How PGA TOUR player Chris Thompson picked up 20 yards (in an hour)

Ho hum, another golfer picked up 20 yards going thru the Tour Tempo Speed Training program. In this particular case, ‘another golfer’ just happens to be the PGA Tour Player, Chris Thompson, who already possesses good speed and a good swing.

Note: the better the player, the better the swing, the more speed they have – The HARDER it is to get the increase in distance. Which is good news for most everyone reading this because if:

• You’re not a PGA Tour Player

and

• You’re ball speeds are below 170 mph

Then it’s (dare I say) easy for me to get you 20, 30 even 40 yards in that first session. If you are a tour player and your speeds are above 170 mph, I can still get you 20+ yards, it will just be more of a challenge…. and I love a good challenge. Let’s take a look at Chris and how we did it.

Chris is 42 years old and is very athletic. Take a look at this swing and his numbers:

CHS: 116
Ball Speed: 168-169
Carry: 279 yards
Tempo: 22/7

I’ve discovered (after years of training golfers of all abilities) that to increase speed and power, you have to follow the principles of how the body operates. I call it the Athletic Operating System (AOS).

The first principle of AOS is to light up the core and the glutes. These muscle groups are crucial for speed and power and for most golfers (yes, even tour players) they are in a deep slumber and need to awaken. So, I took Chris thru my best/quickest exercise to fire up the glutes/core.

Which brings me to another principle of my training: LESS IS MORE. Once you have the effect you’re looking for, if you do more than that, you will start to get tired and also start to train endurance. We are training speed, not endurance! This violates the principle called Minimum Effective Dose (Arthur Jones). Do the minimum amount of work to get the desired effect and then move on! A huge advantage of MED is that it also protects the athlete from getting injured.

Most of the devices I use are Tour Tempo Created (by John Sr. or yours truly) but I do use a few devices from outside the Tour Tempo ecosystem. One of the new ones I absolutely love are the Tsunami bars. Here is a video of Chris do a core move with the Tsunami:

He starts out strong but then he loses his stability and the bar starts to wobble. Oscillation is great for the body and gets all the muscles firing. We keep these exercises short (MED) to promote speed, so in the 4-8 second range.

Next Up, let’s get the body rotating, I took Chris thru a series of band moves (not pictured, but will post soon). Once you are fired up and able to rotate, you are ready to swing.

Here is Chris’ first swing drill, the SpeedBall with the new Face Plates:

After a few swings, he put up a ‘chs’ of 129 mph! The SpeedBall driver is just slightly lighter in weight than a normal driver and this gives you a nice overspeed effect, letting the body know that it can move fast.

Chris loved hitting the SpeedBall and this brings me to the most important AOS principle for training the body for speed/power:

SAID – Specific Adaptation to Increased Demand

You have to have an Increased Demand for the body to make an adaptation. If you just make a practice swing, there is no demand on the body and thus there will be no Adaptation. If you just hit balls, there is no ‘increased’ demand and again, no speed increase.

When you hit the SpeedBall target, there is a huge demand (at impact) and your body has to overcome that demand swing THROUGH the hitting area with more force. As you do this more and more, your body starts to adapt by recruiting more muscles and firing harder, thus you get the increase in speed!

After we did the SpeedBall work, we then went to my brand new creation, the ‘flexible throw off whoosher’. (if you have an idea for name for this device, send it to me as it’s brand new and we will be selling these soon). Here is Chris in slow motion and then me in normal motion.

This new device gets you to feel/create lag and then you have to overcome the resistance of the tail. With the red tail on the club you are working the ‘overload’ principle, which recruits more muscles and creates a power situation. After we did a few of those, we took the tail off and then went for pure speed:

The weight/flex/rope combine to all you to go at FULL SPEED (with some resistance) and the piercing sound of the string gives you feedback. Your goal is to flex the shaft and create the high pitch sound! (Another interesting effect of this whoosh club is that it gets you to put more force into the grip at the top of the swing and this is another speed booster.)

We were now ready to put Chris back on the monitor and the results were/are impressive!

CHS: 119-120 mph
Ball Speed: 177 mph
Carry: 297 yards
Tempo: 20/7 (faster backswing tempo = more speed)

He gained 3-4 mph of Club Speed!

He gained 7 mph of Ball Speed!

He gained 20 yards of Carry!

What Chris loved was that:

• We didn’t change his swing
• He didn’t feel like he was trying to ‘kill it’
• It was challenging • it was fun

I interviewed him afterwards:

With a few more sessions, I think Chris can get to 180 mph (ball speed) and this will be huge as he plays on the PGA tour and is able to hit more par 5’s in two and have shorter clubs to par 4’s which will result in lower scores.

If you love to train and work on your swing and swing speed, then check out our products. If you want to gain 20+ yards, contact us thru the website, our VIP Golf Schools start in May and we will also be offering 1 day sessions as well, you can go through the exact same training that got Chris his 20 yards!

I will have a part 2 to this blog as Chris continues his training with me. We will also explore that blue mat that he was swinging on and how it effects speed!!