In Fall 2015, when I started here at CSUMB, I started working with the new Women’s Golf Coach, James Earle, to develop and run their strength and conditioning programming. Since then, the team has trained religiously in the weight room 2-3 times per week. We have had growing success, which has led to a few folks wondering what we are up to. After one tournament, another coach remarked that they were one of the most athletic teams his team had ever played against (that’s some great praise if I ever heard it!!). He got in contact with me to find out what we do with our team; this is the main part of the email I sent in reply:
The stuff we do goes more or less along these lines:
1. TPI screens and a couple of extra movement tests that I conduct tell us what golf-specific aspects we may need to work on, what movement limitations they might have etc. To address these issues, I prescribe specific resistance training exercises, mobility drills, stretches etc depending on what they specifically need and is indicated by that testing battery.
2. In addition to ensuring that they move well in “golf-specific” motions, I also ensure that they can move in a lot of fundamentally athletic ways. First and foremost, I want my golfers to move well (i.e. like athletes) before I worry about developing them as golfers. In our warmups prior to each session, they work on a variety of basic movement skills to train this- skipping, backpedaling, side shuffling etc.
3. We are also very concerned about developing their overall strength. Strength is fundamental to all other athletic qualities, so I want to be sure they all have a pretty good development of strength across their entire body. Most of what we do in each workout is full-body resistance training, almost entirely with barbells and dumbells.
4. Concurrent with their strength development, we do a variety of explosiveness exercises. They do quite a bit of throwing exercises with medicine balls, but they do some more traditional plyometric work, especially work that focuses on driving themselves sideways off of one leg. They also do a few very simple variations of cleans and jumps in the weight room to work on lower body explosiveness.