GOAT Code Power Program - Step 4 - Advanced Power

For those seeking to hit the ball farther than you ever dreamed, these exercises will teach you how to be explosively powerful, strong and stable.

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This core exercise is going to help you engage your core and all these deep spinal muscles, all these muscles that attach to the spine and the pelvis, and help you start to feel how to develop explosive power and counter movement to the movement of the club that you've been learning.

So what you'll need is some sort of weight.

It doesn't have to be much.

You can use a little dumbbell.

You can use a ball.

You can use anything that's given to give you a little bit of resistance.

I'm going to use a kettlebell.

This is a 20-pound kettlebell, and as you get stronger with this, you'll be able to do more and more weight, but this is really important to get the understanding of how to move your body in resistance and use your legs and your core together.

So all you're going to do is take whatever weight you have and take a little bit of a wide stance, like maybe like a driver-width stance, and then hinge forward from your hips.

So keep your back nice and neutral.

Don't round your spine over.

Keep your arms back, your shoulder blades retracted, so your arms are nice and connected to your body.

And all you're going to do is swing back and forth this kettlebell.

Now, as you're doing this, you're obviously going to feel that you need to create resistance.

If you don't, you're just going to get pulled way over here as the kettlebell swings.

And this is important to understand that counter resistance and how you generate force and speed in the swing.

So you'll see at first, I'm going to go nice and easy.

Just kind of going back, you'll see that my leg, with the kettlebell swinging this way, my lead leg is going to bend.

And as it goes back this way, my trail leg is going to bend.

This is basically the exact same thing that happens in the golf swing.

As you're going in the swing, and you're driving forward, this leg is bending and this one's straightening.

In the backswing, this one's bending and this one's straightening.

So this is a really great way to feel what's happening in the golf swing.

But the big thing is the weight gives you something you've got to resist against.

I'm pushing as the kettlebell is going back this way, off the toe, the ball of my foot, my toes, then it goes to the outside.

And I'm pushing away, pushing the ground away from me to resist the force of that going, the kettlebell going that way.

But if you learn to feel this properly, you'll feel the timing of it.

As you push, we'll actually accelerate the kettlebell or whatever weight you have through the hitting area.

So let me show you.

So if I just kind of let it swing back and forth, you know, just providing a little bit of resistance as I go back.

But if I want to speed this up, now, watch my lead foot, I'm starting to push, and I want to do it the same on both sides.

So that's how you feel power in your swing.

And this kettlebell exercise is one of the best for it.

To feel how you straighten your leg, you push off the ground, and really swing the weight through the ball.

Because that's how you produce power in the golf swing, using your legs, your core, everything together.

This next kettlebell exercise is pretty advanced, but it is very important for spinal health and core strength and stability.

And this dynamic motion, the golf swing asks a lot of the body.

There's a lot of weird things that the body is being asked to do in a very, very short period of time with a tremendous amount of force.

And in order for your body to be able to compensate and deal with these forces, it needs to be trained and strengthened.

And so this exercise, now again, I'm not a personal trainer.

I'm not a fitness expert.

I probably don't know what I'm talking about.

These are exercises I did for myself to increase my swing speed.

But so if you're not sure if this is safe for you, go and talk to your doctor or fitness trainer or what have you.

But these, I call this a round-the-world drill.

You'll see this is a pretty popular exercise in certain circles, but it's not definitely for everybody.

Now, I have had major, major back issues for almost my entire life.

And so I've, I feel very comfortable doing this exercise.

You may not, but, and you don't have to do it with weight.

I'm doing it again with a 20 -pound kettlebell.

You can do it with something much lighter, anything with a handle.

The weighted medicine ball is great.

Even if you just do this with no weight and just start getting a feel for your body moving through, your spine moving through a full range of motion.

With a full range of motion, your spine is going to go side bend.

It's going to bend this way.

It's going to go flexion where you bend forward and extension going back.

And it's designed to move and needs to in the golf swing throughout that full range of motion.

It needs to hit all of that.

And the more dynamically strong and you are, the more you're going to be able to prevent injury when you're putting your body under, under those loads.

So again, this exercise, you can try it without weight.

As you get stronger, if you're more advanced in your own physical fitness journey, you can add weight to this and really start getting nutty with it.

I add, I go pretty heavy with this, but I'm going to do it with a 20 pounder here and show you how to feel this.

So you want the butt, the kettlebell or whatever you have to swing.

And you want your arms to be swung by your body, by your core, your spinal muscles, everything in your upper body.

And of course your leg and torso and hip are involved as well, but you're not trying to muscle this with your arms.

Okay.

Even though there's a lot of weight, you're trying to use your core to swing your arms and create this momentum.

That's going to pull you throughout this range of motion.

So grip the ball.

So I'm going through a full range of motion.

I'll do it from both angles.

I'm going deflection and deflection.

The flexion is resisting the weight as it's coming back down.

I'm trying to control and stabilize it.

And then I swing it.

I go into side bend, extension, side bend, flexion.

That is one of the best exercises, in my opinion, for getting your body comfortable and strong to go through these motions throughout the swing.

I do that pretty regularly, at least three sets of 10 on each side.

So I'll go 10 this way and 10 this way.

So do that exercise to get the feeling of an opening up your spine, getting your body used to these dynamic motions that the golf swing demands of it.

And you will feel that you're able to generate more power as you've seen and understand how to produce power in the swing.

It's a very quick, dynamic, explosive movement.

The golf swing is not slow and syrupy and methodical unless you don't want to hit anywhere.

So we have to get all of our muscles to be able to fire very quickly.

Our nervous system trained to be able to fire very quickly.

And one of my favorite and least favorite exercises is the Bulgarian split squat, but with weight and jumping.

So a typical Bulgarian split squat is you've got your leg up on a bench or what have you, and you're doing a, you know, basically a one -legged lunge like this.

And this is a great exercise.

But in the golf swing, we need to be quick, explosive, dynamic, and quick on our toes, on our feet, on the ball of our feet.

And so what I like to do is use a kettlebell.

Again, any weight, you can use a weight vest.

I use a weight vest a lot of times.

But this I like because it forces you to hold it close to your chest and then your core.

Now has to stabilize in order to be able to control this weight because it's going to try to pull you forward.

So your core is working while we're working on the explosiveness on our feet.

So I'm going to put one leg on the bench.

So I'm just gonna be on the top of my foot here.

So I'm not trying to use my, this foot at all.

I'm trying to just use this leg to push up.

So I'm going to stand nice and tall, core is engaged, the medicine or the kettlebells holding it close to my body.

And then jump.

That motion is the exact same motion, but with both legs, the lead leg is doing it more so than the trail leg.

But that jumping motion, that explosiveness is needed for power in the swing because you're wanting to create as much vertical force to snap your wrist as possible.

So three sets of 10 on this and you're going to feel it.

We're not just pushing up off the ground in the swing.

There's a lot of things happening.

And one of the most important things is creating resistance.

As your body is starting to move back into the lead side or your pressure is moving back to lead side, you have to create resistance.

Otherwise you can keep falling over here.

And because this is happening so fast in the swing, we want to train ourselves in order to be able to respond to this, both our nervous system and the muscles to be able to create that initial resistance using the ground, using our glutes, hamstrings, quad, hip core, all of it, and being able to then shift that into an explosive up movement.

So we need to resist that lateral movement first and then start being able to go vertical.

And so the way that I like to train that, again, with the kettlebell, you can do this without weight, but what you're going to do is you're going to take a step to the side, pretty big step.

And I want you to do it with some speed.

So you can kind of push off your right foot in this case, as I'm going left, and then I'm going to have to resist.

As soon as my foot hits the ground, it's got to be strong.

It's got to plant.

And then you're going to then push yourself back over to the other side as explosively as you can.

Okay.

So I'll do one here to show you.

I'm pushing as fast as I can.

And if I start going quickly, I will actually start jumping a little bit with both feet.

That exercise gets you in the feeling of how your body is moving laterally, but then creating initial resistance against using the ground and then pushing back up off of it with weight three sets of 10.

And you're going to feel that one in the morning.

I promise this next exercise is going to get your glute to stretch in a way that it works in the golf swing, because the golf swing involves all sorts of different forces on the body and using the ground.

We need to train ourselves in a way that most closely mimics that.

And this exercise is a great one.

Again, I'm going to do it with weight.

You don't have to do it with weight, but it's a cross step like this.

You're going to go down and then you're going to push off explosively off your foot to come back to neutral.

So I hold the kettlebell up here to make my core work.

And then I'm going to take a step.

And when I'm doing this, I'm not trying to get really heavy on my foot.

My toes are landing first.

I'm almost landing softly, landing on my toes and the ball of my foot, my heel touches for just a second.

And then I'm really loading into the ball of my foot as I spring back up off the ground.

So this one, you'll see as I go to the side, I'm on my toe, heel hits for just a second.

My glutes really loaded, the glute medius outside of the hip here.

These are all really important muscles that need to be able to fire and explode very quickly in the swing.

Three sets of 10 is what you're looking for.

One of the best exercises in general for overall health, but also the health of your ligaments and your tendons is a jump rope.

A lot of times we focus as we get older on stretching all the time.

I'm not a big stretcher, believe it or not.

I believe in strengthening and strengthening while lengthening.

So what you really want is your lint, your tendons, like your Achilles tendon, for instance, everybody, if you've ever known anybody's had a rupture of Achilles tendon, it's a terrible thing.

It takes a long time to heal.

But a lot of times these rupture because they're not stiff enough, believe it or not.

If you get too much slack in the system, your muscles don't fire correctly and the whole fascial system doesn't load correctly.

So the jump rope is perfect because it forces you to stay on your toes and quickly create rebound force.

And this helps stiffen the ligament, the tendons, so that you're just constantly feeling like you're trying to stay off the ground as quickly as possible.

This is exactly what I feel when I'm swinging at max speed.

I feel like I'm on my toes and then jumping and springing up off the ground.

I want that pressure to hit as quickly as possible and get off of it as quickly as possible.

And the jump rope teaches you how to do exactly that because you're having to jump over the rope all the time.

But one thing that's really important when you're doing this is to switch and do one leg at a time.

It's great to do both feet to coordinate the whole body, but you want to put that extra load on that one foot if you're strong enough.

And again, if you're not coordinated enough or you haven't jumped rope in a long time, put the rope down and just do this on one leg.

Just keep hopping and start feeling how, try to keep your heel off the ground so my heel's not touching, but I'm just popping and then switch.

I want to feel like the ground is like lava and I'm just springing off my toes as quickly as possible.

This is what your golf swing should feel like.

It shouldn't feel like this slow heavy thing going heel to heel.

There's no speed in that.

Speed is from this, your toes.

That is what you want to feel.

If you can jump rope for 60 seconds, switching back and forth between each feet, you'll start to feel how your legs and these tendons have to work to spring you up off the ground and create real speed again in your swing.

As you're searching for getting to your maximum club head speed that you're capable of producing, you want to be able to move lightning fast.

Quickness is what we're looking for.

Speed is what we're after.

And one of the things that you're going to want to feel in practice is how to do what I call the jump foot.

And the jump foot is what you've seen in these videos, where I'm talking about how long.

Drivers pivot on the ball of their foot and the foot snaps back to the side really quick like this.

You want to practice this movement when you're not actually swinging a club so you know how to do it.

So all I want you to do is put your weight, you're going to put most of your weight on your back foot, but you're going to have pressure going into your lead foot so that you can spring off of as quickly as humanly possible.

So all you're doing is I'm starting on the ball of my foot.

My foot is square and I'm going to move forward like this.

So watch my foot.

You see how my foot is kind of my ankle is going to kind of shift to the side like this.

This is what happens in the actual swing because as I go to the top of my knees coming forward, my heel is going to come in a little bit.

And then as I start to shift forward, I'm going to pivot on the ball of my foot and that's going to kick my heel out to the side a little bit.

And then once my weight, the pressure gets fully over there, I'm going to then spring off of it as quickly as humanly possible.

So you can see, I'm going to go here.

How fast can you pivot that foot?

I'll go from up the lines.

If you're watching yourself in a mirror, this, you're twisting it as quickly as possible on the ball of your foot.

That motion, do it on both sides is going to help you start to feel how you move up and open very quickly.

And as you do that, it's going to move your hands into the ball very, very fast and snap the release of your wrist.

So get the feeling of how to use your calf, your foot muscles, your toes, the ball of your foot to turn and get that foot going this way.

Now, of course, this is only for maximum power, right?

If you're an iron swing, you're going to tone this down.

It doesn't need to move nearly that much.

But when you're going for max speed, get the feeling of your feet twisting on the ground and like you're trying to get off the ground, touch the ground as quickly and lightly as possible.

So you can explode, move through the ball very, very fast.

Forearm strength is critical for being able to create that initial velocity of the club and get everything to work together with your body to produce maximum club head speed.

And the motion that happens at the top of the swing is what we call supination.

I'm taking my wrist and my trail arm wrist and rotating it externally.

And we want to be able to do this with some force.

The more force you can do this with, the more the club can keep up with everything else that your body's doing.

And I have two different tools that I'm going to show you that I use.

One is just a typical weighted club.

You don't even have to have a weighted club if your forearms are very weak, you might do this with just a regular golf club.

But over time, you're going to want to start to strengthen your forearms to be able to create this initial velocity of that supination of the wrist.

So start with your club straight up and basically get into where you would be, where you would be at the top of your swing.

And all I want you to do is start to rotate it.

You're snapping that wrist externally.

Now, of course, this motion in the real swing, it starts as supination, but then eventually you run out of supination.

It's when it goes into deviation and then finally pronation.

We don't have to worry about the pronation part.

It's going to happen automatically as is the deviation as the club and the inertia starts pulling the club down.

So what you're trying to do is initially from the top of your swing, this.

Now, of course, your forearm is not strong enough to actually do this at the top of the swing with the club, but that's what you want to feel.

But also keep in mind that your wrist is not going to be perfectly horizontal to the ground.

It's going to be up here.

And so you're actually going to be rotating it this way.

And that's, what's going to get the club to swing down on plane.

As you start to supinate it, you're slinging it out there.

And if you want to add a little more to it, add a little more power and get the, at least get the feeling of how this works, let your right elbow fly away.

Now, of course, I don't want a flying right elbow on the swing.

It just complicates things, but it'll get you the feeling of how your arm and body and core work together to sling this club in that supinated fashion.

You can see that as I'm twisted up here, my arm starts to fly in, I'm supinating the wrist.

All of this works together to create real speed in the swing.

Do it with both arms to balance them out.

But that motion, start getting a feeling for how to snap it.

You can also do this just with the club straight out in front of you, horizontal to the ground and go through internal and external rotation to balance out the forearm rotational muscles, because these don't get worked a lot in most golfers' swings.

They don't really know how to feel that supination.

And so you don't really get very strong forms unless you're swinging correctly.

But we also just tend to not work our forearms out a lot.

So this is one of my favorite exercises.

You get the feeling of how to snap that wrist.

I also have a mace here.

So if you really want to get nutty with it and you've got stronger arms already, this is a mace.

This is a 10 pound mace.

And so now if I really want to start to develop some strength and coordination, grip strength, as well as the supination, I can use something very heavy like a mace to allow me to really start to work those forearms and that supination motion of the arm.