WSJ features TPI

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It's lengthy; here's the link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704130904574644202781104302.html

How the Pros Get Their Bodies Ready

The Key to Fixing Your Golf Swing Is Synching It With Your Physical Limitations

• By JOHN PAUL NEWPORT

Oceanside, Calif.



The Titleist Performance Institute could hardly be in a more anonymous setting: seven miles inland from the Pacific, surrounded by office parks, recognizable from the main road only by its tall, driving-range-style nets. But on any given day, one is likely to encounter several high-profile Tour pros here. When I visited last month, Brad Faxon was working out in the gym and Ben Crane was toying around on the range. Padraig Harrington was expected a few days later with his full entourage—his caddy, coaches and physical therapist.

Players under contract to Titleist get their equipment fitted here at no cost. The company also does much of its club and ball testing at the facility. But the most intriguing work carried out at TPI involves the golf swing, in particular research into the negative cascading effect that physical limitations and dysfunctions, even seemingly trivial ones like a stiff ankle, can have on a player's ability to hit the ball efficiently. For average golfers with major issues, like immobility in the hips (that would be me), the staff can propose workarounds or pinpoint physical therapy regimens that, with time and discipline, can correct the flaws.

"When an average club member goes to a golf pro, the pro may know a lot about the golf swing, but he usually has no idea what that player is physically capable of doing or not doing. Most of the time, not doing. And without that knowledge, the guy has no chance," Mr. Faxon told me between sets in the gym.







The exercises Mr. Faxon was performing, most of them designed to continue his rehab from his second anterior cruciate ligament knee surgery two years ago, were not the type you usually see at neighborhood sports clubs. One of them, called Turkish Getup, looked like something that 19th-century British army officers with handlebar mustaches and long johns might have done. Hoisting a heavy kettle ball directly overhead, with his arm straight and locked in at the shoulder, he sank to a fully laid-out position on his side on the floor and stood up again, repeatedly, in a prescribed order of movements. I tried this later at home with a much lighter weight and found the maneuver surprisingly difficult and unpleasant. But it is effective (the TPI gurus say) at strengthening and training the body's muscles, especially the core abdominal and leg muscles, to work in unison.

"A lot of the old guard still blame equipment for the increased distance on Tour, but so much more of it is the quality of the athletes," Mr. Faxon said. "You don't have to work out to play on Tour, but if you don't, you get passed, because you're not strong enough. And the stuff we do these days is all full-body, functional movement. Nobody's doing bench presses any more, that's for sure."

TPI's understanding of the swing is based on hundreds of three-dimensional computer recordings it has made over the past decade of top Tour pros hitting balls while hooked up to electrodes, some imbedded in a special vest. "There's no one swing that works best for everyone, but all the top players we've tested hit the ball as efficiently as one another," said Dave Phillips, the golf instructor who co-founded TPI with biomechanics expert Greg Rose in 2004. The pros' efficiency flows from a precisely-timed sequence of energy transfers, from the legs and hips to the torso to the shoulders to the hands and finally through the clubhead to the ball.

When the sequence is out of whack, the computer renderings of the swing reveal where the inefficiencies originated, which helps TPI specialists find a fix. Sometimes the solution is simply a matter of improving technique. Sometimes it involves adjusting a player's clubs. But TPI's special expertise is understanding how and where physical restrictions contribute to weak and inconsistent swings.

The first step for a golfer new to TPI is a physical evaluation, such as the one Lance Gill, TPI's head athletic trainer, gave me last month. It began with questions about the current state of my game and my golf goals, followed by two dozen or so measurements of my strength, flexibility and mobility (the ability of the joints to move properly). I sat on a balance ball and rotated my torso with a pole behind my back. I cocked my wrists at various angles. With my hands overhead, I touched a wall behind my back with my thumbs. I lay on a bench with my knees in the air while Mr. Gill torqued my legs this way and that.

Relative to other guys in their mid-50s, I did well in some areas, such as turning my torso against a stable lower body. But I did miserably on two key measures: the full deep squat, which TPI's research has shown to be the single most predictive test of a player's ability to maintain posture during the swing, and hip mobility. Tour pros can rotate their hips internally 40 degrees or more. I stopped at 20 degrees with one leg and 15 with the other. "That means your ability to rotate on the backswing and follow through is very limited, so you'll probably end up making compensations somewhere else. That means loss of power and eventually injury," Mr. Gill told me.

"Like the lumbar-disc issue I already have?" I asked. "Quite possibly," he said.

Within a few days, Mr. Gill had created an interactive Web page for me that included a series of detailed 30-minute workouts, which I have been doing with some regularity for the last three weeks. The exercises focus exclusively on my weak spots, and aren't much fun. Mostly they require twisting my body into hitherto unknown positions, frequently resulting in muscle cramps. But I am feeling a bit more oily in my hips and my all-important glute muscles (the "king" of the golf swing, TPI says) are getting stronger. Some things, like balance, improve quickly, but hip mobility is stubborn. He told me it will probably take two or three months of consistent work before I see improvement there "start to take hold."
At prices up to $10,000, non-Tour pros can buy a multiday "Tour Experience" at TPI, which includes a physical assessment, exercise and nutritional counseling, swing instruction and new clubs. But the more common approach for recreational golfers is to use the mytpi.com Web site to find a local TPI-certified trainer or instructor. There are 3,200 in 47 countries.

"Ideally you want a team approach—a physical guy to evaluate your body and a coach to work on your swing in coordination with the trainer," said Mr. Phillips. Even golfers who have no intention of going to the gym can benefit because the instructor can build a swing around his known limitations, he said. More typical clients, however, are avid 10-handicap types who want to get down to scratch and say they will do whatever it takes.

"When a guy tells me he's willing to work out for 90 minutes four times a week, I interpret that, from experience, as 15 minutes, three times a week," Mr. Gill said. "But I can give him a focused 15 minute workout that will make a big difference in his game."

I'm surprised they don't link the website.