weight training for golfers

This is me, deadlifting in my garage

If you’ve visited this website before you know that I focus a great deal of attention on strength training.

Just like anything else in life, strength can play a key role in your success in golf.

Among professional golfers, this trend is picking up steam.

At a younger age, it is possible to generate significant swing speed purely through athleticism and body speed.

When I was a teenager, I was literally 155 pounds soaking wet while standing six feet tall.  I was a competitive swimmer through high school, so I was always in good shape if not particularly strong.

At the same time, I rarely played golf with anyone who could out drive me regularly.

At my home course, the only one who could stood 6’8″ tall and was also a great athlete with a great golf swing.

However, as we age, we need to start training for strength since we start to lose body speed.

Strength training takes on even more importance for golfers over the age of 50, since we’ve already started to lose muscle mass through the process of sarcopenia.

With that said, how strong should you be as a golfer?

Well, consider that according to Strengthlevel.com, the average untrained 40 year old male who is 200 pounds in weight can only deadlift about 135 pounds.

At nearly 60 years old now, that’s my starting warm-up weight for five reps and I’ve only been training the deadlift off and on since I was 56 years old.

See the graphic below.

What’s amazing is that to get to the novice level indicated on this graph, where the trainee can deadlift 250 pounds, only 2 to 3 months of training are required.

I know this because I’ve been through the process.

In my view, this novice level should be the minimal strength standard for any golfer from 40 to 70 years old.

The other three primary lifts within a sound strength training program are the squat, bench press and overhead press.

This graphic depicts the standards for the squat for men 50 to 59.

The novice lifter who weighs about 200 pounds should be able to squat 175 pounds after a couple months of training.

The squat is the most important lift for golfers since it trains the glutes more than any of the other key exercises.

In this graph you can see that the novice 200 pound lifter in the 50 to 59 age group can bench press 135 pounds.

In this last graph, it is indicated that the novice lifter in the 50-59 age group who weighs almost 200 pounds can press 85 pounds overhead.

The novice members for all of these exercises are quite modest compared to what people who’ve trained for a year or more can do, but they are a good initial target for a golfer.

Any golfer can get to the intermediate strength levels indicated in these graphs with consistent training for 6 to 9 months.

Those levels will provide you with much greater ability to produce power in your golf swing, and it is much easier to do this than to make changes to your golf swing.

If you want a complete strength training program, it is included in my Longer Tee Shots program.  Learn more here.