Fitness Myths That Will Surprise Every Golfer! featuring Chris Finn of Par4Success

0:03 Hi. This is Brian down in Houston, Texas, and I'll play at Melrose Golf Course. This is Golf Smarter, all right. This is Craig Marrow from Flower Mound, Texas. I play at two or eighteen Dallas. It's a simulation of eighteen great American golf holes including Sawgrass seventeen, the Island Green, and Amen Corner eleven, twelve, and thirteen. This is Golf Smarter Episode ten sixteen, Wow, one thousand and sixteen. Good job Bread. Just doing those mobility exercises gets rid of a lot of pain for them. They immediately will start to like, oh, I'm turning more, I'm not sore after I play the round of golf. Particularly like guys who are good players when they were younger. They understand the movement they're supposed to do mentally, but physically they can't do it. You give that guy mobility and his hip back, and his buddies are like, oh my god, what'd you do not to mention his balls going farther than their's. Now that's literally just level one. Then you move up. Level two is how do we get you stronger, whether it's squat type movements or hinge type movements which are like a kettlebelt, deadlifts or bandeded lifts. How do we get your hips stronger?

1:07 Bridges would be the simplest example of that. How do we strengthen basically like the backside of your legs, your button, your ham strings. Those are your two lower body and then you're also working getting stronger in your upper body, whether it's with dumbells or barbell or cables, whatever it may be. Those are the big ones that we really want to see get stronger with. And then you get to power. Power is how quickly can I get it from the bottom to the top. So if you can move fifty pounds but it takes you a minute, that is less powerful than if you can move fifty pounds the same distance in one second. That's where the explosiveness comes from. And so those are kind of the big three categories. So during that fifteen minutes a day, because you're assessing, you know exactly it is what you get rid of all the extra noise and you're solely focusing on what is the low hanging fruit for you at that moment.

1:52 Fitness myths that will surprise every level of golfer With Chris Finn of power for success. This is Golf Smarter, sharing stories, tips and insights from great golf minds to help you lower your score and raise your golf IQ. Here's your host, Fred Green. Welcome back to the Golf Smarter podcast. Chris. It's a pleasure to be here, Fred. I'm excited. Uh, you know, you've been on a bunch of times and we've done this for years now, but now you're a podcaster. Well, you know, I was inspired there. There has been inspiration. It took me a lot of a lot of years to get up the gusto to uh, to have the you know, the courage to start my own thing. But yeah, I think I'm not gonna lie. I've I've learned a lot.

2:39 I've been on a number of podcasts and it is interesting, you know, podcaster to podcasters, you go on different shows and there's different levels of preparation that people do. There's different levels of quality that people have. You know, some people are in a room with like dogs going off and ye other people are recording. It's finny you see the different soft where people use this to make sure that you don't catch any lag or anything. And you're definitely I mean you're over a thousand episodes at this point, I believe. So, uh, you've done this a few times, not your first rodeo, and uh, you definitely were one of the first ones that I was around. I was like, oh, that's how the professionals. Do it, smoking mirrors, my friend smoking mirrors.

3:23 Yeah, so I think, yeah, I'm excited we have our you know, the golf Inness Bomb Squad is one that we're uh or I think we're only like eight hundred episodes or plus behind you. So, but it's been fun because it's uh, you know we have we do on Wednesdays, we typically will have a guest, so we'll have somebody on that we were kind of talk shop and whether it's in the instructional world or the fitness world or whatever it may be. So that's kind of fun because it's an interview. And then on the second one we do we do I do two every week. We do kind of a shorter kind of it is, so we do a shorter kind of you know, ten to twenty minute kind of quick hit episodisode on a specific topic. So that's usually just me diving in deep on you know, whether it's something cool that I saw on a client or a question that somebody's had. So it's cool. It has a little bit of variance for me. And then it also gives me a platform that if I want to go off on a you know, on a soapbox, you know, I talked to a computer for twenty minutes and then see what people think.

4:19 So yeah, I you know, I've never other than that one episode, after my little bonus episode after the Masters, I've never been able to just sit down and talk for twenty minutes like that on this show, mainly because I have too many questions and I want to get experts on like yourself, who can just do the talking for me and I can just ask ask a lot more and do follow ups. When you keep saying we do this show, it's not just you, it is me. That's just my vernacular. Anything at parpass, I say, we. As a group produce a podcast.

4:59 Correct. I I'm just the talking head. I go on and talk and then you know, our team does the voice. I don't. I don't know how to how to edit or like that's I have a great team and they helped me do all that. And I will say. Really smart, I really smart, because a lot of people disappear when they have to start doing all the ends. I don't like. I saw what it was early and I was like, ah, I have my I have my circle of competence. This is not it and I am not doing this. This will not go well. But I also I have such a newfound respect for the interviewer. It's it's funny. And now when I go on as like like in this scenario, it's like, oh, this will be fun. Just get to talk and hang out and you know, when you're the interview work like the research you got to do. And because that was some of the things I noticed going on other podcasts was how much of a better experience it was when the person that was interviewing you had done research or you know, I had a guy we record an episode earlier today and being able to hey, man, I saw that you had this great tweet that you had and it was you know, and being to set them up to then kind of dive into there and just it just the conversation and goes so much better there.

6:06 It's such a skill set that I had no idea about until Yeah, go on a show with you and it's like, oh, he actually like looked at what I do. Like that makes my job as the interviewee much easier. Absolutely. And I you know, I tell people a lot. I'm like, listen, this is your soapbox. I'm not here to do a gotcha. This is not sixty minutes, right, I just want to have you, you know, sell your wares, showcase your expertise, and I'll just keep listening. And I know my wife, you know, she wrote a book and it was published in twenty twenty three, and she's been on a lot of podcasts. And actually I learned how to do interviews by being her recording engineer because she was a talk show host. So that's how I learned how to do this and kind of develop my own skills over these twenty years of doing this. But she will be on pot Guess a lot where they do pre interviews. I'm like, what's that. You know, It's like, why are you wasting people's time by doing pre interviews.

7:09 I don't know if you do that or not, but for me, it's like, let's chat for three or four minutes before we start recording and then let it rip. Well, I find that's some of the best content too. It's when it's just kind of off the cuff, and you find I always find it's issuing, and I'm obviously there's a lot of the we have a lot of like the top teachers on and I always joked to our listeners, I'm like, you guys all know this. This is totally selfish on my part. I'm a golf junkie, and every question I ask is probably at least in part for me. But but you know, when you have those discussions, yeah, I mean, you have these discussions there and then there's this like aha moment. I've never once had a moment where I was like, oh man, I wish we weren't recording. I've had tons of moments where I was like, oh, I should hit records sooner.

7:55 Absolutely absolutely. But when you have as much which recording experiences I do have been doing this for my pretty much my whole life, you have also the horror stories of it wasn't recording, Oh my god. Or the one time when I was interviewing Carlton Fisk at spring training during baseball spring training and we did this great interview and I sat on the mic court and it unplugged. The thing was just twenty minutes of air. Oh gosh, my, so my horror story. There's been two. I had. One one was the hard part I've had, the only one. The bad one I've had is like we had a thunderstorm going on here in North Carolina while we were recording, and like the internet was super in and out, and then you're trying to have an interview with someone and there's lag and it's it's just it was awful. And it was I think it was Michael Breed, like it was like a big name, and it was like, oh my gosh, this is so embarrassing.

8:55 I like can't really hear or interact. So that that was That was a bad one. The although I will say the worst one I require will record in the single the solo episodes Ideal record in batches, and I recorded four, so they're like twenty minute. I mean, it's hour and a half and I'm just kind of go, go, go, go go. That's exhausting. I made the mistake of not checking that the it had selected the right mic. It had somehow like auto selected to a different mic, and so then I I so, you know, I finish, and I get a text from the guy does the podcast. He goes, hey, man, did you have your audio on? And I go no, I had to go back and do four podcasts. I just talked for an hour and a half to myself and did it unscripted and did not record a single word.

9:50 Fred It was I was like, oh, I wanted to run through a window. I was like, this is all just like, Okay, my career as a podcaster is complete. It was like, hey, guys, I think we're maybe just do one episode a week. We don't need these anyway. Oh my gosh. Oh. The thing that I've learned that I think has helped me through with the podcast is as long as you're a good listener, right when you're interviewing somebody, and if you have a list of questions that you feel like you have to get to, you're going to miss all this great stuff because they're going to be saying something and you just can just wait for them to finish and then say keep going. You know, yeah, what does that mean? Can you explain that to me?

10:36 And I found that's always worked really well for me. And talk about being self serving. I started this podcast to get free golf lessons, right, just like I'll just interview experts and see what happens that's worked. I think some of my favorites have been, you know, particularly the to your point. I'll have a number of top one hundred instructors on and I've kind of have my bullet points of things that I want to talk about based on what their YouTube videos or topics or philosophies have been around. But inevitably I get to I asked the first question. I think we had a like Adam Young came on, a great instructor out of Las Vegas, does a lot of online stuff, and started ham on.

11:19 I had like a hole list of I mean, fred I prepped right, I'm like, I'm going to be ready. I asked them the first question, and I just realized we're both absolute nerds, and it just goes nowhere where I had planned, and it was the greatest episode of just going into the weeds. And he's pulling up videos on his computer and sharing his screen and we're talking through different Oh yeah, this is what I see physically, this is what he sees instructionally, and I think it just to your point, I think when you can go those directions, that to me is one of my favorite things about doing the podcast. Is I inevitably in every guest I have on, I learn, whether it's from a fitness person, whether it's from a medical person or a you know, instructor, or whatever, whoever it may be. It's there's there's always a learning, and that's I never will get off a podcast like, oh man, all right, that was a waste of time. Uh actually has a lie that happened once but more than once more and then we had to work on our screening process and who we let on the podcast. But uh, that was an awkward email.

12:24 Hey man, we lost your we lost the episode recording. Uh, we we're not going to do it turned into like a like a whole sales pitches, like there was no value add content at all. Well, let me just let me just say to you that there have been episodes that I've finished going, Okay, that was really a waste of my time, that that was useless information. I didn't get anything from that, And I'll publish it and get emails going. That was one of the best episodes you've ever done. Yeah, that was so so just don't beat yourself up. Just get the content out there. Yeah, no, it's a it's it's been a fun learning experience where expert two years, two years in, we're in the we're getting close to two hundred. It's just been it's been fun. It's and I love I love also having you know, you've had me on a couple of times.

13:10 You've been generous to do that, and I always find it's fun having people back on and then you know, hey, last time we talked, this is where you were at. Where are you at now? And yeah, it's been fun to do that. And I will say my interviewing has definitely I listened to the first couple episodes, I was like, oh gosh, that was terrible. And then I'm sure I'll say the same thing. And you know, a year from now, i'll listen to what I'm doing now I'm like, god, you were terrible, Chris. But that's how we get better. And that's the fun part of it, right. Okay, I just got to tap on the shoulder talk about golf man? What are you doing? Okay, I'm sorry, it's like, don't are about your podcast? Enough? All right, Well you should just check it out though it's called The Golf Fitness Bomb Squad. And enough of that. Let's talk about us. Let's talk about let's get some golf stuff going on here. You guys have done some research recently about golf fitness, and that's what we're here to talk about today. And they're apparently we as golfers living in a series of myths about what is relevant and what is important as far as golf fitness. What have you learned? I am so interested in hearing about this.

14:38 Yeah, So I think one of the most interesting things that we found recently Fred was and actually it was it was just like on a whim this one. It was pretty funny. We had a person, a client, who had flown in we do. We do weekend events now in addition to the regular training we do, and so they had flown in and they brought their golf sheep and you know, they were like, hey, I brought my golf shoes. I didn't want to wear spikes like the ones that I normally play with, so I just brought these like comfortable ones. Then he's I don't know why it stuck out to me. He said, you know, it doesn't matter anyway, It's just whatever whatever's on my feet. I thought myself, I feel like it does matter because I feel like i've looked at this before, and so you know, we went through the weekend. It was fine, and then so you know, the next week I came in and I said to my team, I said, guys, I want to do an experiment. And they're like, sure, Chris has another great idea, right, So usually they're all stale, they're all stupid and don't mean turned into anything I was.

15:39 I was like, what I want to do is I want to I want to go on the because we have two sets of force plates and our simulators here, it's like I want I'm curious based on what's like my if I'm on a stable or unstable surface, just how much of a difference does it make in terms of how much force I can produce. So I said, well, we're gonna do We're gonna take these. You know, if you guys have if you've seen like a blue eric pad, and there's like these big blue phone pads that you'll see at the gym about you know, maybe two inches thick and they're just foam. You'll see them a lot in like rehab centers for balance and those sorts of things. So we take two of them, we put them on the forest plates and I do. So one of the big predictors of club at speed is your vertical leap, So how much force you can produce while you do a jump. Right, So if you're standing, you kind of dip down and jump as high as you can. So I put those the pads down and I we turn on this the force plates, I do the jump, and the way you measure is you can measure how much force is put out, right, So there's about nine hundred to just it's about nine hundred watts of forces put out.

16:41 So then you're like, all right, and now get rid of the phone and let's do it again. And so we throw it on and I do the same jump, same nothing different, and it doubles the amount of force that puts that's put out. Well, okay, I mean, if you're on a two inch Poham pad, going to lose a lot of your power, aren't you, because you're not really pushing off the ground. Correct, Well, so you're pushing off an unstable surface. So the analogy I would use is think of if you could push one hundred pounds of force into the ground, right, and but now you have to take you know, energy, the equivalent to maybe twenty pounds of that to make sure you don't fall over to balance. Now you can only push eighty pounds in right, so you'll have less energy to produce the force because you're using a lot of your energy to balance. And you know, rule one of the body is don't let Chris or Fred fall over, right, stay up right?

17:36 Yeah, so's and for me it's you know, as I get older. It becomes more important, exactly right, So you know, and so so we do that, and you know, we're like, Okay, that's cool. But if we're filming this whole thing, we have a YouTube video that we're eventually going to put out at some point. But you know, I'm like, all right, that's cool. But who cares, right, because you know the golfer I had, you know, there's members in here all the time, and I'm like, guys, this is amazing. You see this, And the average golfer looks me, They're like, yeah. Right, let me ask you this. Did you do this in? What were the shoes that you were wearing, just wearing golf shoes, were wearing. Just regular kind of comfortable sneakers. Right, So basically, what I think of the Eric's pad is like an exaggeration of an unstable surface versus a stable surface. So if we're talking, if we tie this circles back to golf shoes, a comfortable golf shoe like kind of casual, no spikes, maybe just a couple of little nubs on the bottom, versus you know, your traditional kind of hard, hard, basic.

18:35 Spike less shoes have been all the rage over the last you know, fifteen years or so. Correct, Yeah, and so, and if you look at the tour the tour players, over eighty percent of them wear spikes, but I look at the amateurs, it's basically flips or almost eighty percent of them don't wear spikes, right, So, so basically what that is is that's an exaggeration of Hey, if I'm on a non spikeless shoe and an eRx pad versus a spiked shoe, which I'm jumping on the ground because there's there's my balance is going to be connected there. So so then we're all right, let's swing a golf club and see if this actually means anything. So bring the golf pads, you know, put them back, or the eRx pads we put them on the force plates.

19:16 Swing club ed speed it's like one O seven, one O seven, one o eight. Right, take get rid of the force this the phone pads. Guess what the club ed speed was greater significantly one six It was like one it was almost one sixteen. Wow, so that is significant. That's almost it's over twenty yards almost. We're getting towards thirty yards. So that's obviously an exaggeration, right because you're sitting on a two inch pad. So then if you if you you know, bringing this truly like a golf shoe differential what we've then because then we start testing the actual shoes because now I'm like, okay, now I'm very curious when you actually test a golf shoe. It can be up to up to ten yards three miles an hour difference if the shoe does not match your foot and if if you have not like a spike versus no spike. So there's two elements. There's an external element and an internal element. So I think of the external is spike or no spike, right, so that's going to connect you to the ground. On the external side.

20:22 The other element is you know. Some people spikes, the spikes will connect you to the. Ground, correct, yep. So having a spike will connect you to the ground. That will increase the amount of ground force you can create, which then obviously increases club at speed. Wow. So that's that alone is like three miles an hour. Then if you go and you look at the actual type of shoe on the inside, based on your foot. So if you have a flat foot, that's what's technically what's called a hypermobile, So it's basically you don't have an arch, so it just collapses. If you get into a shoe that's going to give you a little bit more support, give you a little bit more of an arch. It actually gives you better connection to the ground that can increase so that can that will increase the amount of force you can produce even more so for more speed Versus if you have a very high arch that's called our rigid foot doesn't collapse at all. Getting a shoe that actually promotes a little bit more mobility to promote a little bit more connection to the ground will also increase your club speed because it increases the amount of connection you have, which increases the amount of force that you can produce. So there's an internal element and an external element to the shoe. We're not even talking about the fitness element that then adds on top of that.

21:31 This is like just simply you know, people talk about the ball roll back and the impact. Literally just getting the right shoe totally erases any ball roll back, like it's ten yards immediately right there. And I think it's such an overlooked element when we're talking about performance or fitness for golfers. What is the footworth that they are or are not wearing. So it was just a fun study that we did and it was like the one out of one hundred where I was like, ah, that actually showed something. It exaggerated it. And then when we tested it in an actual golf shoe with spikes versus not with spikes, it actually carried over as well too. So for the average golfer. How do I translate that information? So, for the average golfer, wearing spikes will increase your club as speed, or I should say this, wearing spikes will increase the amount of force you can produce into the ground. So if you produce the force at the wrong time, you may not see an increasing club as speed.

22:26 So meaning if we think of a professional golfer swinging a golf club, they are going to produce the max amount of force. Think of like a vertical like drive into their lead leg from the top of the swing until left arm lead arm is parallel to the ground on their downswing. Right an amateur golfer is going to typically produce all that force too late, so add impact or after impact. And when we look at ground forces, the amount of vertical force you can produce into the ground, amount you can push into the ground if you're gonna jump, particularly into your lead leg, the amount that you can produce, and assuming you do that at the right time, has a direct connection to drive. It causes kliphet speed to go up. So having the better connection through footwear is going to give you the opportunity to produce more force.

23:17 There obviously is the caveat You got to produce it at the right time. There's a skill element there. But the other piece physically in terms of what that means for you, just the golfer listening right now, if you go out and buy say you're wearing a casual shoe right now, and you go out and you're like, all right, I listened to this guy. He said to go get shoes that connect me to the ground. With spikes in them. If you go buy spiked shoes but you don't have the hip mobility to actually clear into your lead hip right, well, now you're just gonna wreck. You're gonna like wrench up your knee or your back because your foot is now planted and your hip doesn't move. So and typically what you'll see in these guys this you know, if this is you, if this describes you listening right now, what you're seeing in your spikeliss shoe is as you swing through through impact, your lead foot will spin out right.

24:09 It basically releases to really because your hip isn't giving you anything, so it's going to release from there because your knee joint is not a rotary joint. So it's in a very interesting discussion because I think it's irrelevant for a lot of things. When it comes to speed and performance as a golfer, we want the quick fix, So we're going to go do the speed training. We're going to go buy the speed training thing. We're going to go buy the new driver. Don't just you know, I'm gonna go buy the new shoe that's going to connect me to the ground quicker. But if you don't have the physical capabilities to stay safe while adding the speed that can lead to injury. And I think that's always the caveat that I'm always preaching about, is adding speed is easy. Right if you're solely said, I don't care about getting hurt, I just want to swing faster. Great, do speed training, get a really long club forty eight inch shaft, and get your foot connected to the ground.

25:00 But if you don't have the physical prerequisites basically to allow that to be done safely, then you do potentially bring an injury risk. For sure. Is this information scientific or anecdotal? I mean, you did your test, but it's you, it's you know, one test. Yeah, so yes, it's scientific. So I'm not the only one who's done it. So there was actually a lot of research back. This is probably five to ten years ago, done by foot Joy, foot Joy and body tracks. This is before force plates were really widely available. It was a it was called a pressure plate, so they were trying to improve pressure ratings. I know Squares Golf Shoes has done a ton of research on this, so it's it's not unique to me. This is a brand agnostic kind of science. Nerd just looking at how can I help somebody increase club at speed. What are all the different levers I can pull for somebody? And so it is you know, and then we've have sense run this obviously internally with all of the different golfers that come in and hey, what's your clubhead speed?

26:12 You? If you have good hip mobility, you pass your four rotational mobility centers which we've talked about on the show before, and we have the home assessment that people do and hey, you pass that, this is an option for you. We can get you in a better shoe and this is a like quick immediate clubhead speed boost and if you have good mobility, we were able to do that safely. So I think the the one caveat it will increase your force production. Now if you do it at the right time, Yeah, it depends on the person, right and then then that's another discussion of training and those sorts of things. But yeah, if you improve your connection to the ground, you will increase the amount of produce a force you can produce that as a kind of causational In terms of scientific I've.

26:58 Had multiple guests on who are shoe manufacturers and inventors, including Robert from Squares. He was I think this was like the first podcast that he was on, so I've been with him since the beginning, and I've always been fascinated. And I don't remember who exactly told me, but I think it was Squares. It said, if you can twist your shoe in your hand, that's a bad golf shoe. You need a very sturdy golf shoe. From the fitness side of that, Does that hold up? Do you agree with that? Yeah? I think everything is on a continuum, right, So I think if you had at its core, yes, that is accurate. I think there's varying levels of that based on what the foot is, right, And that's where there's different styles of shoes, right. There's going to be some that are more rigid, there'll be some that are have a little bit more flexibility. But yeah, if you can rotate it back and back and forth, and the ultimate goal of that shoe is to produce as much is a performance driving shoe, to produce as much force as possible, which then drives as much speed as possible. One hundred percent yes, right, And I think that's always the challenge with that shoe companies will have is they have to balance that scientific fact with comfort, right, which is why the spikeless just kind of I want to wear it to the grocery store. Shoe has been become so popular, right,

28:30 and so you know, in a perfect world, yeah, that's what every shoe would look like. But people want to they want to look stylish, they want it to be comfortable. The amateur will generally prioritize comfort and look over the performance side, but they'll go up by the new driver, you know, every year, right, because they're going to gain twenty yards every single year. And we know that's not true unless you work on your speed. So do this. And if you don't know this answered, that's okay. But it's like, does the squares shoe that squared off toe and the rigid bottom is in fact? Is that a better shoe? I mean you got guys like Nick Faldo and John Daley saying, oh yeah, I swear by these. Is that a better golf shoe?

29:23 I mean, I think the toe box design that they've done. Now, I haven't actually researched these at this point, I had them. We actually are doing some stuff where they actually are sending us some to do some research on them, which I think is really cool. Yeah, we're going to actually we're running a study with a number of our different of our clients trying different shoes and seeing so you know, I could speak intelligently at that point. What I will say, just based on the biomechanics of the foot and the footwear and that toe box, it makes sense, like it does when you look at the studies that they've had done. It makes sense. You know. I think everything that Squares as a company seems to go after his performance based right, and so from that approach, it's right, you know, from a style, you know, those are all other discussions of I think, if we're strictly talking it, how do I get the most out of a shoe as defined by you know comfort? You know, the wider toe box is going to give you more what I was talking about, Like, if you have a rigid foot, you want a footwear that's going to try to get more connection to the ground so you have the ability to put more force.

30:36 The wider toe box is going to allow you to do that versus you have a really narrow shoe. The extreme would be think of like a woman in a high heel, like with a like super tight and like a high heel that they'd a stiletto that they would wear to like a wedding, Like not a lot of ground force going to come off of that toe box right, like right that they're ripping their shoes off because their feet are bruised and bloody at the end too, exactly right when they're dancing starts, right, So that'd be one extreme. You go the total opposite extreme, and that's where you have the rigid kind of support. You have the wider toe box so that you can actually drive from the first methead all the way to the fifth met head, you know, under the big toe to under the little toe.

31:17 So all of that is one hundred percent on point. Yeah, And the thing is for me and I really like the square shoes. I've liked them a lot in the past, but since I walk the course a lot, most of the time, my feet hurt, my ankle's hurt wearing those and walking in those, and I've really had to adjust my shoe wear and decide where I go because you know, in northern California, we have very hilly courses. There's a lot of elevation change, and so some shoes just hurt at the end of the round, not just my feet and my legs, but my back.

32:02 Yeah. And I think this is this is getting into my geekiness of researching shoes. And I know, I know weight, like the weights of different shoes and stuff like. I think if you're looking at across the shoe spectrum, you know, if we're talking on the square specifically, like when they came out, if you look at it was a couple at least one hundred grams heavier their earlier shoes than their their later shoes, right, And so I think that's been the balance talking about the continuum of if you go straight up performance, it's going to be a heavier shoe because you have to put materials in there that are going to give you something to push against, you know. So I think what you've started to see, particularly as you go through the technology and the innovation of materials and all those sorts of things, I think you're going to continue to see shoes that are going to drop on the weight side and while being able to maintain that on the stability side. And I think that in my opinion, on the shoe side of things, that's where it's going to continue to go. And looking at how can we get this shoe as light as possible, with as much connection as possible, with as much support as possible, and and be weatherproof right and look cool and feel comfortable right like all those other all those things. So, but that's I think one of the things just looking at if we take Squares as the ultimate kind of performance focused shoe, it was heavy, you know when it first came out, and if you now look at it, you know, there's there's foot joy shoes that are lighter.

33:32 There's also some that are heavier. Like there's there's other brands out there that now you know, the Square shoes are not the heaviest. Uh. And I think you're going to continue to see that across the shoe spectrum, across all those companies. Yeah. Are you familiar with the Afalon's affalons. I've heard of that. I have not like dove into those at all. Were those We did an episode with him, and I like those a lot. They the bottom of him had like I can't explain it and I'm just moving my hand and the listeners have no idea what I'm talking about. Okay, But the Aline and Sketchers got into the game as well, and I'm a huge fan of Sketcher shoes, although I've the I do have a pair of Sketchers for my winter shoes, but I've never gotten the more recent ones.

34:22 Are they in it for the style of it and just be able to get old guys to be their test do their testimonials, you know, Ringo Star and Tony Romo And you. Know, I have no idea in that one. Yeah, I think I just always try in the fitness space, in the rehab space that's obviously where I live. I just always try to boil it down to kind of first principle thinking, right, and if I'm talking about performance, what are the first principles of a footwear ground for ground reaction forces and connection to the ground. And that's ay, it needs to be connected, it needs to be stable. You need to have you know, basic physics. Force pushed down against, We'll get a reciprocal force back up. Right, So if I can put if I have more to put something against, I'll get more back up. That's why if you go out and it's just pouring, just poured rain, playing it's wet and soggy, you're not going to hit it as far. You're not going to swing as fast because you don't have the ground connection. And then and then yeah, because you think about.

35:21 It, and I always blamed it the balls not rolling. Well there's that too. It's also going to stop and not go anywhere. But think think of the erxpad experiment that I just talked about, you know, to a lesser degree. If it's super soggy, you're basically hitting off eRx pads right, your feet are slipping a little bit, it's a little mushy, you know. Versus if it's hard and firm, you're gonna be able to really dive in, you drive in, and it's going to se your foot's going to stay connected. So like, those principles don't change. Obviously there's preferences in style and comfort and all those sorts of things, and you know, the different companies take different approaches there. But the first principle, the foundational principles of producing speed from a performance standpoint, don't change.

36:08 Lots of times on the show, we'll talk about with fitness people and even equipment people, it's like, you know, the balls, they their technology is getting better, and the clubs, their technology is getting better. And people think that if I get a new club or I get new balls that I'm going to get greater distance. You may get a little more. But really we come back to this conversation that we've had so often that the most important tool in your bag is your body, and if you want to get greater distance, it's more about your swing speed. Right, Yeah, I mean definitely, if you want a sustainable difference or a distance, it's your body, right, So you know, go buy a pair of shoes that connect to the ground.

36:57 You can swing the club faster. Go do some speed training drills, or get a different driver your clubhets. Maybe you can move that clubhead faster. Go take lessons and get more efficient. You know, technically you can swing it faster. At the end of the day, the engine that drives all of that is your body. And your engine's only as big as your engine is, right, and you're in that engine. I think it is. A car has a has a set of brakes that you know, that's your your strength, that that is capable of slowing down a certain speed, right, And so this is all the research that we've done. I think one of the other myths that you always hear is like, oh, just as you get older, you're naturally going to lose distance, like, Okay, yes, but the average guy. But when we look, yeah, but yeah, yeah, and yeah, and the average guy who doesn't do the right stuff. What we're seeing in our database just points over fifteen thousand guys that we've seen change data. We've got a number of guys that been in the dayabase for over a decade. You're seeing guys lose if they don't do the right things. They will lose ten miles an hour a decade if guys are doing the right thing.

38:12 So if we look, if we compare those at the you know, the control group, guys who don't do anything, compared to the guys who've been with us for ten plus years, those guys don't. We can't stop loss with age. Like guy, we have one guy, he's started at seventy, he's now eighty four. I can't. I'm not going to stop him from losing distance. But what we've seen is his rate of loss is eighty percent less. So instead of losing ten miles an hour, he's only lost two in the last ten years. That's significant, it's massive, and that's because he's working out regularly on the correct things to work out. Yeah, so he's got his engine right, and so he's keeping making sure he's mobile and his hips and his spine and his shoulder and his neck, and he's making sure that he's strong enough to support the speeds. This with our database at this point, it's it's just a math equation, right. You say, hey, Fred, how fast do you want to swing? You say, I want to swing one hundred miles an hour. Two hundred. Great, we'll go for two hundred. We have an equation for that you'd be you'd still be thirty miles or twenty seven miles an hour faster than the world long drive guys that we have.

39:13 But they're kids, you know. Records are made to be broken. But yeah, you say, hey, I want to swing whatever it is, two hundre miles an hour, hundred miles an hour. I'd love to get to one hundred. Yeah, So you say one hundred miles an hour, we can say, hey, well, if you want to get there, to do that safely, meaning you can swing one hundred both physically your body is able to do one hundred and five, right, so you're not redlining every single time. Your mobility and your hip needs to be X amount of degrees and we do it. We can do it based on your age, because you know, at fifty versus at twenty, to swing one hundred miles an hour, the mobility requirement is different, the strength requirement is different in terms of to do it safely. And so that's where you can say based on your age, you know this is these would be the degrees of mobility you need in your join. These would be the strength numbers of your squat movement, a hinge or a deadlift movement, a press, an upper body push movement. Right, these would be that those are that's you're breaking. So it's like how good are your breaks? And then then there's power tests your lower body how you know your vertical leap how much force can you produce through your legs? And then also your upper body push power? How much force can you produce through upper body? You know that think of that as like how many RPMs do you have? Right, so think of a car analogy. I think of your mobility as how good are your tires? Your strength is how good are your breaks? And then your power output is how big is your engine? And when you can like a plug in hybrid, plug in hybrid, those those or

40:44 even get an electric one. All right, those testas go. But you know, and what it's it's just a math equation. You say, hey, you know this is the speed I want to be at, this is my age. Then okay, these are the physical things that we need to train up for. And so I think when you talk about the other gentleman, Dennis, he's one of my favorite guys in the world. Like, when people come in, the average guy picks up six miles an hour in the first year, right, So if you think about it, it's because they're not optimized. So the average guy is going to pick up six miles an hour year one, and then if he does nothing else, he just if he doesn't gain ever again, which they actually tend to gain about another two miles an hour each year for the next three Let's say they stop at six. If he loses two miles an hour every decade, we got thirty years till he's back to where he started, which is crazy. But there's this myth that hey, once I hit fifty, it's all downhill, or for some guys, it's once I hit thirty, I'm all down it's.

41:45 Oh my god, I'm turning seventy. It just changes. Right, It's based on perspective. Right, you're almost seventy now you're like, hey, when I was thirty, man, I was great. Right. The guy who just turned it. Didn't play golf until I was in my forties. That really screwed. But I think that's that's a huge myth that a lot of people have, is that this idea that when I get older, I'm going to lose. And have yet to meet a guy over the age of thirty who came in one hundred percent optimized, meaning they had nothing to gain, and we were totally in just lost prevention mode. So you know, all those guys, everybody comes in, they all can gain. And then if you just keep doing the right stuff, like fifteen minutes a day, like it doesn't take a lot, Guys, you can truly only lose like two miles an hour a decade, and all your peers are losing ten.

42:38 Tell me, give me fifteen minutes a day. What do I need to be doing. I'd love to do. I will do fifteen minutes a day forever. Yeah, well, I think that's well. So that's where we always start with the assessment. So you know, you do you do your your mobility assessment. So I always think of a remember the nutritional pyramid, right, and then we realized that it didn't really makes sense and whatever. You anyway, that's another rabbit hole cap exactly right. So like remember like where carbs used to be at the bottom, right, So that's that's think of that is you know, I think of golf performance, think of it as like a performance pyramid. I think of that that's your mobility, right. So if we use the car analogy, those are your tires, right. So the first STEPISNE is to assess your hip internal rotation, which is your ability to rotate into your trail hip on your takeaway and into your lead hip going through impact almost seventy. We want to see that, you know, thirty five to forty degrees both, you know, most importantly on your lead side. Then we'd look at your shoulder rotation.

43:38 So I think of like a pitcher throwing a pitch or a quarterback, right and then they kind of sling their arm back. That movement needs to be you know, almost seventy. We want to see that probably about five degrees beyond spine angle. So if you think of if you kind of have your arm up you know, elbow shoulder height ninety degree, you know, bending your wrist or entire in your elbow, just kind of rotate your arm back like you're gonna throw a pitch right that forearm should get you know, zero is if it's equal to your spine angle A zero, it should get five degrees passed when you're it's easy when you're sitting. You got to do it when you're standing in golf posture, right, because now you got all of a sudden because now you have to fight gravity and you're doing it in the specific position that you would do it when you're when you're playing. Okay, so you gotta pass. Those are the two big ones that everybody struggles with. There's also like we look at thracic rotation, which is, you know, give your arms crossed on your shoulders, rotating as far as you can each direction right, getting towards seventy. We want to see at least you know, fifty degrees each way.

44:41 You know, so if you think of if you're if you're facing a computer screen, that'd be zero. If you turned totally sideways, that would be ninety, right, So can we get halfway there? So a spinning chair makes that easy. Yeah, right, but that's think of that as like your base level, right, and so that's step one. And if we don't pass there, all we do for fifteen minutes a day is we work on improving those areas until we start to pass them. Are we get to what specific exercises that I should be working on? Since you're in North Carolina. Right, yeah, and I'm not. Yeah, So this is where that's why we work with people. We do this people all over the world, right, so, oh you do this remotely? Oh yeah, ninety ninety percent of our business is remote. Yeah, so we work with about over a thousand people around the world. And so so this is where yeah, well, well personally, if we get off this, we'll get you an assessment and we'll give you all the stuff you need to do. But you know, for everyone listening, your first step is typically going to be you know, soft tissue work, which is you know, rolling on a phone roller using la crossball. Right, we got to get the tissue.

45:41 I was using analogy. Every muscle has a sleeve around it. So if you're wearing a sleeve, if you raise your arm up, your sleeve slides down your arm. Right, if you grab the bottom of your sleeve and hold it in tight to your chest. All of a sudden, your arm doesn't move anywhere, right because the sleeve is restricting it. So what basically the goal of the soft tissue mobility is to basically remove that restriction. To think of like your arms almost duct taped to your side. We got to rip off the duct tape and that's where we see huge improvements and mobility. Like for like week two weeks, all of a sudden, you go from hey, I got ten degrees and it's cramping to I get to twenty or you know, twenty five, like I've doubled it, and that just fixing. Just doing those mobility exercises for people gets rid of a lot of pain for them. They immediately will start to like, oh I'm turning more, I'm not sore after I play the round of golf, like, oh I will you know, I wasn't able to move my hips first, Like particularly like guys who were good players when they were younger, right, and they they understand the movement they're supposed to do mentally, but physically they can't do it, can't do it. Right, You give that guy mobility and his hip back, and it's like and his buddies are like, oh my god, like, what'd you do?

46:51 Right? And not not to mention his balls going farther than there's now, but like that's that's literally just level one. Then you move up. Level two is how do we get you stronger? Right, So, whether it's you know, squat type movements or hinge type movements, which are like a you know, whether it's kettlebell swings or kettlebell deadlifts or banded lifts, right, how do we get your hips stronger? Right? Bridges would be the simplest example of that. How do we strengthen basically like the backside of your legs, your button, your ham strings, right, So those are your two lower body and then you're also working getting stronger in your upper body, which you know, have like a bench press type movement, whether it's with dumbells or barbell or cables, whatever it may be. Those are the big ones that we really want to see ge get stronger with. And then you get to power, right, and power is how much force you can produce and how fast you can do it. So where strength is like I just if I'm going to push fifty pounds it can take me two minutes to get it from the bottom to the top.

47:46 I just need to move it. Power is can I get it from the bottom of the How quickly can I get it from the bottom to the top. Right, So, if you can move fifty pounds but it takes you a minute, that is less powerful than if you can move fifty pounds the same distance in one set. Right, So that's where the explosiveness comes from. And so those are kind of the big three categories. And so during that fifteen minutes a day, because you're assessing, you know exactly it is what you kind of you get rid of all the extra noise and you're solely focusing on what is the low hanging fruit for you at that moment. When I go to the gym, I generally bypass the weight room and go right to the pool and try to get some swimming in. Should I be spending more time lifting weights or if you want distance, Yes, it's the resistance that I get from the pool without having to create pain. Yeah, that is that helpful or not?

48:44 Or this is all Yeah, I mean it's helpful from the general health and wellness cardiovascular benefits to it, right, like general well being by all means keep swimming if you're trying to improve. And it's the same discussion around like guys are like, well, I do cardio, you know, I get on the elliptical and I go like, great, there's nothing wrong with that. It's just you're moving long, it's for a longer duration of time, and you're moving slowly. Is that what you want in your golf swing? No? Right, right? So, and that's where I think you get to. The golf is a power sport. The entire swing, like the down swings less than a second, the entire swing. You know, maybe not even too right, thanks John Daly?

49:26 Maybe yeah, But so I think you got to think of how you want to train, how you want to play. So if I want to play an explosive sport, I want to swing faster, I'm upset that I'm losing speed, Well, I probably should do stuff that would help me swing faster, and that's going to be producing force. Right. So basically, like think of like lifting weights. If you're lifting more than six reps, like say, if you have a weight that you can do fifteen times, you're not developing strength, You're developed You're doing It's called hypertrophy, you're trying to like build mass or build muscle fibers. Ultimately we want for golf is we just want to be able to produce a lot of force or however how much force we need. So there's no need to do more than five or six reps because that's kind of the physiologically the strength range. And so if you want to you know, if you're in an off season and you want to do a lot of reps because you want to put on a base or build a bigger engine, that's when we would do ten fifteen reps in a set. But that's going to make you sore, So you don't want to do that when you're in season. When you're in season, like our guys on tour now, they're doing three to five reps max in a set, right, so the weight they're using is going to be relatively heavier because they're only lifting it three to five times. They couldn't lift it fifteen times. But the number of repetitions they do is less. That puts less stress on the nervous system muscularly, they're not sore and allows them to perform their best.

50:49 So that it starts getting into a little bit of the nitty gritty, but that's how you keep it short as you say, hey, this is what I need to work on. These are the two or three things that I need to do. As long as working stint with that, we just snowball wins and progress occurs. And you are at par four Success number four p R number four success dot com and you're also on Instagram and Twitter and YouTube channel to all par for. Success, all part for success. And we actually we created you know, parp success dot com slash golf Smarter, so anyone listening they can grab the home assessment for free and thank you. Yeah, and we actually if you go there, we actually we don't do this for all the shows, but for you for the show. For you guys listening, it's because I like I like Fred and he's had me on multiple times. Uh. We also are you have you graced me with your presence early on. I appreciate it.

51:45 They gave me some street cred. Uh you know, but but we also after you guys, if you go to parpus dot com slash golf smarter, you'll get the home assessment you just put in your email, will send it to you and then it also gives you an option if you want, for a free one on one console one of our guys, so they'll actually go through the assessment with you live, walk you through you know what it means and all that sort of stuff too, if you wanted that sort of attention as well. So awesome, But that's that's how we keep it short and then understanding like, hey, if your shoulder is good, we're not gonna waste time on your shoulder, like put your hip stinks, well, then we're gonna work on your hip, and I think that's important. Awesome, Chris, it was great talk to you again, and also remember to check out the Golf Fitness Bomb Squad your podcast, and we will of course, as always, we'll stay in touch and we'll do this.

52:32 Again for sure. I definitely got to have you on. We gotta got to hear the Master story to my listenership. That's a good one.