Quote:
Originally Posted by GolfSavage
A recent program on Versus had them checking the effect of swinging a weighted club prior to hitting, similar to how a baseball hitter swings a bat with a weight when he's on deck.
They had a PGA pro warm up using the weight, then hit several drives. After a cool-down, they had him warm up swinging his regular, unweighted club and hit again. His second set of drives averaged several (I think 8-10) yards longer than when he used the wieghted club to warm up.
The theory was the weights tended to make you use more of the the stronger, slow-twitch muscle fibers, actually slowing down overall swing speed. The feeling of increased speed after using the weight is just your mind comparing the speed of the weighted versus the unweighted, not the speeds you swing the unweighted club before and after using the weights. It was funny, because the pro thought he was really killing the ball, crushing it down the fairway after using the weighted club, but he was actually losing distance.
|
I read this elsewhere and the theory is apparently correct. It was explained that distance, especially by little skinny guys, is generated by the "fast, twitch" muscles and that the benefit from using any weighted club comes from swinging it very slowly to stretch the bigger muscles.
Quite a lot can be achieved by swinging a length of garden hose cut to about 43 inches. The objective is to get it to really "swish" - and it's cheap, but unfortuantely, not patentable.