In our last blog, we talked about assessing your 2023 season and all the areas of your game that should be evaluated before starting an offseason plan. Once you have established your golf strengths and weaknesses now is the time for an assessment with our team of golf, health care, and fitness professionals that will give you baseline metrics for where you are starting your offseason and set some goals that will allow us to create a customized performance plan for you.
To create the most efficient performance plan for every golfer we work with, we need an in-depth analysis of each part of a player’s game. To get the most accurate analysis of a golfer, we created the Golf MRI, one of golf’s most comprehensive assessments. The Golf MRI assesses every part of a player’s game and gives us a thorough understanding of how each player biomechanically moves, thinks on the course, and swings a club.
The Golf Assessment
The golf portion of the Golf MRI assesses everything from long game to mid irons, wedge play, and putting. This gives us a baseline for how you swing the club and what may be leading to miss hits and poor play on the course. This assessment goes deep into metrics such as carry distance, club speed, ball speed, attack angle, club path, spin rate, lie angle, bounce, yardage control, and dispersion patterns. Once we have collected a player’s club and ball data, we want to analyze movement patterns from their swing. We start by assessing each player’s ground reaction force measurements. Golf is a ground reaction force sport and as coaches, if we cannot understand how a player interacts with the ground, changing motor patterns in the swing becomes very challenging. Along with ground reaction force we also use 3D swing capture technology to get in-depth swing analysis such as kinematic sequence, body segmental speed data, along with swing positional faults and dysfunctions that are challenging to see with the naked eye. Through analyzing all of these data points, we can get to the root causes of swing dysfunction and create a motor pattern training and golf instruction plan to correct these issues and create a more efficient, powerful, and repeatable golf swing.
The Body Assessment
Once we understand how you swing the golf club and the dysfunction we might see in your swing, the next step is understanding why. With each player we go through a thorough biomechanical assessment and golf movement screen to understand how your body may be forcing you into certain swing faults. Our body assessment begins with a golf movement screen that assesses several foundational movements that a player must be able to perform in order to make an efficient golf swing. An inability to own these foundational movements will make creating permanent swing changes nearly impossible. Along with the movement screen we take each player through a full body biomechanical assessment to understand how each joint in their body functions. The golf swing is a full body movement and if any 1 joint is unable to do its job effectively, we will start to see compensations that can lead to swing faults, poor play, and injury. After our biomechanical assessment, we take each player through a strength, power, and speed evaluation to understand where our players may be lacking, leading to poor stability, slower club head speeds, and distance limitations.
After understanding how the body moves, we also want to assess other areas that can be affecting your game such as mental prep, focus, vision, diet, and heart rate variability. If a player has all the physical tools to make an efficient golf swing but mentally is unable to compete at a high level, achieving performance goals will be impossible. We take each player through a mental preparedness screen that assesses factors such as attention, focus, and response inhibition that gives us insight as to where in their game they may struggle mentally.
The next phase of our body assessment looks at vision. We believe vision is a very under assessed aspect of a player’s game, but is crucial especially when it comes to short game and putting. If a player is unable to read small angulations or direction of grain on a green, short game improvements will be challenging.
The last 2 main areas we assess are diet and heart rate variability. Diet is crucial to ensure you are adequately fueled to play your best through 18 holes, but also for off season strength and conditioning. If we want to be in the gym building strength, we need the right building blocks from our diet to get stronger and build muscle.
Lastly, understanding heart rate variability is one of the most important factors when designing and monitoring a training program as it gives us insight to a players nervous system function. It is also crucial to ensure a player is in the right state of mind and has proper nervous system control to perform at their best as well as avoid overtraining and injury. We track our players heart rate variability as it is the best way to monitor nervous system function and ensure we keep our players on track to get strong, move better, play their best, and avoid injury.
Performance Plan
Now that the assessment is complete it is time to design an offseason plan to reach 2024 season goals. As we discussed in the last blog, goals need to be specific. For example, a goal should not be; shoot lower scores next year or I want to hit the ball straighter. Better goals would be, I want my scoring average to be below 80 or I want to average 14 greens in regulation each round.
Each performance plan is created to improve that players areas of weakness while maintaining their strengths and can consist of golf instruction, golf motor pattern training, equipment modifications or club fitting, biomechanical re-alignment, strength/power/speed training, neurocognitive training, dietary consultation or referrals to our advisory board that consists of sports medicine doctors, nutritionist, optometrists, sports psychologists, and naturopaths.
Each performance plan is periodized to have players peak during their competitive season or for major tournaments. Whether you are a local club member, competitive junior player, CIS/NCAA player, or a CPGA/PGA professional, if you are looking to take your game to the next level book your Golf MRI today!
For more information, please reach out to the golf team directly!
Dan can be reached at: dan@honsbergerphysio.com
Brandon can be reached at: brandon@aimgolfacademy.com
