Out in paradise, on the island of Oahu, a University of Hawaii professor was doing yeoman’s work studying the effect on weighted baseball bats on his college players and local high schoolers as well.
Coop DeRenne attended California State University at Northridge (same as yours truly) and starred on the baseball team there. An injury cut short his pro playing career after just a couple of seasons with the Montreal Expos. He earned a PhD in Kinesiology and moved to Hawaii.
DeRenne went on to conduct over 40 studies, mostly in baseball pitching and hitting which mostly consisted of using something like these fungo training bats to make the greatest impact on the ball, and contributed to many books and videos on the fundamentals of hitting.
By 2002, the distance craze was taking hold on the PGA Tour where bombers were starting to make headway like never before, playing a style coined as ‘bomb and gouge.’ Players would hit the ball as far as possible with the ‘new’ ball and titanium clubfaces of the era, and could still recover out of the rough because they were so close to the green.
However, there were really no studies being done on golf swing speeds. So DeRenne’s studies on bat speed, being the closest thing to a golf swing, had to be cited often and used as propose theories on training.
In these days you could find some pretty wacky training tools being used for the sake of increasing clubhead speed. Most of them were very heavy, as the ‘best wisdom’ of the day was to apply the overload principle to the golf swing. Players and teachers jumped on the endorsement bandwagon.
Even the completely discredited ‘donut ring’ was being used in golf to massively overweight the club for added resistance.
As sports science turned its eye to the study of the golf swing, and computing power started to grow fast enough to measure it, a new training protocol started to spread.
Maximum power, important in nearly every sport, was not just the result of strength, but strength combined with speed – thus called the strength-speed curve.
Peak power was found to occur at around 30-40% of an athlete’s maximum lift. At this mass, we can move an object relatively quickly through range of motion. Training at maximum speed suddenly became the thing.
Another principle that gained headway in golf speed training was overspeed training. Although DeRenne’s research strongly suggested that swinging implements +/-12% in weight for training was part of a good bat speed protocol, an underweighted golf implement has not been widely available until recently.
Today, many more PGA Tour and World Long Drive Tour competitors are training much more optimally and safely due to the application of DeRenne”s research studies at the University of Hawaii into golf.
It is quite common to see a pro golf athlete doing Olympic lifts, medicine ball throws, and vertical leaps to transform themselves into more powerful specimens. Even college and some high school programs are sending their teams into the weight room for golf specific power workouts.
The golfer is simply becoming a more explosive athlete.
