"What's Your Swing Speed?"

About three months ago, I joined a great gym that is about five miles from our home in Stuart, Florida. It's a Planet Fitness facility. It is a gym with stuff in it...that's it.  That's all I wanted, and it's very inexpensive to join.  I don't generally use weight machines, but I do use the treadmill and the elliptical machine.  There are lots of free weights and three universal gym stations which I use for pull downs and triceps exercises.

I bring my PowerSwing Trainer and a set of Medium PowerBandz to the gym every day.  I have created a very intense and very effective golf fitness routine with the PowerSwing Trainer which involves four sets of twenty-five fast repetitions.

After about ten to fifteen minutes on the treadmill, I perform a dynamic warm up routine involving three movement patterns. I do a few sets of upper body exercises with light free weights and then on to the PowerSwing Trainer.  I perform two sets of twenty-five right handed swings with my PST, one set of left handed swings and finish with one more set of twenty-five right handed swings. (Since golf is a one sided dominant sport, I want to make sure I am balancing out the movements). The gym has one entire wall full of mirrors, so I am able to monitor my swing, rotation and posture the entire time. After that routine I am spent. My heart rate is way up and I feel great! This part of my workout takes about ten minutes total. I finish with about four or five PowerBandz exercises and I am done.

Yesterday, I was coming out of the men's locker room (of course the men's locker room) and a fellow who looked to be about my age (I turned 63 yesterday) approached me and, without asking my name or saying hello, blurted out, "What's your swing speed?".  I stopped, paused for a second and said, "I don't know".  He said he had been watching me with that "rubber thing" and was curious as to my swing speed.

That's not me and it's not the locker room at Planet Fitness.  This picture is just for effect.

That question got me to thinking. Is it really important that I know what my swing speed is?  Will that determine my golf fitness level? Will it make me a better golfer? Will I hit the ball straighter? Will I be more popular at the 19th hole?  In my mind the answer to all those questions is...no.

I workout hard to get into the best shape I am capable of (actually for the past two years I have been very sporadic in keeping a consistent workout schedule if at all...until Planet Fitness).  I am losing some excess pounds, am hitting the ball better than ever in my life, and enjoying my time on the golf course like never before.  If I started to worry about my swing speed, I might not have as much fun.

I will be shooting a video of my workout with the PowerSwing Trainer and posting it next week because I think it will be a benefit to some of you who are looking for an exercise routine that is easy and golf specific.

Having watched several videos with our friend Martin Chuck, inventor of the Tour Striker training club, I have been creating some very specific exercises with the PST to help me get my hands more forward at impact to compress the ball better. So far it is working.  I will be posting those too.

So you stay posted, I'll keep posting and...who cares what our swing speeds are as long as we are enjoying the game and having fun.

Ken Pierce

golfgym.com