Watch this video of Dr Neil Welch, Head of Lab Services & Research, “How Fit is Fit Enough For Golf?”
This video was recorded as part of SSC’s Online Public Information Meeting, focusing on ‘An Evening for Golfers’
Dr Neil Welch is a Senior Strength & Conditioning Coach and Head of Lab Services in SSC’s Sports and Exercise Medicine Department.
Hi, my name is Neil Welch. I am the head of the Sports Surgery Clinic lab services and research within the sports medicine Department. Thanks for taking the time to listen and watch this presentation. I’m going to cover a topic and hopefully convince you a little bit about the importance of Fitness, but I’m going to talk about how fit is fit enough for golf?
The sports medicine department is kind of adjacent to the main Sports Surgery Clinic site. For those of you who’ve been out here, we see between 600 and 700 patients a week, the majority of whom have had some musculoskeletal issue, either back pain or knee pain, but we also see a portion of patients who are just looking to improve their health and fitness, and it’s the experience of these type of services that we’re going to draw upon today to talk about the role of aerobic conditioning and aerobic fitness for golf, but first of all I think it’s worth exploring and going through what aerobic fitness is? Now I’m not going to go into a lot of physiological detail with you; we’ll just do a high-level overview. Essentially aerobic fitness and changes in that is an improvement in the ability of the heart and lungs to move oxygen around the body. When your muscles work, they use oxygen to help burn fuel in order to be able to continue to deliver force and keep you moving, and so any improvements in the ability to move oxygen around the body lead to an increase in aerobic fitness and an improvement in your efficiency during tasks that require that.
Now golf is a sport that’s changed quite a lot over the last couple of decades, and the answer is on Fitness; it certainly has grown, and that is filtering down towards the amateur levels and the social levels within the game as well to some extent, I guess! Most of the emphasis has been placed on the role of strength and power, with figures like Bryce de Jambo highlighting the importance of lengthening his driving game, and Club head speeds and ball velocities are figures that are talked about a lot. We have even covered this in presentations here at the Sports Surgery Clinic before. But what I’m going to do is lean a little bit away from the strength and power side of things, the importance of the relevance of that and talk more about the aerobic elements within the game and the aerobic demands. So first of all, we talk about aerobic fitness for golf, you know why we need it? What’s the point? The two broad areas where it can have some benefit, one is around improved endurance and the second is around better mental focus and concentration. We’re going to talk about each one of those.
So the need or requirement for some kind of endurance comes from essentially the length of the game, and depending on the course that you play and how well you are playing, you can cover anywhere between six and twelve kilometres during the round okay, which is a decent Difference by anyone’s yardstick and in order to be able to support the strength and power demands within the game having a good aerobic base is important for that. What you will actually see during a round is your heart rate will vary, so the aerobic demands will vary depending on, I guess, whereabouts on the golf course you are and the mental demands of the mental strain, but anywhere from sort of 52 and 78 percent of your maximum heart rate is where you can jump around so it’s quite a significant Range or change in Aerobic demands within the sports and oftentimes this can be down just to the track that you’re playing.
So here is a lovely image of Enniscrone; I’m sure there are a few of you on tonight who have played there even if the courses don’t have a lot of vertical, but there’s a lot of undulation there’s a lot of challenges in that up and down movements, and that’s where a lot of the aerobic demands come from so just making sure you have
Fitness to get around the golf course regardless of the shots you are playing is a bit easier; this is where the endurance and the aerobic demands and improvement start to have an impact. When we talk about concentration, studies talk about aerobic fitness being related to higher executive functioning and so your ability to start making decisions through sustained attention; you know, for those of us who start to fade throughout the back nine, oftentimes we can talk about the role of an attentional focus being an issue the fitter we are the more able we are to sustain high levels of attention to whatever it needs to be would be that a club selection, shot selection or even just the task demands and being able to execute our golf swing the way we want to. Selective attention, so for those of us who are looking to maybe improve our golf swing and are focusing on certain cues or certain elements within the swing, maybe you have been working on it with a coach, being able to stay on the message, I guess with our attention is aided by aerobic fitness that falls under this higher executive function and the technical side of the game is something that is impacted massively by the level of aerobic conditioning and obviously a potential Focus so any improvements there are obviously going to be beneficial and then resistance to interference so the idea that you know potentially and some of our old habits and old thoughts around our golf swing start to slip back in or even some jibes with the people that we are playing with our ability to resist those kind of and not let them become part of our golf game is also improved by better aerobic fitness so there’s a few areas there where we can start to develop our game just simply by being a little bit fitter.
There’s some relatively interesting cases where we can kind of see that the role of this particularly among the elite game so what I’m showing you here is a graph of heart rate information from Justin Thomas a couple of years ago and this was around him making an eagle putting when he was playing in the tall grass and what we’ll look at is the first part of this graph here highlighted on the left is as he’s starting to get ready for his for his putts and his pre-putt routine we can see obviously the importance of the shots his heart rate starts to climb from below 100 up to 110 beats per minute the next patch of this graph just demonstrates the effectiveness of his pre-shot routine so aerobic fitness is going to impart support your ability to lower your heart rate is going to be dictated by the efficiency and the Improvement in your heart that you gain from aerobic fitness so we can see that heart rate dropped to below 105 before he takes the putts and then what we see after this is success and celebration so obviously he goes a bit bananas at sings in Portuguese. He is putting himself in a much better position within the tournament there, but some interesting information around maybe how the role of aerobic fitness can benefit our golf game and give you a little bit of better control. Right, who’s to say that if Justin Thomas’s Fitness levels weren’t as good and he wasn’t able to bring his heart rate down that he might not have made that shot, and then obviously, that’s going to impact his earnings, you know we can imagine the same thing happening for us in our golf games.
So is getting a little bit fitter worthy of devoting that much time to improving the game? You know I’m not going to stand here and say that you know you should take time away from you’re your practice in order to be able to get fitter, and that’s going to have the magic input into your game to have you reaching the handicap that you’re looking to, but it can have some benefits probably I think the wider benefit of aerobic fitness is something that might swing you towards making a bit of a change you know because there are lots of other benefits to aerobic fitness and again I’m not suggesting we all need to be looking like this in our later years, but certainly we start thinking about the longevity effects of being more aerobically fit.
There are a number of areas where we can see improvements, and a healthier cardiovascular system is one of them. What we’ll see is a reduced gain in weight as we go year on year; aerobic fitness is vitally important for that, we see reduced inflammation within the body, and anyone who’s had issues with joint pain in the past is probably going to understand the rules of information there, and we’ll talk about that in a second and then reducing the risk of developing chronic diseases so just staying healthier throughout our life and making sure we’re living as long a life as possible.
When we’re talking about cardiovascular health, essentially, we’re looking at the improvement within the heart itself, the circulatory system behind that and then also the lungs, and there were certain adaptations that we get with our fitness work and our aerobic training, Increases in our heart stroke volume this is essentially the amount of blood that the heart can pump in each heartbeat so as you get fitter the heart itself changes certain elements within it get bigger it’s able to bring more blood into it and to pump more blood around the heart this is what contributes to reduced stressing heart rate so effectively the heart is more efficient and like as your aerobic demands increase your heart just doesn’t have to work as hard. We also get an improvement in the way we move oxygen around the body, so actually, within muscles themselves increase the number of capillaries, they are the smallest blood vessels that we have, and we get a large number of capillaries around the muscles to deliver blood around the muscles and therefore oxygen to help us become more efficient at burning fuel and using the muscles.
For further information on this subject or to make an appointment, please contact sportsmedicine@sportssurgeryclinic.com |