The Ultimate Golf Fitness Guide: Gain Distance, Mobility & Strength

Happy Monday,

Thanks to Mark, Doug, Anthony, Lisa, John & Lee for last week’s comments. Glad you enjoyed it, and as requested, I’ll line up a guest for a breaking 80 & 70 version of the show I recorded with Ian Taylor.

This Week

Golf Fitness: I sat down with golf fitness expert Shaun Dyckhoff to break down how golfers should really train for better performance.

Weekly Skills Game: Make your range sessions match the golf course (with no tech).

Tip of the Week: A quick, actionable advice to apply to your game.

Quick Video: The REAL Lesson From The 10,000 Hours Rule

Enjoy.

The Ultimate Golf Fitness Guide: Gain Distance, Mobility & Strength

Golf fitness isn’t just about lifting weights—it’s about moving better, feeling stronger, and swinging faster.

In this episode, I chat with Shaun Dyckhoff about the key mistakes golfers make in their training and how to fix them.

📢 Listen to the Full Episode:
🎧 YouTube: Watch here
🎧 Apple Podcasts: Listen here
🎧 Spotify: Listen here

🏌️‍♂️ Rapid-Fire Takeaways:

✅ Your body is the most important club in your bag. Stop ignoring your fitness—better movement leads to better golf.

 ✅ Mobility before mechanics. If you can’t rotate well, your swing will always have compensations. Improve your hips, thoracic spine, and shoulders first.

✅ Speed training works—when timed right. Jumping into speed sticks without a strength base leads to injury or plateaus. First, build the strength to produce force, then convert it into speed.

 ✅ Speed training isn’t just swinging harder. Proper structure, rest, and progression matter—don’t just rip speed sticks without a plan!

 ✅ Strength leads to speed. If you’ve plateaued in distance, it’s not just technique—you might need to build more strength first.

✅ Play better, not just longer. Training your body allows you to swing pain-free, hit it further, and play multiple days in a row without feeling wrecked.

⛳️ A Challenge for Your Next Round

🔹 Struggle with consistency? Take 5 minutes before your round to do a proper warm-up: Shaun recommends three moves—hip mobility, thoracic rotations, and shoulder stretches. See how it impacts your swing.

🔹 Is fatigue an issue? Track your last 5 holes. Did fatigue affect your swing? Were you still hitting fairways and greens, or did mistakes creep in? If your performance drops late in the round, your fitness may be a limiting factor.

🚀 Bonus Thought: Are You Training or Just Exercising?

There’s a difference. Exercising is showing up at the gym and doing random workouts. Training is following a structured plan designed for long-term gains. Golfers who train with a purpose—see better results, faster.

And with that in mind, let’s move on to Break X Golf.

Break X Golf – Weekly Skills Game

This range challenge is one of the first I developed as a university golf coach. It helps make your range sessions measurable and fun and ensures you practice the most important parts of your long game.

Below is Level 1, the Break X Golf app automatically unlocks harder levels as you progress.

For personalised practice plans and over 140 skills games, check out Break X Golf.

Break X Golf is a sister project to Golf Insider and was co-founded by Will Shaw.

You can check it out here.

The REAL Lesson From The 10,000 Hours Rule

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Happy golfing – The Golf Insider Team

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