or twice a week. We are going to take a quick break and we will be right back. I absolutely hate bulky wallets that make you sit unevenly. Ridge has been solving this problem for over 12 years now and their latest 2.0 model takes their slim modern wallets to the next level. It's modular, which allows it to hold up to 12 cards and your cash while barely taking up any room in your pocket. And the Ridge 2.0 is made with premium materials like titanium and carbon fiber. So it's built to last and it's even 10% lighter than its last model. Plus, all of their wallets have a built for life warranty and there are over 50 colors choose from now, including your favorite NFL or MLB team logo. 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[email protected]. Yeah, so I think ultimately John and all comes down to our evaluation and this is this point we can profile you pretty quickly. So the simple way to profile yourself would be first thing we want to look at is do you have enough road remobility in your hip, your shoulder and your thoracic spine and that's going to be enough is defined based on age but also how fast you're trying to swing. So think of it as like a pyramid, the old food pyramid that I think they did away with. But it just got changed massively. Yeah, my kids came home with some weird plate looking thing. It's like all steak and milk now, right? Yeah, all milk. Anyway, we've moved to that apparently, but I'm going to take over the pyramid because it works well for this or the bottom part of that pyramid or the foundation of health and speed and all that, everything that we want from go fitness is mobility and having the ability to move our joints in a way where we're not running into, you know, hard end feels or running fast into brick walls where we get hurt basically. So that's kind of the first place that we always start with guys. And then what we found is if people can put in 90 minutes a week, 15 minutes, six days a week, it's enough. You know, we see on average 10 yards in the first 10 weeks like yeah, regardless of where you start, right? Some guys may start there. Let's say that looks good. Then the next step is the strength step. So right, this would be like we're looking at your tri-phasic. So it may be that like your tri-phasic focus generally, we just do that kind of on the bigger movements like a squat movement or a hinge or like slash deadlift movement, a press movement. We're not doing it on every single movement, but it may just be that hey, if you can work out 30 minutes, three days a week, great. Well, that's all we're going to take from you. Obviously, if you can put in more, you move faster. But then the third kind of level of that pyramid is in the power side, right? So that's the jumps, the med ball explosive stuff, cable explosive stuff. That would be kind of that third pyramid or layer to that pyramid. The tip of the pyramid, which I think used to be like dessert, right? That to me, dessert still is for me still is. That is truly speed training. In my sonar and all of our research, we categorize people as three categories physically. There's ticking time bomb, which is 93% of every single adult male over 50. Talent's gone for it. Do you actually tell people this or do you have like a euphemism for it? No, we tell you're ticking time bomb. Or if they're already hurt, then we're like you explode it already. And then we have, I call the unicorn is like the more RPMs under the hood guy. Right? So I'll start
there and work our way back to the more common. The more RPM under the hood guy is, I'll use an example, he was like 35 years old. He played division one basketball, he's six seven. He jumps 40 inches out of the gym. He can throw the medicine ball, freaking 50 feet. And he swings a club 100 miles an hour. Yeah, you know, your scratching your head, you're like, dude. And he's hyper mobile like a gymnast. He checks all the bottom of those pyramid. With him, he's somebody where like, hey, let's do like a step change drill. Let's just get you to like, figure out how to use your lower body first. And within five minutes, like this, what you see on Instagram, it's like, hey, within five minutes, guy goes from 100 to 127 miles an hour. I know someone like that who is a division one track athlete who took up golf in his 30s. And I'm like, yeah, try the sticks out. He's like, two weeks later, he's like, oh my God, I'm at 118. I'm like, yeah, of course. You suck it. I'm like, it took me four years. I've had a 20 mile an hour increase with someone as well. 20 mile an hour, I just asked them, just, can you swing faster? Yeah. All right, let's talk about the ticking time bomb then. Yeah, they do. So the tick is time bomb is somebody who either doesn't pass any like all the mobility tests. So they have a restriction mobility wise, which that will ultimately limit their ability, limit their on ramp. So I think ultimately what that's going to limit is ability to produce impulse. So the amount of time that they're going to be able to produce the force. So that's-- you can accelerate faster on 100 yard on ramp than you can on a 10 foot on ramp, right? So that's going to be the first one. The second is that they swing faster than what their body can handle based on all of our data. So we'll look and say, hey, your club hits beats 75th percentile for your age, but your power is 20th percentile. So when that number gets beyond 15% away, that would also-- so somebody who passes mobility but has that kind of a gap would fall into a ticking time mom and/or somebody who fails mobility. Unfortunately, those are majority since it's 93% of guys over 50. Those are the guys that are going for all these speed tricks. So they're skipping the bottom parts of the pyramid and jumping right to dessert. Got it. People are getting ahead of themselves and asking their body to do something that it's not. I'm going to keep them all up. I mean, basically, they're already 50% away faster than what their body can handle. And now we go to speed training to get even faster. So we widen the injury app. And then we scratch our heads and we blame it on the stick companies. They're like, oh, speed training sucks. No, it's just good for the right person at the right time. And unfortunately, most people are not the right person. So you found in your study that lower volume was actually a better outcome for people. So tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. So this was back 2017, 2018. When some of the companies-- I won't mention any names-- but some of the companies at protocols at that point were doing 100 rep protocols per week, or per session. Per session. Per session. I've done them. Yeah. It could take 30 minutes. Be on your knees. Then you'd be-- Stan, I mean, it was like-- and then you'd step into it and you're doing on each side. And so coming from the support performance background that I do, like, can you think of 100-- the Olympics are coming up, right? Can you think of 100 meters of sprinter doing 100, 100 meters in a training session three times a week? That's like utterly ridiculous. You would never do that, right? So I looked at that and so I was like, I wonder what would happen if we did a third of the volume. And so that's what we basically did is we did-- we're only going to do a third of the volume. And the other thing that a lot of the protocols didn't respect was the glycolytic recovery. You're going to go as hard as you can. That energy system gets exhausted really quickly, and it takes a minimum five, six to one. So if you work out for 10 seconds hard, you got to rest minimum a minute, right? So that's where we implemented after each set of five swings, you'd rest two minutes. And so when we did that, what we ended up seeing, we did-- and we also did a light stick, overly heavy stick, kind of one that was more along the lines of the driver. So we also looked at weights as well within this. TLDR, there was no statistical difference if you did one stick for a third of the protocol versus all three and getting 100 reps per set. Which is kind of good news, meaning more rest, less reps. You're going to get the same result. Yeah. And this was also the other thing that stoked this is I was getting a lot of people coming into to get hurt doing speed training. What kind of injuries were you seeing out of curiosity? Rists, elbows. Elbows? Yep. And then we get some backs as well, too. But definitely a lot of risks in elbows, particularly when you're doing dry swings. Like at this point for us, if somebody's over 120, we work with most of the long drive guys. None of them do dry swings. They all hit golf balls for speed training to get it. Because if you're swinging north of 120 with a dry swing, there's no decel. So that's, we see a lot of injuries at that speed. That's a conversation. I was at the PGA show last week in talking with someone who I respect on speed training. And I realized people listening to this. There are so many different opinions, right? People come out of from different angles. And his belief to me was that's all my head elbow issues that have been persistent for several years. And he's like, I just don't like swinging hard without making contact with something or having some type of resistance going on. That was just his belief. He's like, I think that's a recipe for an injury eventually. I can tell you what it is. Just from experience and having to fix them all. What's more important part? How do you fix it? I'm trying for four years. I mean, elbow-- I never was for going on what's causing it. So the elbow issue means as many injuries going to be the symptom. I don't know what caused it. I think it's a combination of probably too much weight, too much of that. Millions of golf balls over 25 years. Well, I think also if you're talking about elbow issues in particular, the first thing that the number one cause of elbow issues is going to be not having enough shoulder extra on a rotation. So failing the shoulder rotary test on the same side. Or failing the hip rotation test. Which elbow is it for you? My right, I have tendonopathy. You're right, hand player. Yeah. And I now developed golfer's elbow in my left. Got it. OK. Yeah. So I don't know what your hip rotation is. But-- It's not bad. I mean, I'm fairly mobile. But yeah, this has been-- I don't want to turn into the John Zelbo show out of having issues, too. But I'm at a point where I'm considering surgery in the next year or two. But this is where the first thing I would look at was-- we can do this afterwards, too. It's like, look at your actual hip-in-troner rotation on your left side. So that in South of '45, that's the number one cause of elbow issues that we see is that no matter what you do to that elbow, if you're always running into a block on your lead hip, you're going to have to overuse the elbows and wrists to create the road to movements. So you're automatically increasing stress on the elbows. Then obviously, the rehab stuff. Then you can do needling. You can do it. He sent record. I've done it all. And I've got messages from so many people from the show. It's amazing what people, everyone, is trying to be helpful. Like, you can go down to a whole rabbit hole with this stuff. So I will table that for another day. Looking at your question on that, the reason why hitting a golf ball doesn't hurt these guys is because when you hit the golf ball, it actually decelerates the club. Yeah. There's a deflection. Yeah. And ultimately, my opinion has changed, I think, over the last five years, working with more of these super high speed guys is ultimately what we care about is ball speed. Like Clubshead Speed is important. But the truly, I think, respecting the speed is a skill. Yes, you can build a big engine and you can go fast. But you start getting at 115, 120 when you're playing. You probably should be doing speed training in respect to not necessarily clubhead speed, but to ball speed. And can you hit center club while you're going all out? And ultimately, that's going to be what transitions to the course. OK. So it sounds like you're not against the overspeed training in general. It's just the context of it needs to be appropriate for the player and where they are and kind of their-- the majority of people that I-- like, if you're an amateur golfer, the majority of you should not-- there's probably lower hanging fruit that is safer than swinging dry swings with different systems that are out there. I will say just I don't get paid by Sasha or Stack, but his system, in my opinion, is the most intelligent out there and that it will use algorithmic adjustments for you. So if you are going to do one, that's what I recommend to our clients. I do need to talk to him about getting paid for that. But we've had Sasha on the show a couple times that saw him last week. I love him. He's super smart. Wealth of knowledge. Yeah. But I think the majority of people before talking about overspeed training are going to get so much more benefit by getting mobile first, strong enough. And then once you know where you're at, there's a time to do that. I think unfortunately, we just try to jump to that first. Yeah. And you found that 30 times a week was just as effective or 30 times twice a week was as effective as 100 times. Yeah. We did a follow-up study because I was like, this is a big claim that I would be making. So we did a follow-up study with a little larger groups as well. And we found the same exact thing statistically. There was no difference whatsoever in terms of club-head speed gains, doing just one stick 30 times, three times a week. So thankfully, at this point, all the protocols that I see out there now are lower volume, particularly in the beginning and they ramp people up. So at the very least, probably less people are getting hurt just because of that. Yeah. And where do you stand on? Mike Carroll has always had a piece of advice where he's just like, hey, at the end of your driving range session, take like five or 10 swings with your driver and hit a ball and just go crazy with it. When you're obviously fully warmed up where you're hitting the golf ball, he's obviously a proponent of all the things we've discussed as well. But do you like that? I mean, it sounds like you would because you're hitting a golf ball. I love Mike, I've had him on our podcast a number of times.
and him and I are definitely aligned on pretty much everything. The one asterisk, I guess I would say, is if you're going to do speed training, do speed training. Like if you're going to wait to the end and it may just come down to you don't have time to have like a speed day. Yeah, which in any case, what Micah saying, go ahead do it. But like what we recommend to our guys is take out like a PRGR or a stack radar, you know, one of this just gets club speed ball speed. And then you go, you swing as hard as you can and you see what the numbers let's say you're in you pick a metric, right? Whether it's ball speed or club speed that you're trying to beat. Let's say you're doing club at speed. So you swing a hundred miles an hour. And now you have three swings to beat a hundred miles an hour. And then if you don't beat it, you got to rest two minutes before you get to play again. If you do beat it, then you get a you refresh and get another three swings to beat the new high. Right? And that's your new mark. I will say I do find that that is easier for a lot of guys to do in a simulator where they can only put up on the screen the ball speed so they can't literally can't see where the ball goes. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely are some mental issues that we have as golfers of yes, I broke my speed, but it went in the woods like like you have to let that go. And I think that does. Yeah. You know, who did a good job of this recently? I'll give a shout out to them SkyTrak released a new version of their launch monitor and one of the yeah. So they have a speed training mode now where you can kind of like what the PRGR does. It'll just measure your swing speed independent of hitting a ball. But then they also have that mode where you can just focus on ball speed or whatever. And it's I think something that most launch monitor companies should think about kind of programming. And I think that's a really good point. 100%. We do in person events once a month will have 10 to 20 kind of people fly in. And one of the segments we do is we take them through proper speed training. Yeah. So we'll put up on the Sims just the one one number we're blasting music. Basically, it's like it's basically like they're in a long drive speed training session. And these are like we got 78 year old guys wearing bandanas. They're teams. They're going there. They're going against each other to see if they can be gain the most relative to where they started as teams. That by far and away though, John is the number one thing that I see with these guys is like there's no swing tip. It's like dude, just go hard move. Yeah. Yeah. Like take it back fast and go like you're just going to take their head their minds off of it and then get into the point like if they put an idiot mark on it, but their clubhead speed was PR. We're slapping high fives and they're like totally confused. You're like, no, that's the point. The whole goal of this was more clubhead speed. Now that you get more clubhead speed, now you can work on it and sign on the face because I was seeing it for golf, but it is such a big mental barrier that we a lot of golfers need to break down. So if someone asked you, they're like, Hey, I don't want to go through evaluations. I don't want to do different phases. Like I just want to cover the basics. So the basic, I'll tell you what I do. After I've learned everything and maybe it's not as much as I could be doing like specific to speed, but I just wake up and do like 10 minutes of mobility. I do three full body strength workouts a week. I actually started doing Pilates. I have a tonal machine that I love. Sure. And they added Pilates to it. So I've been doing some Pilates, which I've been kind of enjoying just to kind of mix things up. And then I'll just kind of go crazy on my simulator trying to swing really hard and I've done it all. I've done stack super speed golf, but I don't, I think for a while I was going way too heavy and way too fast. And my belief is that's where the elbow stuff started showing up. I don't know for sure. Yeah, so I think the question is like this a lot. I think every, it sounds like you're doing a lot of the right stuff. My first place I would look is I would want to see, I would want to measure what is the actual mobility that you have in the hips, the spine, and the shoulder. If those are all great, what you're doing just to maintain it a little bit on each is perfect. But if your shoulders and your teaspoon are good and your hips stink, well, maybe 10 of those 15 minutes is hip. It may just be too, just a little more customer. Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to maintain like I built up to maybe a hundred and eight hundred and ten miles an hour and I've pretty much like stayed there doing this stuff. I haven't declined. To me, this is a guy like you is like super fun because now I'm going to start to look at and say, all right, he's got a base, right? He's been doing a lot of the right things. Well, let's look at how he, how he moves. So one of the things we haven't talked about we haven't published this, but we started really looking deeply into it's called elastic utilization ratio. And so the early test we looked at just a vertical if you'd start by standing up, you dip down and you jump up as high as you can. Yeah, now we have force plates now and multiple sets and we've started looking at, you know, obviously it's not how high you jump. It's the amount of force you can produce that actually is the closer relationship, causational relationship to speed. But the other interesting thing we've seen particularly in adults is looking, honestly, we have a kid, he's playing at Carolina who he falls into like a 60 year old category for this. We also look at what's called static leap, right? So you would squat down like you're at the bottom of your dip before you're going to jump and you hold it there for like five seconds. And then you just immediately jump straight up. There's no dip. So there's no elastic stretch that occurs. It's from like, almost if you were sitting in a chair and you just got to stand jump. And so when you look at the difference of those, what you're getting is the static is saying, if all you can do is use your strength because you don't have any elasticity to use no rubber band effect, how high do you go? How much force do you produce? And then let's look when you're standing up and you can have an elastic effect, theoretically you should go and efficient. Lastly, you should go higher. What we see with a lot of adults is that ratio is like one to one or even negative where the static is higher than the elastic. We have a kid, he's, he'll play on tour. He's at Carolina right now. Since he was 16, his EUR was negative. He just naturally is a really strong kid and he gets his speed from his strength. He does not get it from elasticity. So we've had to over index elasticity, pliometric, those stats to sort of work for him to try to continue to get him to go faster. So that's where like for you, I'd look at say, all right, what can you do? What can you bench? What can you squat? If you're hitting those metrics to me where it's like, all right, you're pretty much at the ideal numbers of where getting more isn't going to get you like that much more speed. I'm going to look at your obviously your chest pass. I'm going to look at your vertical and then I'm going to particularly look at your elastic utilization ratios in those arenas. And probably your training starts to look a little bit more dialed where maybe instead of three days total body strength, let's say your elastic utilization ratio isn't any good. Let's say you're not very elastic. Yeah, well then maybe two of those days, like 60% of the time, I may have more elastic elements. So we may do like French contrast training, right? We'll do a squat and then immediately go into a resisted broad jump or some sort of depth drop to a jump or box jump, right? Or some sort of pliometric element in it. To see if we can get your elastic utilization ratio. So that's where it starts to get really intricate is looking at if all of your stuff is pretty good, then to me, that's where all the fun stuff that you see on social and what kind of becomes important. But for some people to start. It sounds like you're obviously a big proponent of dialing it in and being customized versus, okay here. I mean, again, let's say someone doesn't want to do that. You said you got 90 minutes a week. What is it? Lift weights and mobility. Well, how 90% of people over the age of 50? I mean, shoot over these are 30. Let's go. Most people are sitting all day long. Do mobility work on your hips, your shoulders, and your T-spin for maybe even do five minutes a day. And then like pick one, one a day. Just alternate between those three. And then squat, deadlift, or hinge. If you don't want to deadly on your obviously, hex bar, we've also found hex bar squatting is a little bit more highly correlated to club head speed than deadlifting. So we definitely prioritize kind of a squat. Hex bar is a great tool that's safer than a barbell because most people have crappy form. And they say that deadlifts are the spawn of Satan, but in reality, they honestly, it's become my favorite exercise. I was a guy who skipped leg day for over a decade. And I love doing RDLs and neutral deadlifts. I love it. It's fun. I said the fact matters. Most people do it wrong. And then they blame it and say it's a bad exercise but in reality. Well, I definitely in the beginning, I wasn't doing it properly. I was hurting my lower back but I think it's helped my lower back now. Well, yeah, especially if you do it correctly. So, you know, but so I mean, if I was just saying this to the average geo out there, five minutes a day of mobility to rotate into your shoulders, your T-spin and your hip. And for specifically, extra rotation and the shoulder and internal rotation. Then I would say pick one day, do some squats, another day, do some hinges or safety. I would use a hex bar, but a hinge. Then do a press movement, like a bench press or something along those lines. And then I would do a row movement, like a seated row or like something like that. That would be it. If that's all you did, that will help 90% of people. A year case, you've been doing all that already. That's where I'm like, all right, well, I mean, if we're truly going to see 115, we're going to have to get a little bit more specific and see exactly what you're doing. And how do we kind of break through that 108 to 110 plateau? Yeah, I've been hesitant just because of the pain, right? I moved back on the weight because I started trying to squat and deadlift as much as I can. I felt it in my elbow, like trying to deadlift, to ton of weight, tearing up my elbow. So I'm like, I'm just going to back off. Number one rule in the gym is do no harm. Exactly. So yeah, I've been like in a more of a static mode the last few years and just holding on to what I've got. But I think if I'm being critical, like, yeah, the jump, the other stuff could be, I've ignored that because I'm kind of a creature of habit. I'm like, I'm just going to do my three full strength workouts a week and I'll be fine. I mean, the simple thing for someone like you, as I would say, like you're somebody who's been lifting for a long time, just throw in if you're doing a squat, throw in a jump activity, like a within 30 seconds afterwards and do five to six reps of it. And you're doing a press, like one of my easiest things that I'll do,
is I'll do a set of bench. I'll take a six pound medicine ball. I'll lay on my back with my arms all the way out on the ground. I just tossed it up like 18 inches. So then I have to kind of catch it. I'll catch it down to my chest and then I try to explode it up and hit the ceiling. So there's a elastic element to that where I'm working on speed. So yeah, that's the piece that sounds like could be added for you. What are the dose for response curves? Look, looking like in terms of, you know, if you if you did an hour of training a week versus two versus three versus 10, is there a point where it's do you talk through that? Yeah, so I think what we have found is that 90 minutes in a week, so we guarantee everything we do with all of our clients and other the guarantee and that's what when tracking everything it's 90 minutes is kind of the minimum that we require. The reason it's 90 is that probably leaves 20 minutes of human error and laziness of not doing anything. So it's probably more than 70 minutes. Yeah, but that obviously is just also we're telling them to do exactly what it like what is the lowest possible hanging fruit and think of theory of constraint, right? We're going to attack what is the one thing that one domino if we knock this down that makes everything else easier and that's where we start in that 90 minutes and then from there we go to the next to the next right. So now sudden mobility is good. Cool. The next constraint is strength. So we're starting to work more on that. If you can get to two, three hours, I would say if you get to five hours a week going north of there, there's probably a diminished five hours a lot. That's a ton. That would be a lot. So that'd be like exactly like three one hour strength workouts in a week and then you're probably going with like 20 minutes of mobility every day. That would be excessive. I don't say that would be excessive. There's some people in it to do it, but if you love working out, sure go ahead and do it. But I would say the guys who get the biggest gains that we see as golfers who are doing like enough total for the week, I'd say when she gets to three hours, we're kind of like anything else you're doing is just because you like it. Yeah, which that's one of the reasons I want to have you on just to like kind of reinforce that message is like it is unbelievable what you can achieve in 90 minutes a week if you kind of stuck with it and the other right plan. And I think that's just a matter of we have a home assessment we use that we give to people for free. All of our clients like we literally will say, Hey, these are the five tests. If we don't look so we have a number of people who may not come in once a month and we'll say, All right, in two weeks just retest yourself and make sure that it's you haven't gone back or it's staying the same or like guys go on golf trips. Right. And it's like you just like taking time bomb golf trips. A lot of it's going to go play 10 days in a row after not playing for three months. A lot of it's destroying my back. Yeah, but like those are like, even like, Hey, when you wake up, just test your hip quick. And if it's not at x point that we've determined is good for you, roll out dude five minutes to get it where you need it. So you're good for the day. It's just learning a lot of those little things and learning your body because John, it may be your hip, Adam, it may be your shoulders, your thing. Everybody has their little unique thing. But for me, it's the biggest I think when for me is every guy who can come in or grow is like, I know my body now that they feel empowered that they know what their body needs to continue to stay healthy and play. How do you improve flexibility as logical and obvious as just push yourself into that range of motion and push it a little bit more? The other tricks. Yeah, so interesting research around this is they do some studies and like a lot of people say, Oh, if you're, you know, let's say you can't touch your toes, for example, right? That's just one that everybody knows. They'll say, Hey, you got stretch, right? So the classic way we would do that is bend down, try to touch your toes, hold it for 30 seconds, right? And you're like, All right, I do have three times. I should be able to touch my toes. The fact of the matter is when you look at the actual fibers of muscle that acted in mice and fibers, they did studies with contracture research that actually see those lengthen because the idea is like, Hey, my hamstrings are only 18 inches and they need to be 20 inches. So I'm going to hold them and they'll get longer. It takes five. You've told us for minimum of five minutes for like at the fiber level for that stuff to actually get any sort of length to it. Nobody's holding stretches for five minutes. So where we see the improvements is generally speaking, it's my facial work or like basically I'll call brain work. So think of my facial is very simple. If you think of think of your arm as your muscle, say your hamstring or what any muscle your body, think of your sleeve on the arm as the fascia. If I raise my arm up, the sleeve will naturally slide down. Unfortunately, what happens is we get older is we'll develop like duct tape. That's my non-technical term, but everyone understands it. Consider like you grab the bottom of your sleeve and you hold it to your chest. Now, the sudden you can't raise your arm. There's nothing wrong with your arm. It's just the relationship between the sleeve and the arms no longer allowing the arm to move anymore. So all we have to do is remove my other hand from my sleeve and all sudden, magically, my arm goes back up. So how we'll see like big improvements in mobility immediately is through that sort of a thing. So you can use lacrosse balls or soft balls or therocains or somebody's thumb or their elbow. We have somebody come in here, we'll pin and strip. So we'll pin the restriction and strip, move their arm through and we're pinning kind of the fascia. Basically, quote unquote, ripping the duct tape off and then magically all of a sudden they pick up 10 degrees. It's like when we have our events here, the average person in an hour of a mobility course that we go through like a class, when we test them afterwards has gained at least five degrees of motion in every single joint. Right. And that's not because we stretched the muscle. That's because we ripped off a lot of duct tape that they were stuck with. So think of that as step one, that's a nervous system change. Step two is then you need to actively use that motion now that you've unlocked it. So your brain doesn't try to re-lock it up. So think of it as like golf, right. If you don't practice chipping, you will not be as good at chipping as you were when you were practicing. Right. Your brain kind of forgets it. It's a skill. Movement is a skill too. If you're not using a certain movement, your brain is trained to say, "Hey, what's the least amount of work I can do to keep Chris upright?" And if he's not going to use that motion, well, then I'm not going to give it to him. I'll just restrict it. And I don't have to be as strong to control the whole motion. So it actually starts to begin weakness that starts to happen. So think of it as the first step as you got to get the tissue relationship cleaned up so you can actually move through the motion. Second is you have to actually actively use that motion and move through it. So this would be like a 90/90 that you mentioned, John. It is a great thing. I think of like if I was going to release my TFLs and my glutes with a lacrosse ball to clean up the tissue restrictions, then I sat and I did a 90/90 where I'm kind of moving my hips back and forth to move through it. That's kind of step two. Step three is now you want to load it or move fast through it. So now you may train like squat, which requires internal rotation to get to the bottom of squat. You may train a med ball throw posting on your left leg to internally rotate all the way into your lead side with velocity, right? And focusing on clearing into that hip. So it's kind of a three step process. I think where a lot of people get stuck is they just roll and they don't do the other stuff. And so they just end up chasing their tail. Now the other fashion is if it's not a tissue problem, it can be a movement problem. So a lot of people who can't touch their toes. It's simply because if you go stand up against a wall, put your heels on the wall, your butt on the wall, try to keep your heels there and try to touch your toes. What's going to happen is you're not going to go very far because you'll fall flat on your face. Your brain is going to say, Adam, you're going to fall on your face. So it's going to restrict you from moving. So it will tighten the hamstring. All right, this is why you'll have women who can palm the floor with their knees totally straight. You're like, oh, my hamstrings feel so tight because their brain is like, oh my god, like either you're too weak to control that motion or your kind of feels like it's falling forward. As opposed to, you know, John, you mentioned that you've gotten much better at deadlifting. Can you imagine deadlifting with your heels on a wall? No, I can't press your butt back. Correct. And that's that's what allows you to go down. That's a lot of people don't think about is to touch your toes. You have to push your butt backwards. So we'll actually do drills with people who say, hey, stand a foot away from the wall. So your heels are like 12 inches in front of the wall. And just keep your knees straight and sit back to your butt. It's the wall. And just get the feel of what that feels like. And we'll have guys who we happens every month. Guys, come in. I haven't touched my toes in 30 years. It really is unbelievable. When you I've been doing deadlifts for six, seven years now and like I used to wake up in my 30s. I couldn't put my socks on in the morning. I was so tight. Now it's like no problem. Well, now you've trained your body to move. So I'll set now the hamstrings don't feel like they have to contract to save you from falling over. And you got stronger. So now you're that's to me, that's like the save button. When you get strong through that range of motion, now your body can control it. It's amazing how much less mobility you actually have to do because you can maintain and control it. Yeah, let's talk about injuries. We'll let you go in a bit. But you clearly will get a ton of people coming to you in pain. And a lot of rehab is kind of what we've been talking about is like getting more mobile and stronger. So walk us through like what are the most common injuries golfers are coming to you with? And then what does, you know, if someone comes to you says like, Hey, I've got a problem area. What does it look like? You know, give me an example of what that might look like for someone. Is it any different? No, so it's I think the number one thing that I if people take nothing else away from this and talk about pain wherever you're hurting 99 percent of the time isn't the problem. Yeah, it's something else caused it. Right. Let's be like hit a root and you fractured your wrist. Yeah. Your rib pain is not because your wrist is a problem. It's going to be because something else is not doing what it's supposed to and the wrist is taking on the load, right? The most common injury and golf is back. So particularly the low back. And so I think when you start to think about how that happens, the number one limitation that golfers have is no hip motion. And if so, a joint is supposed to move and it doesn't, then the joint above or below needs to.
take on that motion. Yeah, but low back is right above the most commonly restricted area. Types? Yeah, the hips are the most restricted and it's not happens to us that the back is the most commonly injured, right? Because the back ends up trying to take on all the extra work that the hips and/or the shoulders are not doing. So I think when we have somebody that comes in, the three most common are going to be back issues, elbow issues, wrist issues. I'd take kind of like second tier is going to be shoulders, hips, and knees. Those are probably the two main categories. You always get random stuff otherwise, but those are the definitely back shoulders and wrists are definitely the most common. And so I think when we see that when somebody comes in the evaluation that we go through, honestly, is no different than if you were healthy in the beginning. I want to grow, how well do you rotate? If you don't rotate where I want to know how strong are you? What can you do without pain? The one difference is then we'll start to look at joint specific, like Sophie just talked about your elbow. I'm going to want to know is it inside or outside? Is it from the flexor carbion there? Is there pressure there? Is it coming from the radios? Is it from supinator or pronator? Like we're going to stress all these others to try to figure out which muscle in particular is causing the problem? But that's still that's just the symptom muscle, right? So obviously in the pain situation you have to address and fix the symptoms so that this would say to your elbow. So your elbow feels better, but I also know that that elbow will never get better if we don't address maybe the hip that isn't moving. And that's what's causing the extra stress on the elbow in the first place. I think that's unfortunately where a lot of golfers kind of get screwed is they'll go to the doc or the physio and I have an elbow pain or back pain injection. The joke is you go the first time they'll give you ad bill and tell you to rest two weeks. Yeah, maybe PT, right? You go the second time they'll give you an injection. You go the third time then they'll cut you. So you've got to go three times before they'll cut you. But unfortunately none of them are looking at the way the insurance world works. Like if you go for elbow pain you go to PT for elbow pain technically they can't bill you if they treat another body part. Like they only treat your elbow but the reality is 90% of the time, 99% of the time the elbow is just a symptom. The problem's coming from somewhere else. That's kind of the challenge that I think a lot of people run into is they'll symptom treat and not necessarily problem treat. So yes, you got to get rid of the symptom but if you're not addressing the problem and ultimately it what's causing it you're gonna kind of chase your tail a little unfortunately. Just like the golf swing. After all of my searching I'm still not sure what the root cause is. We're gonna look at your hands. You've got me curious now at this point but the number of people that have come into me like I've seen 20 doctors, I've seen like I'm never gonna be able to be pain free and then you look at my mind is like simple stuff of like well let's look at hip rotation. I had a college golfer who came in she had not played for seven months. Very close to this point she was a high schooler so she's 18. She's going to top division one ACC school. She has not played for eight months she's had back like terrible back then. She's seen four docs, two surgeons. She's scheduled for surgery in two weeks and we happen she happened to know somebody that I worked with. She came around with her friends. She was in town for when we were driving through for vacation or something so she comes in and literally all it was was her so as muscle was so locked down which is a muscle that goes from the inner thigh kind of up along like under her belly button. It's the number one strongest hip flexor. It's also a hip internal rotator. Shockingly it was on her lead side. She's a right-handed golfer. It's on her left side. She swings at 18 and like five six one ten. She swings one ten. Wow. And shockingly like her muscle sees up because she wasn't strong enough. So literally going to just release the sewage she stands up and she's like in ten minutes I can swing pain through. It's like cool. Well that's what was causing the pain symptomatically but that's not what's going to fix it. That's going to come back and tighten back up if you just go start swinging again. The good news is now I know I can fix your pain. Now we got to fix everything of why that sees up and you got to get stronger. I think that's unfortunate. A lot of people would be like they stand up off the table and they're like oh my pain to go on I'm fixed. They're end up being back four weeks later because they get hurt again because they didn't actually fix it but a lot of stuff can really be that simple. So where do you think if you've been doing this you said for well over a decade and obviously a lot has changed like what's your prediction for like the next five or ten years? Is it more of this personalized type care and golf fitness? Like what would you like to see happen? Yeah I think I think what I would love to see particularly with where AI is coming. I didn't see any of this. You're starting to see. You saw it a lot at the show on the PJ show recently where there was the AI in the like swing bays and those sorts of things but I would love to see it coming where you know it's in the fitness world where we're using AI to do evaluations and measurements of these things where we're using kind of the human and the coach. So hey these are the parameters that we're looking for. Can you give me the most accurate measurements help me profile and basically help to make the coaches more efficient? I don't think AI will replace the coaches but I think it will make coaches much more accurate much more consistent and that feedback loop back to the golfers. Good. Just going to get exponentially quicker. It seems like I mean we the technology is there to pick up 3D motions with the basic cell phone camera at this point. Yeah we're just waiting for there hasn't been that one singular platform that's put it all together. You've certainly pieced it all together. There's measurement tools out there that can measure how far your hip moves or your shoulder moves right but there's not a tool out there that has put it all together that takes that puts it into an algorithmic based on a database and then says hey based on this this would be what it's recommended and then kind of let's go from there and adjust but it's common. Investors? Possibly you. Get prestige worldwide on it. I've got the roadmap built out just waiting for there to be a platform our way that we can do it. I mean it's the technology to your point is there it's just fractured. Yeah playing an AI that I have done and trying to build agents and those sorts of things and it's just not efficient enough yet but it's certainly there it's been there where you could put think of like going to the ear in your home you put your phone up with your workout and you're gonna get immediate feedback I mean the tonal all of these. Yeah I tried it on the tonal released it a year ago I tried it I was like still too early right. It was annoying I did. Yeah. It's like I get a little deeper or you're leaning too far left or coming right that's coming and it's going to be incredibly accurate the key is going to be how annoying is it and a second it's inaccurate people are going to stop using it so it has to be a good enough quality where it's not annoying. Yeah that's always the problem any product training aid whatever is like if it's not properly designed people give up in like under two minutes so like I'm out. You've got one chance to get them. Right but that to me like the consumer while they are going to get annoyed think about if you can take that feedback bundle it and send it back to the coach because you're doing the workout let's say asynchronously. The coach gets that immediate feedback of hey on their squats they're leaning five to do more left or right. Yeah that'd be interesting if you were just recording all of your workouts in the background and it's kind of summarizing everything and sending a report to the coach that's like obviously summarized and quick that they could see it. Now that's actionable data that the coach can use to help you in your next coaching session and they have all the like like those are the things that a ways that I think that's going to really kind of be used to. Well whoever's listening who wants to build that app perhaps it's a business opportunity. I mean no I got the plan I'll build that. Awesome. Well is there anything like I know we covered some of the studies is there any other major points you want to hit on this have we kind of gone over you know the basics of your kind of philosophy? I think we've covered everything. I think the only other cool thing that we didn't get to from one of the studies was the eccentric we talked obviously about the tri-phasic. Yeah that's led into we did another study on eccentric rotary loading which to me I still think that's one of the most under recognized findings that we've had even like with my own team. I'm like guys use the flywheel more. So if you've heard of a flywheel but basically yeah yeah I've seen them. Okay yeah so basically the harder you pull it the harder it pulls back so it was initially. Yeah. It came out for like astronauts and for loading and everything in the 50s when they're open space and zero gravity. So they could kind of get resistance even though they didn't have gravity. So what we found is because that has an eccentric overload we hypothesized that well I wonder if we used that because we had done that other study where rotary with bands and cables kind of didn't do anything. It was much better to do vertical leap and chest passes like pushing power. Well I wonder if we overloaded instead of concentric like a typical cable machine if you set it to 20 pounds it's 20 pounds the whole time right when you pull it out and when you rotate it back you do a chop whatever. With an eccentric flywheel if you pull out let's say with you know 20 pounds with speed it's going to pull back with 30 to 40 right and there's bluetooth devices that will measure the wattage of output that you can see how much more you're getting on the eccentric return back especially you pull out harder then you have to really fight to control the return back. We did a six week study with that and we saw 150% improvement in clubhead speed gains relative to just traditional rotary movement right so if you're doing rotary movement let's say you were going to gain two miles an hour you with eccentric you gain three right so rotary movement would be like kind of mimicking the back swing like you're getting resistance as you're rotating away from the ball yeah maybe just super simple we have to say you have your arms out in front yeah and you just kind of with a bar and you just rotate got it right you're just rotating your body and your torso on either side. Just like testing your like oblique strength and that type of stuff. Correct.
Right. So, I mean, when you think about it, it makes sense. If training on a muscular chair, eccentrically in frontal and your sagittal, like the other planes makes sense, it would make sense than going kind of side to side, transverse, like that would make sense too. It's the same tissue. So, you would think that physiologically we'd have the same training effect. So, that was something that we definitely saw was hugely important too. One challenge with that is not many gyms have eccentric flywheels because nobody knows what the heck they are, how to use them. They look cool as like a home workout tool because I think they're really space efficient, right? Yeah, I mean, from a rotary standpoint, they can just hook onto a wall. They don't take up much space. I think it's cool because I got the tech built in where you can measure your wattage output time by time they all have apps with them. So, that was a really cool finding that I think is important to note too, just because I see so many golfers doing these rubber band rotations and stuff. And I'm like, "Guys, there's a better way." Yeah, yeah. I'm looking at them now on Google. I've seen them before. They're cool. I love gadgets. I mean, that's why I've been a tonal user for I think four years now and I just absolutely love it. Not a paid endorser, but I just love the product. It's been very good. And I think that's the word a lot of the fitness stuff is going is using those home units. You start putting in the AI and the camera capabilities and giving feedback. Yeah. And it saves space too. I was going to like build a squat rack and all this stuff and I'm like, let me just get this thing that goes on the wall. You could do it all. Let me see. Thank you for all your time. I think we have, you guys had set up a special landing page for listeners to get the, tell us more about the evaluation that people can get and I'll tell them where to go. Yeah, for sure. So basically what we try to do is give away the evaluation for free to everybody. So suddenly you can do it home so you can assess all of your rotary, the rotary spot joints that we do when people come in here. You can see how you compare to other golfers your age. I think that's one of the really cool things is based on our database. If you're 45 or 85 or how do you compare to other people your age as well as like how do you compare based on like how fast you're swinging. And then we'll also, if anybody wants just for being a list for the show, we'll also have the ability to even let you jump on. We'll do a 45 minute free console with you. So kind of talk through what your results mean, give you a better idea of the data. Careful. We have a lot of listeners. We're going to overwork. We're prepared. It may just be a couple, maybe a week later so before we can get to you. The ultimate goal that we have is yes we're a business and if you want to work with us great, but I think the ultimate mission that we have is to help every golfer play this game as long as possible. In my opinion, that starts with having the right information about your body and having a concept of what's normal for your age, which I don't think has been really available in the past. It's kind of been, how do you compare to Tiger? How do you compare to Tiger? Yeah, which is irrelevant, right? How do you compare other people in your age bracket with your physical abilities so you can get all that for free now? Cool. I'll put it in the link in the show notes, but it's par 4 as in the number 4 success.com/sweetspot. I'll also put it in the show notes, but that's where you can get your free evaluation. I think I'm going to do the evaluation too. I want to go on here. Yeah, me too. Sorry, it's a par4success.com is obviously the company sites so people can learn more there. Any other resources that you guys have a YouTube page and other stuff. You've given us a ton of information, so promote yourself now. We're on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, so we definitely put out a number of different things every single day. I mean, the studio quite often, recording things. Those are all great resources. We try to put out a bunch of content, educate, give you lots of free resources there. Definitely check it out. I think the number one spot is to check out that home assessment, figure out where you're at, and then that at least gives you an idea which of the thousands of videos, even just on our YouTube page, to the e-should be starting. Yeah, relevance is a big issue in the golf swing and this stuff also. Very good topic to cover. All right, so we'll have that link in the show notes. Thanks for coming on. Hopefully, people learned something new where we're trying to give different angles on this topic. So thank you for that, Chris. Adam, we're going to find everyone your stuff. Adamiangolf.com. John, we can be able to find your stuff. Go check out my YouTube page, John Sherman Golf, and we'll see you next time with the new episode.
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