Golf Speed Training: Biggest Myth BUSTED!

Myth: Overweight swing training is speed training and is needed to gain club speed in golf.

What do the current Ball Speed World Record Holder and the LPGA Tour’s Longest Hitter have in common? Both don’t use any overweight swing training! While conventional wisdom in the golf speed training world is that overweight swing training is needed to increase overall club head speed, many of the fastest golfers in the world never touch anything heavier than their own driver. Why is that? Let’s dive into and dissect the top three reasons why overweight options are typically encouraged and determine if there is a better way.

Is Stronger Better?

The first reason that overweight swing trainers are used is that it increases your strength. Stronger muscles have the capability to produce more force so this is thought to contribute to an increase in club speed. This has been a principle used for years. Get into the gym and lift heavy, swing heavy training aids, and you will get faster. While this seems like a good idea on the surface, the practical application of this could not be further from the truth.

Since golf drivers are so light in nature (around 310 grams total including shaft, grip, and clubhead), the determining factor to generating more clubhead speed lies less in the strength category (we aren’t swinging sledge hammers) and more so in the composition of the primary muscular movers in the golf swing. Everybody knows that one skinny 16-year-old who can hit the ball a mile but is incredibly weak in the gym. That’s because every muscle is made up of a combination of slow and fast-twitch muscle fibers.

If a lifter wants to get stronger, they will continually lift heavier weights. As the weights get heavier, their muscles break down through training and repair themselves as well as make and increase the overall number of muscle fibers in that muscle (muscle is made from a collection of muscle fibers). The muscles grow and adapt to the stressor (heavier weights) and build an environment to lift heavier weights. This means building more muscle fibers specifically designed for the stressor, heavier weights. These new muscle fibers’ jobs are to move heavier and heavier weight, not move lighter weight faster.

The same principle applies for speed training in golf. When you train with a heavier object, the only thing you are training is to increase your body’s adaptation to its stressor (strength to swing even heavier objects). Even though it feels like you can swing your driver 20mph faster when returning to it, you now have told your muscles to build and recruit the wrong type of muscle fibers greatly hindering long-term progress.

The last piece to this is the central nervous system’s (CNS) role in speed and your ability to swing the club. The CNS is responsible for not only processing information but also controlling body movements. This includes muscle contractions which means that every swing is controlled by the CNS. If you want to swing faster, you must train your CNS to move quicker.

By nature, the nervous system tries to protect the body by keeping movement within a comfortable zone and at a certain speed ceiling. In order to break through this “comfortable zone” and swing the golf club faster, the body must move faster. Every time your body moves faster, the CNS gets more comfortable with it and will continue to allow your body to move at that or a faster pace. This is why underweight options like the Speed Toad are so valuable to gaining speed. It allows your body to move faster than your nervous system typically allows with a golf club. Overweight (aka heavy) swing training does the exact opposite by reinforcing to your nervous system that it should move slowly with every swing.

All of this is why Olympic sprinters started overspeed training by sprinting downhill and on treadmills set to very high speeds instead of the outdated training philosophy of sprinting with a parachute or attached to a band behind them. Even when combining both together, their performance was negatively impacted through the recruitment and building of slower muscle fibers as well as reinforcing their nervous system to move slower. It does not matter the effort required to move or swing an object, you cannot get your muscle fibers or nervous system to move faster by moving slower. It really is as simple as that.

Will It Help My Swing?

The teaching philosophy over more than the last decade has been that swinging a heavier object encourages better swing mechanics. The thought is that golfers will focus on trying to maintain proper form in order to manage the extra weight of the club. In turn, this should lead to better technique and an improved swing. Unfortunately, this also could not be further from the truth. So many golfers screw up their swing every day by trying to gain speed with a heavy training aid.

The heavier an object gets, the more difficult it is to physically maintain proper form (whether focusing on it or not). It is vastly more difficult to get your body into the proper positions when a heavy object is pulling/pushing you out of it. Training aid companies that sell overweight options encourage you to swing as hard as you can with every swing, not slow down to maintain proper control. This further reinforces bad mechanics with the heavy training aids because the top priority becomes speed and effort, not technique.

As a secondary piece to this, when speed training in golf or trying to gain club speed, the goal is always to swing faster. When using a heavier object to swing, you become falsely rewarded for bad swings. This means that your swings with improper technique will actually be FASTER than your swings with good technique. Heavier objects encourage the recruitment of stronger muscle fibers (not faster as discussed earlier) which typically results in swing flaws like coming over-the-top/being over plane. When comparing an over-the-top swing to a good or proper golf swing with a heavy training aid, an over-the-top swing will be faster due to bigger and stronger muscle fibers being involved as the primary movers. The exact opposite occurs with a regular driver setup. The over-the-top swing will be slower and less accurate (we all hate losing golf balls off the tee) than a good swing.

When you compare incorrect form such as an over-the-top move with an underweight training aid like the Speed Toad, the proper form is faster just as the driver reinforcing good technique instead of bad. So not only will heavy overweight objects be harder to swing correctly, they will also encourage and reward your bad swings. Save your swing and avoid overweight swing options.

What About Injuries?

The third reason why overweight options are a bad idea for golf speed training is that they greatly increase your risk of injury. A great way to look at injury risk is by determining the force production of the activity. Torque is the rotational force being applied to the golf club to make it reach peak speed in the downswing and also decelerate it to stop in the backswing. While you can see the complex equations to calculate torque broken down below, torque ultimately boils down to moment of inertia multiplied by the angular acceleration.

The amount of torque produced by the body throughout the swing directly correlates to the amount of force (stress) applied to your tendons, ligaments, joints, and muscles. Many think the amount of torque is as simple as “a faster swings produces more torque” but this is NOT the case when discussing different weighted objects. Below is how an underweight, overweight, and typical driver setup compare.

Normal Driver

A typical driver head weighs around 195 grams. While every shaft and grip are different, 115 grams and 45 inches is a good example. The body would produce around 17.96 Newton-meters (Nm) of force to swing this 310-gram driver 100 mph. That is the amount of force needed to generate this speed in the downswing and stop it on the follow-through. 

Underweight Option (Speed Toad)

The Speed Toad weighs only 140 grams which is 55 grams lighter than a typical driver. With the same 115-gram shaft and grip combination, the total underweight option would be 255 grams. Since the Speed Toad is specifically designed to be swung 7 mph faster than a regular driver, the body would only produce 16.91 Nm of force at 107 mph.

Overweight Option

With the same 55-gram weight difference from a driver head and 115-gram shaft and grip combination, the total weight of the overweight option would be 365 grams. At 7 mph slower than the 100 mph driver swing, the force produced would be 18.29 Nm at a 93 mph swing speed.

So What's The Risk?  

Even though you swing slower with overweight swing training, it produces/requires more torque which is more taxing on the body. This force and stress on the body really begins to add up after multiple swings per set, multiple sets per training day, and multiple training days per week. All of this extra force means a higher risk of injury. 

Conclusion

Not only is overweight swing training not needed for gaining club speed, it is actually incredibly counterproductive to gaining speed. You negatively hurt your golf game by breaking proper technique and allowing bad habits to creep into your swing; you train to develop the wrong type of muscle fibers that won’t result in faster swings while also encouraging your nervous system to maintain slower body movements and muscle contractions; and you put yourself at a much higher risk for injury. The bottom line is that the speed training myth of needing overweight swing training to swing faster is BUSTED.