Has anyone’s golf swing gotten worse after lifting weights?
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010 at
1:31 am
ConnorWilhem3 asked:
I’ve been lifting hard the past few months and gained 10 pounds of muscle. My strength is great, but I’m now shanking the ball.
I’ve been lifting hard the past few months and gained 10 pounds of muscle. My strength is great, but I’m now shanking the ball.
Tagged with: Golf Swing • Lifting Weights
Filed under: Golf Swing
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Just keep hitting them. I had to lift weights all summer for my high school football team and I hit a golf ball and it was like I had never played before. It just takes some time for your body to get used to.
Yes that did happen to me, just wound a little too tight. Before you hit the links make sure you stretch properly , especially your shoulders and upper body. It will help tremendously.
lifting will affect your swing but you should be able to adjust
It happens sometimes, not just with golf. I used to be spot on for three pointers then i gained 12 pounds, none of my shots were hitting. I had to ‘recaliberate’ my aim to accomodate my newfound strength. I practiced at it day and night for a week until i got my 3 pointer back. After that, i was once again able to hit at least a dozen in a row consistently during practice..
Muscle is great but your problem now is your flexability. That is the only problem. When people get big they forget about stretching properly and lose their flexability.
I think weight training is excellent for golf. The vast majority of the top players in the world are on some type of strengthening program. I would make sure and include 2 things in any program: Stretching is an absolute must! Also, plenty of sets with lower weights and higher reps.
Lifting weight is not recommended to help improve the golf swing. It may or may not help depending on your actual body, muscle mass added strength added etc.,
Golf is more about co-ordination and while strength may help speed and skill are far more important. Specific golf exercises to increase flexibility and build elongated muscles rather than bulging muscles are recommended. Too many bulges may get in the way and reduce flexibility which would be counter productive.
It is unlikely weight lifting made you swing worse, that may have happened as a result of false expectations.
Keep pracitcing you are probably swinging faster than you normally would, but just don’t realize it. Slow down your swing speed. Pros only swing 85% of what they can fully swing. It is not a race.
I’ve been lifting weights and I’ve had a better swing because I gotten stronger I’ve also hit straighter.
Johnny Miller was the leading money winner on tour for awhile, then he spent several months in the offseason working on a ranch that he had bought. He returned stronger, but he lost the fine putting touch and his game never really recovered.
David Duval was #1 for awhile, but he started an intensive fitness training program, probably in response to Tiger. Shortly after that he dropped out of the top ranks and had trouble making the cut. Did the training contribute to his difficulties? It’s hard to know for sure.
A golf swing is a delicately balanced motion involving precise coordination of hundreds of muscles and perfect timing. The margin of error at impact is very small. Changes in the strength and flexibility of some of those muscles can easily throw the overall result out of whack. You may need to retrain your swing to get used to your new strength.
For some people, strength training can lead to “trigger points”, which are tiny muscle cramps or knots in a single muscle fiber. You usually don’t know that you have them unless you probe around with on your muscles with your fingers. A trigger point is very sore right at one spot, but you can’t feel it unless you are pressing on it. Some people get just a few; other people get dozens of them. A trigger point will interfere with the smooth operation of the muscle group that is it in – not good for golf.
The bad new is that a trigger point often will not go away by itself. The good news is that you can usually make a trigger point relax by pressing hard on it with your thumb, moving side to side crosswise to the muscle fiber. Do it about 12 times and the trigger point will relax a little or a lot. Repeat a few times over several days and that will often take care of it.
If you have trigger points, getting rid of them will make you feel much better overall, because they often cause funny pain in other unrelated areas, and they make you feel generally tense.
Well, you’re not the first to encounter problems and you won’t be the last. I can’t speak to your problem personally but it reminded me of what two-time PGA Tour winner Keith Clearwater went through soon after he hit the weights hard. Jaime Diaz wrote an article about it in the May 24, 2002 issue of Golf Digest. There was a sidebar to the article that covered Clearwater’s problems. Mind you this was eons ago in the perspective of how far science has come in golf fitness. But much of it is very relevant today. Here’s the sidebar in its entirety:
yeah, stay loose, stretch, etc etc
That’s not uncommon. As your body changes, so must your swing. You just changed your body faster than you could adjust your swing, and now must teach yourself how to play with your new body shape.
Don’t listen to anyone who tells you lifting is bad for your golf game. Probably 99% of top players these days spend time in the weight room. The idea that lifting weights will ruin your swing is an archaic rumor that was passed down from the old timers. Serious bodybuilding can have short term negative affects, but once you ‘level off’ and are mostly lifting for strength training you’ll have no problem maintaining and improving your game.
Look at Tiger, his swing used to be beautiful but now he has fallen in love with bodybuilding and his swing has gotten worse. But you just don’t play enough from what I’ve heard.
You have to adjust your swing with more strength comes more speed. Go to the range slow it down a little and find your speed again.