Why the TPI philosophy is the gold standard for golf swing improvement
Golf is a fantastic sport because it is one you can play from childhood through retirement. It challenges you physically and mentally, it builds social and business relationships, and it offers the opportunity to play in some beautiful places. But golf can also be frustrating if you are experiencing limitations that you maybe not have had in the past. These limitations may not be causing pain, but you may notice your shoulder doesn’t rotate or you’re not getting the distance you’re used to. These all are signs that your golf swing needs to be assessed.
There are a lot of golf performance philosophies and programs out there, but as a Reno physical therapist and avid golfer myself, I have found the Titleist Performance Institute to be the most effective to improve your golf swing. I chose to get my Level 1 Certification with TPI because the philosophy focuses on efficiency.
Why Efficiency is the Key to an Effective Golf Swing
The importance of efficiency is that it is repeatable, controllable, and gives you the maximum amount of power with the least amount of effort.
I know it doesn’t sound very sexy, but the efficiency of your swing is so much more important than style. There is no perfect way to swing a club, but as a TPI Certified Expert, I will work with you to help you see the pattern. Efficiency is going through your swing in a certain pattern: It starts with your pelvis, and then your trunk, and then your lead arm, and then your club. It is the basic mechanism of winding and unwinding consistently every time.
Think about when you watch two completely different golf pros – their style may look totally unique, but if you break down the pattern of their swings, they both follow that same exact progression from trunk through club. This is because most pro golfers are efficient and swing in a certain way every time, whereas most amateur golfers swing out of sequence. When I work with golfers, I work to change that, so they have consistency and efficiency in their swing.
How Titleist Performance Institute Certification is Applied in Physical Therapy
Seeing a physical therapist to help improve your golf swing will be most effective for golfers who are experiencing some type of limitation in their game that they haven’t had previously, or who are having pain when they are playing. If you have some sort of strength or mobility limitation that is getting in the way of your golf game, having an assessment is a good place to start.
When I work with a golfer, the first thing I do is the TPI 16-point physical screen. We also do a video screen where we record the patient’s swing mechanics. Then I evaluate both the physical screen and the video footage and link them together to see the patterns that are causing the mobility or strength issues. From here, we can develop a treatment plan using TPI’s 5 Basic Necessary Skills for golf swing improvement.
- Core Control: Build strength to keep your trunk tight and controlled.
- Lower Body Dissociation: Work on mobility to rotate your pelvis and your hips without rotating your upper body.
- Upper Body Dissociation: Work on mobility to rotate your shoulders and your trunk without rotating your lower body.
- Maintaining Posture: Build strength to maintain a straight spine from tee-off through full rotation.
- Setting and Releasing the Golf Club: Work on your grip on the club and the actual finesse of the golf swing. Are you able to put it all together in a repeatable and controllable way?
Once we find the body-swing connection, we can link impairments to swing characteristics and build a customized program to master these 5 Basic Necessary Skills. Physical therapy provides interventions from exercises that can help improve the mobility or strength issues you are having and then apply those to the swing movement. We have to break it down and then build it back up again.
Why TPI over any other Golf Program
The largest benefit of Titleist Performance Institute training programs is they are widespread and well known. So, if you are working with me as a TPI Certified physical therapist, and you have a swing coach, it is most likely we will have a common language that can be understood between golfers and coaches. This keeps us all aligned and working towards a common goal. TPI is also used by many pro golfers and is one of the most popular training programs in the golfing community.
Also, TPI is incredibly flexible. It provides a very solid framework by focusing on efficiency and patterns, but it gives physical therapists, coaches, and golf professionals lots of flexibility for directions they can go with training programs based on the needs of the golfer. It can lean more medical for rehabbing an injury, or more performance-based for improving a golfer’s overall game.
In order to best serve our golfing patients, Battle Born Health offers a Golf Performance Package that includes assessment, comprehensive training program, retaining movement patterns, and ongoing optimization. Get in touch to learn more today.
