Crossfit and Golf

This is a review of CrossFit and how it applies to golf.  What is CrossFit? CrossFit is the principal strength and conditioning program for many police academies and tactical operations teams, military special operations units, champion martial artists, and hundreds of other elite and professional athletes worldwide.

Our program delivers a fitness that is, by design, broad, general, and inclusive. Our specialty is not specializing. Combat, survival, many sports, and life reward this kind of fitness and, on average, punish the specialist.

The CrossFit program is designed for universal scalability making it the perfect application for any committed individual regardless of experience. We’ve used our same routines for elderly individuals with heart disease and cage fighters one month out from televised bouts. We scale load and intensity; we don’t change programs.

The needs of Olympic athletes and our grandparents differ by degree not kind. Our terrorist hunters, skiers, mountain bike riders and housewives have found their best fitness from the same regimen. This is taken directly from the website.

As a practical matter CrossFit is a place where you learn to push you self in a class atmosphere that provides motivation through competition. It also teaches you proper form for many exercises. This is not always true sadly there are a lot of places that don’t do the best job in coaching. However, there  are a lot of great places to work out. You will get out what you put in.

So I want to talk about two exercises that translate directly to the golf swing that apply to the two different swing styles in golf the 1-2-3 hitter and the 4-2-3 swinger.  The thruster is a basically a front squat into an overhead press. The key to this lift is connection and allowing the big muscles to generate velocity and have the smaller muscles finish the movement.  The snatch and the clean are also exercises that require development of the kinetic chain but also require only use of the big muscles to power the motion of the bar.

CrossFit isn’t the only place you can learn these movement and other similar movements that strengthen hips and promote good economy of motion but the next place that you can access this information are weight rooms for college football teams.  Check the video’s below for demos if these lifts. I am not an expert but I will answer any other questions I can. I hope this was helpful.

This is a general overview if there are any specific questions I will do my best to answer them.

-Carl

Thanks for the overview.

Did you play golf before CrossFit? What changes in your game did you see?

I didn't play before CrossFit, but I can tell the difference in my swing when I'm serious about my fitness.