Guest: Mike Carrol (Fit For Golf)
Host: Jeff Pelizzaro
Episode Number: 361
Podcast: The 18STRONG Podcast
Partners: Linksoul, 1stPhorm
Summary
Listen in as we welcome Mike Carroll, the mastermind behind Fit for Golf, to the 18STRONG Podcast. Our conversation takes a thorough look at fitness within the realm of golf, exploring how strength and speed training can lead to significant improvements in your game. Mike brings his unique insights into training golfers and shares valuable dos and don’ts for consulting with professional golfers. He shares how he primarily works with them remotely, showing the flexibility and adaptability of his methods.
As we continue, we explore the significance of physical training in golf, focusing on swing speed and its relationship to the technical aspects of the game. We discuss the importance of understanding the biomechanics of the swing and how to enhance the physical qualities that contribute to it. There’s a focus on prioritizing physical training to improve physical qualities while using practice time for skill development. Listen closely as we caution against getting too wrapped up in specific exercises that may not significantly impact performance.
Our guest Mike, a prominent figure in the world of golf fitness, offers his insights on long-term physical training structure. He recommends three training sessions per week focusing on strength training, cardiovascular exercise, and explosiveness or power work. Listen in for a discussion on golf injuries and recovery, highlighting common injuries and emphasizing the importance of rest. Wrapping up the episode, Mike shares his favorite golf books, social media accounts to follow, and the best piece of golf advice he has received. So, whether you’re a seasoned golfer or a beginner looking to up your game, this episode is packed with valuable insights and actionable advice.
Main Topics
(00:04) Fitness and Golf
Interview with Mike Carroll on simplicity in golf fitness, training professional golfers remotely, and improving game performance.
(11:07) Physical Training’s Importance in Golf
Proper biomechanics and physical training are crucial for swing speed in golf, while skill development should be prioritized during practice.
(20:37) Effective Long-Term Physical Training Structure
The ideal training program for golf includes strength, cardio, power, mobility, and scaling for injuries to improve physical function.
(31:51) Mobility and Speed Training in Golf
Mobility work and warmups improve golf performance, incorporating dynamic movements and swing speed for average golfers.
(36:28) Speed Training for Golfers
Speed training for golfers leads to improved swing speed through physical capabilities and skill practice, with the potential for significant gains.
(49:08) Benefits of Training for Golfers
Resistance and speed training benefits health, fitness, and longevity. Start slow, warm-up, and incorporate into golf routine.
(57:16) Golf Injuries and Recovery Importance
Golfers should gradually increase speed training, prioritize rest and recovery, and avoid overtraining to prevent injuries.
(01:07:05) Golf
Recommended books, dream golf foursomes, bucket list courses, social media accounts, and best golf advice from guest Mike.
Follow Mike Carroll
- Instagram: @fit_for_golf
- Twitter: @Fit For Golf
- https://fitforgolf.blog/
Links Mentioned
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Want the full episode transcript? (click the “+” 👉🏻)
0:00:05 – Jeff Pelizzaro
The 18STRONG Podcast, episode Number 361 with Mike Carroll of Fit for Golf. What’s up, guys? This is the 18STRONG Podcast, where we’re here to help you build a stronger game, because we believe every golfer deserves to play better, longer. In this episode, I’m super excited to finally have Mike Carroll on the show from Fit for Golf. Mike has one of the most popular social media accounts and golf fitness apps out there and is really just some great things for not just the high level golfers but really the golf population in general. And so in today’s episode, we get to really kind of talk about the in and outs of strength training, building speed in your golf game, and really how keeping things simple is really the best way for you to make significant gains without overdoing it. But also, if you’re just starting out, then you’re going to be able to make much more significant gains than you think you are. And then we’re going to talk a little bit about the dos and don’ts of strength training and speed training, and so we’re going to really help you figure out what you need to do to make your game better and make yourself stronger.
Right at the best, our partners over at Linksoul have been providing us with the best apparel for both on the course and off the course, from polos to t-shirts like the one I have on right now. Everything that they have is meant to be worn from the golf course to wherever you’re going next, whether that be casual, whether that be to the beach there’s all different options over there. So go to 18strong.com slash Linksoul. You’ll get 20% off of anything in your cart over on Linksoul’s website. Go again 18strong.com slash Linksoul for our favorite brand of apparel for anything on the golf course and off. Now let’s get to this week’s interview. Mike Carroll, welcome to the 18STRONG podcast.
0:02:06 – Mike Carroll
Thanks very much for having me, Jess. I look forward to chatting.
0:02:09 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Yeah, honestly, I can’t believe that it’s taken me this long to bring you on the show. I feel like we should have had this conversation years ago, but I just love everything that you’re doing. I think when people think fitness and golf, you are definitely one of the people that they come to mind, especially in the social media world and in the fitness world. So congrats, first of all, on all your success and everything you’re doing.
0:02:34 – Mike Carroll
Thank you very much. I think the fact you haven’t gotten me on is probably the same that you’ve got far more interested guests to talk to, which is probably a good thing.
0:02:45 – Jeff Pelizzaro
So where are you now? Obviously, people can tell from your accent that you’re not from the States, but you’re in the States now, right?
0:02:52 – Mike Carroll
Yeah, I’ve been in Southern California for seven years around Huntington Beach, newport Beach, irvine area. I’m from Ireland. I was born there, all my family is there, was there until I finished college and then a couple of years afterwards and I moved out here to work for, like I called Mike Hansen in a juke called Hansen Fitness for Golf. Mike’s been kind of specializing in training golfers for probably maybe 20 years now definitely over 15. And there was a job opportunity in his gym that I saw online and applied came over. So I came over in 2016 and started working for him.
At the same time, I started up the Sid for Golf I had. About three years ago I stopped working for white and white full-time with Sid for Golf, which is 95% the app, and then I traveled to work with a couple of professional players a little bit, but only a few times a year. So kind of an interesting. In the last two years I basically stopped being an in-person trainer, which I had been for the 10 years previous. I’m now much more so like running an online business and, I guess, consulting with some high-level players trying to help them with their physical preparation.
0:04:26 – Jeff Pelizzaro
So you said you’ve traveled to a couple tournaments. Do you have any? Are there any pros in your area that you see on a relatively normal basis, or is it all just consultation stuff?
0:04:37 – Mike Carroll
So there’s not a single PJ Torpler in Linsen, california, to the best of my knowledge, because the state taxes are so high.
I think Phil was the last one and then, when his daughter finished high school, I think even he left. Obviously he’s one of the guys who’s made enough money where he wouldn’t think it would matter, but I honestly don’t think there’s any of them based here. So I currently work with three PJ Torplers and none of them live here. So I tend to see them at tournaments and what’s nice about that is I go to a tournament and I get to see two or three of them in the same week, so it’s a nice way to catch up. And how do I do that? A few times a year and then most of it is just talking to the regularity by phone and text and checking up on things that way.
0:05:30 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Gotcha. So, yeah, a lot of online stuff. When you first meet with them, do you do an in-person assessment, like do you travel to go see them even before a tournament or anything like that, or is it strictly pretty much at the golf tournaments?
0:05:45 – Mike Carroll
No, we usually get started after a phone call, to be honest, like a nush huge on, like regimented screaming, was our assessments.
To be honest, and because I think we can usually kind of start training and making progress without doing that, based on sort of the information they were made to me in a phone call and we started maybe looking over some of their trading records and some of their stats and things like that.
So, honestly, when a lot of them I could be training them or, I guess, consulting with them remotely for months and like many months before I see them in person, it’s definitely nice to see them in person from time to time. You get to check up on things. It’s definitely good to sort of build a relationship as well. But, to be perfectly honest, I just don’t want to be on the road, kind of traveling like around week to week. So, yeah, that’s just the way my input is going to work. To be honest is I’m going to be mostly remote and then when I do go to maybe I don’t know three or five tournaments a year and maybe see them once or twice outside of that, if we happen to be in the same location for whatever reason, it tends to work quite well.
0:07:06 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Nice. So you said that you came over to work with Mike, but obviously that’s a huge jump going from Ireland over to California. Were you looking to move, change locations? Or was it simply you came across that opportunity and you’re like yeah, I got to take this.
0:07:25 – Mike Carroll
Yeah, it was mainly I just saw the opportunity and it suited sort of what I was doing or what I was interested in at the time, like I think I was only maybe 24 or so, maybe 25. So I was shortly finished. It was only a short time after college. I was working as a trainer, like working for myself, based in a gym, and just didn’t really have any commitments. So it was just, I was very mobile in terms of I didn’t have any ties keeping me at all, basically apart from family, but ordered matters. It was easy. So, yeah, once I was able to kind of secure work and get a visa taken care of that’s always the biggest stumbling block for anyone outside the US who wants to work in the US and I was happy to come over.
0:08:18 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Were there any like big surprises when you came over here? Had you been over to the States before? Were there any different big cultural shifts when you got over here?
0:08:27 – Mike Carroll
I’d been to the States for two summers before that, both on the East Coast, and I did the summer caddy in New Jersey and I also did an internship with Eric Cressy in Cressy Sport Performance. But that’s a little bit different when you know you’re only coming, for they were both three periods. That’s a little bit different to kind of moving over and trying to work and get properly set up here. I wouldn’t say there was any huge cultural shifts because I had spent some time here, you know anyway, and life in Ireland and the US isn’t that different, to be honest, like the cultures and things are reasonably similar and obviously there’s no language barrier. Well, the accent is nearly a language barrier.
But no, there’s nothing too major, to be perfectly honest.
0:09:22 – Jeff Pelizzaro
I would imagine that most people that are listening have heard of you or heard of Fit for Golf. What would you say is kind of the how would you describe your mentality when it comes to fitness and golf? I think that there’s a lot of different ways that people look at what fitness should look like when it comes to golf, and I know that you have some very strong opinions on just the way that you like to train, the way that you run the app, the way that you get you maximize your golfers potential.
0:09:55 – Mike Carroll
Yeah. So I think if you’re trying to work with people in physical preparation for any sport, you need to be able to determine what are the limiting factors in that sport from a physical perspective. If we look at golf, what are the demands of golf when there’s two main things that are happening in the sport from a physical perspective? Number one is we’re making golf swings and number two is we’re walking. There’s some standing around as well, but it’s mainly walking and swinging and walking. The ability to walk a golf course and sustain that is very rarely a limiting factor unless there’s a serious injury or a major medical problem. Those things are generally not particularly hard to get to a level where there’s going to be no further benefits and performance. Like there’s tons of regular everyday club players that are at a level that would be more than sufficient to be PGA tour standard in terms of walking the golf course because they’re fit of people.
But then if we think of the physical qualities that are involved in swinging a golf club at a level that the best players do, then we start to see that there’s a huge golf when people tend to lack the mobility, the strength and power that higher levels of players do and club at speed has the biggest relationship between differences and playing levels. When you look at, a big population of golfers across a wide range of scores saw that as due to technical mastery for sure just differences in literally quality of swing. It’s a technique broader than a physical thing. But even at the highest level of the golf we see that that’s one of the big differentiating factors. And that’s the thing to where a wide, big interest is essentially understanding the biomechanics of the swing.
What goes into a now in golfers swing faster from a mechanics standpoint, and then how could we enhance the physical qualities that underpin that? And I guess that’s it in terms of working with real high level players. But probably what I’m just as interested in is essentially trying to help people get to a very high level of fitness and physical function and then be able to maintain it for as long as possible. And what’s sort of really nice for all of us that are interested in both golf and that is that there’s huge crossover in that the things that you need to do to be in a position to swing very fast also have great transfer to just stay fit and strong and healthy and everyday life. I am thinking that for decades really.
0:12:53 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Yeah, that’s what really resonates with me when going through your stuff and watching the way that you present information online, is that while it is totally geared towards the golfer and really a lot of it is geared towards increasing their strength, increasing their swing speed you do a great job of crossing it over into the lifelong aspects of it too, because golf is a unique sport that, unlike any others, we can play when we’re five years old and we want to continue to play until we can’t swing a club anymore, and so to really work on the longevity piece I think is so important. But you mentioned really kind of diving into the mechanics of what does it take to build swing speed? What are the pieces of the body, the movement pieces, and there is always the technique side, there’s the strengthening side and, from my perspective, where it can get kind of muddied is how do we utilize the? Are people using too much or trying to use the exercises too much to work on the technique stuff as opposed to just working on their body and the athleticism?
0:14:06 – Mike Carroll
Yeah, that’s something that I kind of think about and talk about a lot. Really, how I usually describe it is that I think there’s a gray area where a lot of people get stuck in and in that they try to improve their swing technique and their physical characteristics like strength and power at the same time, and what often happens not always is that they end up choosing exercises that are not specific enough to the golf swing to improve their mechanics and they’re also not stressful enough to cause any type of physiological adaptation that’s going to improve the physical quality. I know they’re way better than not doing anything, like not exercising at all, but if we’re trying to get the most out of, like our hardly limited, let’s say, training time, I think we always kind of need to ask the question like what adaptation is this leading to? Is this enhancing the function of my nervous system? Like how well I can recruit muscle fibers and get them to contract? Is it a strong enough stimulus where it’s going to increase the size of my muscle fibers? Is there enough mechanical tension? And in a lot of those exercises there’s not, and the argument that could be made sort of to refute that is well, I’m doing something that he’s going to enhance my swing technique, but oftentimes I think it’s nowhere near as effective as actually practicing your golf swing with a golf club or with drills that are way, way more specific to that. So in January, I think most people are much better off trying to use their physical training time to enhance their physical qualities, use their practice time to work on their skill and allow those two things merge together, especially when it comes, I would say, to strength exercises.
If we tried to get too cute with, like, simulating movement patterns, which is where a lot of people kind of would go down the specificity of route, we started running into problems very quickly in terms of not being able to load them heavy enough or have many options for progressing the long term where we can actually make progress in the long run and like, if you think of something like, say, like a cable pulley rotation or a medicine ball throw or something like that, sure they could be used to strengthen muscles that are used in the golf swing in a reasonably similar fashion, but in terms of like the coordination and speed, they’re still a million miles away from the actual golf swing.
So they’re not specific exercises really. They’re slightly more specific than something like a bench press or a deadlift, but I still wouldn’t consider them very specific. They’re definitely not like technical drills that are going to have a direct impact on your golf swing. And then the other thing is like they just get challenging to load in the long term in a way that you can make a lot of progress and compare it to things that are more general in nature, are much more similar to being loaded and building strength and power of the long term. I still incorporate them a little bit because I think they’re value, but it just needs to be, in my opinion, a very clear rationale for why you’re doing a certain exercise and there needs to be a good understanding of, like what is the goal of the training and because otherwise we can just kind of fall into the trap of doing things that, no matter how much we improved at the exercise we’re doing, it just doesn’t have much potential to move the needle at terms of our performance.
0:18:06 – Jeff Pelizzaro
I would totally agree that you know, not asking that simple question of what’s the goal here, and I love even further going into what’s the adaptation that I’m really trying to work on and so many of our golfers I know personally in our community and I’m sure those in the fit for golf community and I would assume a lot of there’s a lot of crossover there are.
We’re all stressed for time. We’re all looking to make things as efficient as possible, and that’s a message that I keep hearing from from you is you know, how do we really make the most sense of what we’re doing with the time that we have? You know, we got to practice, we got to, we got to train, we got to eat, we got to do all of these different things that are going to move us, move the needle, move us forward. But how do we, how do we help people not waste time on, you know, things that don’t really matter quite as much? So if you could, what’s a bit of a structure that you would tell people like, hey, these are the things that you really should be working on, thinking about as you’re getting ready to jump into your golf fitness training program.
0:19:12 – Mike Carroll
Yeah, so, generally, if I’m advising somebody with their overall let’s say, physical training, and if we take an average, you know, let’s say working person that’s maybe 60 or 60 years old or whatever, or it doesn’t really matter what age any any adult, I would say and our older adult, I’m a big fan of trying to get people to have a slot for exercise pretty much every day. The reason for that is, I think, that if people can do that, they’re much more likely to build a habit and stick to it. It doesn’t mean that every day is going to be a long training session or a very hard training session. What like is, if you think of it in terms of long term health and physical function. There’s really two elements of training that that people have to be on top of. Number one is cardiovascular fitness, what both people refer to as cardio or aerobic training. Like there’s kind of no way of arguing with the amount of research that shows how important VO2 maxes for longevity, which is basically how aerobically fit you are, and there’s also no arguing with the importance of muscle strength. So there are the two things that I get people to focus on mainly and how.
I think a really nice way to structure it is is simply have three training sessions a week for each element and that might look like something like on a Monday, wednesday, friday, somebody is going to do their strength training work. It’s going to be three total body strength training sessions where they do a little bit of lower body, a little bit of trunk and a little bit of upper body. In each session, or each one of those sessions, they’ll go through dynamic warm up so that they’re getting to work out the mobility and flexibility stuff that everybody kind of wants to work on and says they need more of. Then, on the days in between, they’re going to do some cardiovascular exercise and that might be depending on what the person enjoys. They might be on a bike, they might be jogging, they might be inclined walking on a treadmill, they could be on a roller and elliptical, they might be like pick up basketball or hockey anything that gets your heart rate elevated for a sustained period of time. It’s honestly pretty much that simple for long term physical function in an ideal world.
I’d also like people to incorporate some sort of what would generally be called like explosiveness or power work or race of force development work. That’s touched on pretty well by intense strength training. Well, most people don’t know is that as we get older, obviously we have a decline in physical function kind of across the board. We’ll show a like force production standpoint we lose speed and power faster than we lose strength and we lose strength faster, lose muscle mass. So we should have make our training set up in a way to help be proactive against that.
And so what it tends to look like in a training session on the one day Wednesday, friday is dynamic warm up to get warmed up and work on your mobility. A little bit of lightweight, high speed power work, which might be things like explosives kind of swings, things like box jumps, lateral jumps. You can even do like short sprints or very short sprints on a bike. For the upper body it might be some medicine ball trolls or some band work that’s very, very fast in nature. There’ll be something like hitting a punch bag as hard as you can for 10 seconds and then moving into some strength work which would be kind of in general, because it’s just very efficient is bigger cup out lifts and like swatting, hinging for the lower body, pushing and pulling for the upper body and trying to get progressively stronger in those movements and then on the dick. That’s that covers really nicely mobility, explosiveness or power and strength, and those things also cover your muscle mass.
And then on the days in between, do something for your cardiovascular fitness. It makes sense to vary up those things where you have maybe one one day that’s a longer, slower day where you’re trying to get the duration up. You have another day where you’re getting the intensity up and more of make an interval type fashion, and then on the other day you could do a little bit of a mixture or something like that, and that’s that’s honestly pretty much what people need to focus on from a from a physical training standpoint. Obviously it has to be scaled to their current level. You need to take into account injury concerns. They might have to choose the bold of the exercise or exactly which exercises they’re doing.
And then if somebody is also really interested in getting better at golf, they need to have some time for practice and play. They need to squeeze in some time where they do like specific swing speed training, where they’re swinging as fast as they can, ideally with a radar for speed feedback, and pretty quickly the time requirement there can start to add up. So just completely depends on how much time someone’s able to commit. What cool is that? Like, even with that, say, three day of each template, even if you only had 10 minutes each of those days, the improvements that you would make compared to not doing it is absolutely enormous and so, yeah, that’s that’s kind of the way that I’ve been sort of structuring training for a long time.
I think it works quite nicely for most people and gets them a nice balance across the various different elements and there’s no variety in there that it keeps people interested.
0:25:39 – Jeff Pelizzaro
I love how you break it down so simply and in my personal experience, talking with so many of the different coaches that we’ve had on the show, it’s when somebody like yourself breaks it down into very simple ways of doing it, that that’s when you know we can get really caught up in the flashy exercises and doing all of the different pieces. But really it boils down to getting simplified and doing the things right. Doing the strength training, doing the warm ups, doing all of that when do you because I always find this a little troublesome sometimes with clients and working in some of the corrective exercise stuff Like, if you do have people that you’re working on some other more accessory kind of things, some isolation movements where would you throw that in in kind of that template that you just laid out for us?
0:26:32 – Mike Carroll
And honestly, I think that I think that say, like, if we’re talking about somebody who’s who’s has an injury that they need to rehab, I train you. Rehab as much as possible the same as training, because all that you’re really doing is scaling an exercise or an activity to whatever the person is currently able to tolerate and then gradually increasing the intensity to bring them towards whatever goals that they’re trying to get to. So like, for example, if someone has a shoulder issue, their upper body pulling and pushing exercises are probably going to need to be scammed back to something that’s, you know, pretty, pretty nice, maybe a slower tempo, with lighter ways and higher reps while they’re recovering from that injury and gradually build up to where they want to get to. And another element that I think is really important there for people who do have some sort of specific issue that they’re kind of rehabbing or that is having an impact on their training is don’t let an issue in one specific body part or one specific movement derail the rest of your training. Like, for example, if you have a shoulder or knee issue, train everything around that as best as you can. Why are you bringing that level? Why do you really need that area back up to par and like I would even go so as far as, like if someone like it’s really common for senior golfers to maybe get like a rotator cuff surgery or something like that Like they I you’d often might get an email from there or something saying you know, oh, I need a, you know, six week break or whatever While I get this surgery, and I’d be kind of trying to encourage them.
Like six weeks of not exercising for someone in that day range like is is not good in terms of what they’re going to lose and how hard it is to build that back up.
And that’s where things like machines in the gym are so, so useful because it allows you to knowledge of muscles without having to pick up any weights. So, like you could do calf raises and leg presses, you could even do upper body pushing and pulling on the uninjured side. You could be on, you know, things like bikes and rollers that you could use, you know, without using that injured body part. So I try to not, I guess, like worry too much about getting ultra specific with corrective exercises and more so. Just scale the training plan in whatever way a person needs and gradually build it up over time, like I think the person who coined the term is Charlie Weingroth, a pretty well known like physio and strength coach, and I think the phrase he uses is that rehab is training, training is rehab. There’s no difference between them. You’re just scaling them to the, to the level that the person can currently color it.
0:29:39 – Jeff Pelizzaro
You know, anytime you have somebody even just working on things like posture and, and you know, getting a little bit more of the the upper back and, like you said, the rotator cuff, some of those different pieces, the hips just putting a little more focus on it, and I guess you talked about even in, like the dynamic warmups. You’re doing some of the things that maybe, like the smaller exercises as you would think of, I think it’s very easy to get caught up in like I just want to go, get to the gym, I want to do, you know, for for some people I want to go do my bench press or my squats or my, and get into the bigger things, but talk about how important it is to do that beginning piece and to get your body primed and ready to go for the bigger, stronger exercises.
0:30:19 – Mike Carroll
Yeah, that’s a good way to put it Like if you have a well designed training program that’s covering what you consider to be, I would say, like important muscles or literally just human movement, that human function in general, and then you’re you’re making sure that all of those are covered across a training week. If you could also follow a training program like that for any reasonable period of time, that’s going to be very corrective for any issues that they have like because getting stronger, getting more mobile and getting into better physical condition is going to be, like, comprehensively corrected. There’s not going to be things that aren’t getting touched on. And yeah, I think like one of the big things about a dynamic warmup is like we have to warm up before we train anyway to reduce the risk of injury and to improve the performance in the training session. So why not do it in a way that also improves our, our long term mobility? And if you can have some stuff that works on mobility of areas that need to be mobile and commonly get stiff things like the hips, spine, shoulders, neck and a little bit of mobility work on those before each workout and just adds up really nicely over time as your mobility work, and then you don’t need to.
You know, devote a lot of training sessions to mobility work. And I haven’t. I haven’t done a mobility session in 15 years. I’ve been granted it in my 30s. Some people will say, wait till you know your ex age or whatever. But on the flip side, I do a dynamic warmup pretty much every day where I’m going through full ranges of motion for my spine, hips, shoulders, neck, because I’m doing that before and practicing, or playing, or before and working out, so like there’s been improvements in mobility there, without actually ever doing specific flexibility sessions. And then the other thing is that if your strength training program is well designed and you have exercises where you’re going through a full range of motion, that’s also highly effective for improving mobility.
0:32:42 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Yeah, I even saw I think it was a post that you made either on Twitter or Instagram and this might have been talking about even before a round of golf. But you said, instead of thinking of it as a warmup, think of it as a little as a mini workout. And I love, I love that, right, because you see these golf, the tour players, and when you see them in the tour trailer, they’re not doing just like a stretching routine, they’re actually kind of getting after a little bit.
0:33:10 – Mike Carroll
Yeah, so what it actually said was think of a warmup less as stretching out.
0:33:16 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Yeah.
0:33:17 – Mike Carroll
And more like a mini workout.
That’s right Because, like, the simplest way to look at a warmup is its preparation for the activity that’s about to go ahead and, like anyone who’s listening to this podcast is, you know, probably interested in the golf swing and being better at swinging the golf club. It’s clearly a very fast, dynamic activity. Like you go through rapid stretches, rapid contractions. It’s at high speed. Static stretching is not good preparation for that it’s. It’s very, very different to what you’re about to do. So we want to get warmed up by by moving, starting with slow movements, gradually building up to movements that are much faster and closer movement pattern to what we’re about to do with that. And what’s nice about that is those types of warmups compound over time and can actually make improvements in our physical qualities, like mobility and power, like the higher level players that I work with granted, they have more time and they have a fitness trailer at the golf course Like they all have a warmup that takes about 20 minutes Some of them actually like to do.
One of them in particular likes to warm up for a little bit longer and almost, like you just said, turn it into a mini workout.
But they go through their dynamic warmup routine which gets the heart rate up a little bit. It also gets them moving their hips and spine and shoulders through a full range of motion. But then they actually really like to finish the workout with things like vertical jumps, med ball throws, med ball slams, maybe even swinging like the stack or their driver like maximum speed, a few times to get really, really warmed so that when they go down to the range they don’t have to go through, like you know, 15, 20 minutes of trying to warm up and loosen up, hitting wedges and things like that. They’ll seem like that when they go to the range they could take out their driver and be ready to go without, you know, needing to get through that stiffness. And it also has the compounding effect of, if you’re doing that a few times a week before rounds, you’re going to be getting much, much more exposure to mobility and power work, which would benefits lockdown.
0:35:47 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Talking about swing speed. Obviously you’ve got your your stack system shared on and I know you work with those guys quite a bit and we just had Marty on the show a couple of weeks ago. You said in kind of the layout of your program if somebody is interested in the golf swing and they’re interested in getting better, that that not only practicing their golf is going to be very important, but working on their swing speed is important. And what does that look like for you and the programs that you put together for, let’s say, not the tour level guys, but just you know more of the average golfer. That’s on the fit for golf app and what can people expect if they’ve never experienced any kind of speed training before?
0:36:28 – Mike Carroll
Honestly, like speed training could not be simpler, and the reason why is that there is physical capabilities, like physical characteristics that are very important, like strength and power and mobility, but it’s also there’s also a big skill element to it, and skill requires frequent practice to improve. So speed training is literally as simple as practicing swinging as fast as you can with the goal of going faster. So if you can guess a radar I think the PRG or is like I don’t have any affiliation with them I think it’s by far the best value radar on the market for speed trading. If you could do something like two or three days a week where you get warmed up and for people starting out, I think about 16 swings is a good number. As you get more advanced, you’d probably need to, like anything, build up the amount you’re doing a little bit more and maybe up to 30s or D is probably enough for the vast majority of people over in the course of like a number of months. But I keep it on the low end for as long as you can with still seeing progress. And obviously it’s that simple Like get warmed up, start taking some swings, have the radar for feedback, and having the radar also really boosts motivation and track your results and, like you, will naturally start to wrap up the speed.
There’s things going on in your nervous system in terms of how well you can recruit fast twitch muscle fibers. It’s called motor unit recruitment. You’re able to send signals to the muscles faster it’s called rate coding. There are two things that happen as a result of speed training that are really beneficial. They tend to happen quite quickly. We improve the coordination of how our different muscles work together and there’s just the pure steel element of we figure out more efficient ways to swing the club, based on our bodies. Basically, and for people who have never done speed or strength training before, like for, let’s say, recreational adult golfers, it’s really common for golfers to gain 10 runs an hour club at speed in.
I would say six to 12 months of training for sure.
What’s interesting is that, depending from what I’ve seen, is that people who are untrained and they start speed training they can gain five months an hour in like a few weeks.
The initial gains are really really quick and like the difference from gaining five miles an hour to gaining 10 miles an hour is usually like a big tougher. But it completely depends on what the person is done in the past. Like, for example, if you take the two opposite ends of the spectrum. If you take someone who hasn’t done much physical training and they have poor swing technique, they have huge, huge room for gains. Because if you only got that person to say, do workouts and didn’t work on their swing speed directly with speed training, they could probably gain five or six miles an hour with that, without really trying to work on their swing speed at all. If you got that same person and they didn’t do any workouts and they just did speed training, they probably gained similar or, to be honest, a little bit more. But if you combine both of them, like you have someone who works on speed training which is going to impact their technique. Maybe they work with an instructor that also helps with their swing and they’re doing training that’s going to prove like their strength and power. Like there’s huge, huge rule there that person might gain 12 miles an hour, maybe even more, depending on what their lowest target point is. But then if you consider, like someone on the opposite end of the spectrum, like a tour there, they already have pretty good swing mechanics. They probably already, like are aware of the benefits of being faster and have practiced some speed training and they probably already have done like workouts. They’re rather reasonable. You know level of appropriateness.
So with someone like that, like if you can gain, like honestly, two or three miles an hour in like a season or two, would be hugely impressive. Like if you look at the PGA tour website where they list players, club head speeds, like there’s not many players at all gain a significant amount of speed. Like it’s impressive there’s a player gains, let’s say, two miles an hour from one season to the next, or I would say even more that three or four miles an hour from when they come out on tour to when they’re to when they’re at their fastest. That will be like really, really impressive Players your average 60 or 60 year old or 40 year old club golfers. They might gain that in a week, you know they might gain.
Like, they might honestly they like actually gain that in like 10 swings because they realize, oh, I can actually swing well seven, but I’ve just been swinging 101 all the time because that’s just how I’ve been swinging. I didn’t realize if I actually tried harder there’s way more speed here. Yeah, that’s that’s what I would say. Like the people who have basically been doing less, less coaching, and have technically, let’s say, poor golf swings, have the most to gain. Like 10, 15 miles an hour is not a herd of. But then at the upper levels, like, if, like, if you’re totally engaged, three miles an hour from one season to the next, like that would be I really, unless they’re coming off, let’s say, some sort of injury or something like that, where they were clearly down from their normal, something like three miles an hour is big. I read those guys.
0:42:50 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Yeah, and I think that’s pretty refreshing for the that more, maybe more recreational golfer or somebody that hasn’t been working on any of it, to know. Like you know, sometimes it’s a little intimidating to get involved in some of these things and to start these things, but know that you just doing a little bit is going to give you a lot of gain 100% and, honestly, the training doesn’t even need to be hard, because when you’re a beginner to this stuff, or if you haven’t done it, not tight.
0:43:15 – Mike Carroll
The initial gains are really really easy Like they come. You honestly don’t need to work very hard at all to get initial gains and, to be honest, that’s actually what I recommend. I recommend not trying to push too hard early on, because that needs to, people either getting injured or burned out. So, yeah, like it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s nice that way. What’s interesting with training too, like and you see this across like whether it’s all in you know who, let’s say, loves to get the gym and they’re interested in you know getting their barbell it’s up or it’s. You know a runner who’s trying to get their five or 10 K times. Now, Like, there comes a point in training it’s really interesting, Like where that the early gains are very large and easy to call away.
As you train more and get more advanced, they start to slow down. When that happens, what’s interesting is it’s extremely easy to maintain the progress you’ve made. So you’ll be hugely improved from where you started and maintaining that level is pretty easy, Doesn’t require much work compared to the amount of work that’s required to keep improving even a little bit. That can be huge and oftentimes like it gets to a point for people, honestly, where it’s like that’s just not work, like getting that out of this, how much I need to do it’s just not worth it. Because you know this is a hobby and doing it for fun, and it’s a case of it actually gets to a point really like where maintaining basically is progress, because as people are getting older the naturally is to decline. So if you’ve built up a high level from a few years of training, honestly being able to maintain that then for a long time and not decline is a pretty good deal, you know.
0:45:18 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Yeah, that’s exactly what Marty Jertson from Ping in the Stack told us. He said that after the age of 40, typically you’re going to see a decline of like one mile per hour per year and so just maintaining if you maintain that for 10 years that means you’re going to be 10 miles an hour faster than your cohorts.
0:45:35 – Mike Carroll
Yeah, and what’s important to know too for, let’s just say, more seniors, like the older golfers, is that they often ask, like, am I too old to see improvements? And they might be 50 or 60 or 75 or whatever. And I think we’re conditioned because, like, we base almost our assumptions of, say, athletes declining from watching professional sports, and we see, you know the picture, the soccer player or whoever starting to decline. You know, maybe it’s in, depending on the sport and the position, maybe it’s their late 20s, maybe it’s their big 30s or maybe sometimes it’s their late 30s or 30, 40s. So what we need to remember there is, like those are people who have been training to reach their genetic potential for a couple of decades and then they start to see a very small decline.
If you’re 50 or 60 or 70 and you haven’t been training, or you’ve been training kind of lackluster, without a good program and no real direction, when you start training, you know I would say like much more efficient matter, the rate of progress that you can see can be much larger than the rate of the natural biological decline.
So that’s why he’s with people when they’re 70 or 80 or he’s an older, is that people are often thinking like, oh no, that’s an age when you start to, you know, get worse and slow down.
Well, yeah, if you’re not doing anything, for sure there’s going to be a decline. But if you’re training in a pretty good fashion at that age, like you can 100% get stronger, get faster and make improvements at any age. Like one of the like coolest areas of research that I see coming out is like they do strength training studies in nursing homes with people who are in their 80s and 90s and like you see enormous increases in strength in people in their 80s from like six, like even like four or six eight week training programs. Like like 50% improvements and say like quad strength and stuff like this. Like that’s really important, for if you plans of, say, be able to play golf to a reasonably high level as you get older or even just have a high level of physical function, you know let’s take a second to thank our sponsors over at 1st Phorm, and this week I want to highlight their Formula One post workout protein shake.
0:48:13 – Jeff Pelizzaro
I use this thing pretty much every day after my workouts because, let’s face it, being here in the gym working all the time with clients putting on a podcast, it can sometimes be tough to get my protein in on a regular basis, and so I know that with the post workout shake the Formula One first of all, it’s fast acting. So right after your workout is a great time to get your protein in to help build your muscles, get yourself stronger and repair what you’ve done in the gym. But also, if you don’t know if you’re going to be able to get your protein in your regular meals, it’s just a great way to make sure that you’re supplementing and hitting those marks. So make sure to go over to 1stPhorm.com forward slash 18STRONG to get your 1st Phorm Formula One protein shake, and everyone that enters through that link is going to be put into a drawing every single month for free 1st Phorm products. So, again, go over to 1stPhorm.com forward slash 18STRONG. It’s funny.
So we just had the Thanksgiving holiday and I was over at my parents’ house and they’re both 69, getting ready to turn 70.
And I was telling them how I want to order them a hex bar for their house, because what better exercise for them to just be lifting something a little bit heavy, putting low through their joints, putting low through their bones, because so many of the studies talk about not just for any kind of sports related function, but, yeah, just general health, general fitness, longevity, and they were open to it. It was kind of cool and obviously I just order one for my house. I have a 15-year-old son who’s getting into some competitive golf and I’m like you need to start lifting some stuff that’s a little bit heavier and he doesn’t get to the gym that often. And for all of you listening, you can get a hex bar at Walmart for $75. And it’s a thousand pound capacity. It doesn’t cost a whole lot. It’s a very simple exercise. I know you’re a big fan of it Just helping the population understand that just starting to lift some and heavy for you could be 65 pounds, right.
0:50:20 – Mike Carroll
Well, yeah for sure, even like. First of all, I love that. That’s the exact type of thing I like to hear. Even easier than that that I try and encourage people to do is like I love to have everybody set up with bars and plates at home and things like that. It’s a hurdle, though you can have.
The easiest way, I would say, to develop a high level of leg strength at home, if you don’t want to have a lot of equipment, is do split stance and single leg exercises where you can put your body mass onto one leg. Practice like step ups or step downs off of foot stools or something like that. Do some split squats, holding like any type of weight you have available. Your muscles don’t care what they’re being loaded with. They just respond to the tension that’s put on them. You can find ways to load them pretty well without elaborate equipment. That the response to that, compared to not loading them, is huge.
Yeah, like if there was one message that I could send with my social media platforms and what I try to do more than anything, it’s to guess Like I’m trying to target golfers, I guess, because that’s what my demographic is, but it’s basically just to get the average person to understand the benefits and value of resistance training. Slash strength training and golfers have created the double whammy of that. It’s really beneficial for golf and like they get two benefits out of it.
0:52:13 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Yeah, definitely Back to the speed thing real quick. Are there any cautions that you would have for people that are just getting started or really anyone in general, as far as, like how frequent they do it? You know how you mentioned, you know not going crazy with the amount of swings, but any other cautions for somebody getting involved?
0:52:31 – Mike Carroll
Yeah, and it’s not an exclusive to speed training. It’s the same thing for pretty much any activity is that you should ease into it conservatively and no matter what activity you’re doing, if you start something and you do too much too soon, that’s when there’s a high risk of injury Like that can literally happen with walking and with speed training. Obviously it’s a reasonably intense activity, but we also need to remember that people who are going to be starting speed training, they generally do have a decent background of swing, like they are generally conditioned to swinging because they practice golf and they play golf. But I like the idea of if you’re going to say to two or three speed training sessions a week, I like the idea of treating your first, maybe four weeks or so as like an induction into it and not really worrying about trying to like set and break personal records and just get your body conditioned to swinging and then gradually swinging a little bit faster than you’re used to. And if you could do that like the whole gist and exercise like is that you put a little bit more stress on your body than it’s used to and adapts to it and then gets stronger. Where that goes wrong is when we put too much stress on our body and it can’t adapt to it. And then we keep doing that. That’s when an injury usually starts to pick up. So, like slow and steady, and then what you’d probably find is that you feel better and better doing it and, naturally, like you can then start to ramp up the speed.
I would say that, combined with a very thorough warm like like I mean reasonably good physical condition, I can’t imagine going from like sitting at a desk for a day’s work to swinging a golf club as fast as I can. Like that would be bad idea. So you need to have like a pretty good warm up routine and the same one that you do like. I literally do the same warm up routine before every single practice session, speed session, workout and it’s just automatic. And then before you start swinging as fast as you can, spend a couple of minutes.
Take practice swings where you start medium and gradually build up to full speed. Like you could do something like a set of eight medium to like normal and then a set of eight that’s like pretty fast or close to full speed, and then you should be ready for like going as fast as you can after doing your kind of dynamic warm up. The one like thing with speed trading that’s interesting, I would say like, is that the warm up and the speed training session would probably be about equal in like like. I would say like you could get a really good like, say, speed trading session done in like 10 to 58 minutes, but the warm ups probably have to be that long too, and that’s to help not get injured and you’ll also just do way better in the session. Like. You’d be amazed at how much faster you are and how much more benefit you can get when you’re only warmed up for a session as opposed to not really being ready to go.
0:55:59 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Would you say that three times a week is the limit of what you would have somebody do. Speed session wise.
0:56:05 – Mike Carroll
Yeah, like I don’t, like I don’t know the perfect answer to this, but I would be very skeptical that there is any benefit to going more frequently than that. And even if there’s potential for very, very small gains compared to three by week, I would say that it’s probably not worth this for the rate you’re increasing, picking up an injury and like there won’t be a direct relationship between how much we do and how many gains we get. Like the amount of gains we get will start to level off and then actually get to a point where we can’t recover from it. You might actually get less improvement compared to if you did less. What we need to remember in terms of, say, stress and loading on our soft tissue, like that’s a linear relationship in that the more we do, the more it’s multiplying. And that’s where I’d be worried about picking up like big goals.
Like I’ve noticed in the last maybe say four or five years, that, from what I can see, more common in golfers is injuries in like the elbows and forearms and wrists. So you let me hear a lot more of golfers elbow, tennis elbow and some wrist issues, and I think it’s primarily for two reasons. One is speed training has gotten way more popular. I think we’ve died into it headfirst without really taking, you know, the kind of gradual build up that I was talking about, and oftentimes it’s combined with. People now have way more access to practicing indoors, you know, with, say, cheaper sims and large models and stuff like that, so they have a way bigger volume of practice than they’re used to and their speed training and the volume is just too high, too soon and yeah, so in the soft tissue just can’t keep up. So, yeah, I don’t think that there’s going to be. I don’t think more than three days a week is going to be worth it, to be perfectly honest. And even two days a week people make a lot of progress with. I think we’re one. So beginners will be fine, you’d probably see some progress.
But what would happen is like you say, do a session, it would take maybe a day or two to recover, but then you’re going to have like two or three days of almost like using it before you get back on it, whereas if you can do a little bit, take a day off a little bit, take a day off. Or do a little bit, take two days off. Do a little bit, take two days off from speed training. I think that tends to work quite well, but that will be certainly dependent on the person. But yeah, what I definitely don’t want someone to do is like might just be training is a good idea. I can start tomorrow and I’m going to reach 50 swings a day Like a person. I would put money on them, probably running into an issue, and that would derail their progress quite quickly, as opposed to the person who sat the two or three a week for like 50 swings. I’d be gradually built up over in the course of weeks and months.
0:59:33 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Yeah, I’m sure you’ve had this before too, but I’ve actually had a couple clients or people reach out and say hey, I’ve been doing my speed training six days a week and I’m not really seeing a whole lot of gain anymore. Well, how about we go back to two and I bet you’ll start to see some gains again, or maybe, or maybe not, but at least you’re not going to hurt yourself.
0:59:53 – Mike Carroll
Yeah. So what’s interesting about like speed training and city? I learned that I don’t know if there’s some video with Chris Beardsley, the striking conditioning research guy. So he’s an English guy that does a lot of like mentorship and education for coaches, but he’s written a lot about fatigue and the different types of fatigue and how it impacts, how training while we’re still under fatigue from a previous training session or training sessions kind of inhibit progress. And one of the things that he talks about which is really interesting is that when we have central nervous system fatigue which can be built up from and not a different types of workouts, and it’s primarily related to muscle damage.
So muscle damage sounds scary. That basically what happens, like after an intense workout whether it’s like if you ran for you know whatever, like 30 minutes or 60 minutes or whatever someone may do like you’re going to have some muscle damage in your calves and quads and things like that. It’s not a big deal. It’s one of the signals for your muscles to repair and get stronger. And if you do a hard workout in the gym, you’re going to have some muscle damage. And when we have muscle damage, that’s going to lead to some central nervous system fatigue. And when we have central nervous system fatigue we can’t do as good a job at sending the signal from our grade through our spinal cord to our fast twitch fibers and telling them to recruit. And that’s a problem when we’re speed training because they’re the exact muscle fibers that we’re trying to get better at using. So that’s why we like over time when we’re past the beginner stage and getting to get hired. So we need to be a little bit smart with our speed training and learning that we need to find windows when we’re as fresh as possible to do the training. That’s probably not a huge concern for people just starting out, but definitely when people start to hit plateaus or if it’s people who train a lot, like you said, and they’re wondering why they’re not approving.
It’s one of the hardest things for a motivated, let’s say, athletes or people to do is that when they’re not seeing the progress, they want is to stay back the amount they’re doing. It’s really hard and I think golf attracts a lot of, say, type A personalities because it’s hard and you need to put a lot of work into it and you know the feedback is very objective in terms of like your score and your handicap. Those people have done well in other aspects of their life, like school and business and work and things like that from working harder. It’s like if this isn’t going well, I need to work harder. And I get so many emails from people and they lay out you know, I’ve been training hard, I’ve been in the gym, I’ve been doing my speed training, I’m plateauing, I’m getting worse. Like what exercises do I need to add? Or like what are the workouts do I need to do? And it’s like show me your schedule. It’s like you know probably need to like cut out some of this stuff and take like more days of rest in between things. And it’s hard because they’re used to like but now I feel like I’m not doing enough, like how am I going to get better?
But generally what it does is gives them a chance to recover between their workload, because the whole like a mechanism of training is that like this is kind of the oldest cliche there is. But like we don’t improve from the training session that we’re doing, generally we improve from the stimulus that that puts on our body and then when we recover from that is when we see the improvements. But if all we’re doing is applying the stimulus and there’s not enough time to recover. We can’t make that like step by step progression and that can get hard to figure out after a while. But that’s that’s one of the things that I would I would say is important to be mindful of. Is is if you’re serious about speed training and you’re not seeing the proper suit like is, don’t be afraid to play around with doing doing less basic.
1:04:14 – Jeff Pelizzaro
That’s such a great point and one that I hope the people listening take to heart, and that goes for their strength training, that goes for you know, running, walking, all of it, that you know sometimes you you can just be putting too much stress and stimulus into the body and you’re never giving it time to go through that repair and recovery period.
1:04:34 – Mike Carroll
Yeah, and that’s that’s also like when people start to get peaks and pains or get an injury and like injuries are by far the quickest way to derail progress, generous fitness and health or getting better at golf, because when you ask when you’re forced to take time out, there’s nothing more you know insuring and there’s nothing, obviously, that ruins consistency like an injury. So there’s there’s a certain faction of people where they struggle with the motivation to exercise Like they’re more. They struggle with actually showing up and doing it and getting into a routine. But then there is definitely a faction of people where they really struggle to not push themselves to act. They’re in the mindset that more and harder is always better than that’s also a problem.
And when those people are basically given like some extra time to recover and maybe they put more of an emphasis on, like their sleep and nutrition rather than just how hard they’re doing their training sessions, that’s when they really start to make progress. But they struggle because you’re literally telling them no, like two days in this week or whatever, like your job is to is to not exercise Like I want you to do, like you can go for a walk or something like that, but I want you to stay like relaxed and give your body a chance to recover. I don’t want you doing another like hit session or I don’t want you, you know, doing an extra workout for whatever reason, like that’s just delaying the recovery and you can’t make, you can’t get benefits from it.
1:06:15 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Totally, mike, this has been awesome. I got a couple of questions that we ask everybody at the end of the show to wrap up here so we won’t take up too much of your time. So, just like we asked everybody on the show, caddy Shack or Happy Gilmore.
1:06:28 – Mike Carroll
Happy Gilmore.
1:06:30 – Jeff Pelizzaro
I figured strength speed. You know, it’s all all about hitting bombs, right.
1:06:34 – Mike Carroll
Yeah, exactly.
1:06:36 – Jeff Pelizzaro
If you could pick a walk up song to the first T-Box, what’s your song?
1:06:40 – Mike Carroll
Yeah, DMX X, gonna give it to ya. Nice, I just thought my Spotify rapped. You know that everybody was posting yesterday. Yeah, and two of my top number one of two songs were both DMX.
1:06:58 – Jeff Pelizzaro
I haven’t even opened mine up yet, but I’m gonna guess Zach Bryan’s probably at the top of mine, but there’s some probably 90s hip hop and rapping there for sure. Yeah, is there a book that you like to recommend to people, one that maybe you’ve read, that means a lot to you and that you tend to recommend or have shared with a lot of folks, whether it be golf, fitness or just something else.
1:07:19 – Mike Carroll
I go with two for like everyday life stuff. I would say Katalina Cabots by James Clear. I think it was really good. Probably a popular answer, I’m sure, but it’s really good. And then for golf, I think that everybody every like teen golfer that’s better interested in understanding golf better and improving should read every shop counts by Mark Brody. Arguably nobody has had a bigger influence on the direction that golf has went in the last 10 years or so in Mark Brody.
1:07:56 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Yeah, I would totally agree with that for sure. If you could pick a dream for some celebrities, athletes, whoever it might be, that you could go play golf with who’s in your for some.
1:08:07 – Mike Carroll
So I never got to meet either of my crowd sawters and they passed before I was born. So I had picked both of those and probably Rory I’m a big Rory son.
1:08:22 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Awesome, can’t imagine. Why.
1:08:24 – Mike Carroll
Yeah, well, when I was so Rory is, I think, maybe two years older than me so like when I was a teenager playing in Ireland growing up, rory was kind of getting what he was. He was already famous in Ireland. He was famous in Ireland from when he was quite young and then obviously his progression was very, very fast and high. So, following him for like a long time I’d love to play with him Excellent.
1:08:52 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Is there a bucket list course that if we said, Mike, we’re flying the 18STRONG jet, we’re taking you anywhere you want to go. We have access to go to any golf course on the planet. Where are you going?
1:09:03 – Mike Carroll
I think I’d really like to play at Royal County Dau in Ireland, under the condition that we get a good day of weather. There’s so many really good courses in Ireland that I haven’t played because I moved here like shortly after college, which is kind of when it’s only there when you can start before the play, that when you kind of have your own card stuff. I got to play Cyprus Point last year, which was really cool, which is probably one of the more popular ones, and I went to the Masters last year as well to watch. So I’ve seen both of those places. I think I’ve seen some pictures of what can get out and heard reports and it looks really nice. So that’s probably top of my list right now.
But I’m not a huge golf course. You know sicko. Some people are like, oh my God, have you seen this place? Or they’re really interested in like golf course architecture or layouts and stuff like that. I’m not huge for that. Like I appreciate a good one if I’m there, but I don’t really have a list of courses where I have to go play here.
1:10:10 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Got it All right. You obviously have a very robust social media presence. Is there a social media account that you like to follow, like to watch and this doesn’t have to be in the golf realm at all that you would recommend to the 18STRONG crew?
1:10:25 – Mike Carroll
So yeah, it’s funny. I immediately thought of, like educational ones. People who listen to this show, I think need to check out Chasing Scratch and they have a podcast, youtube channel, social media presence, their podcast in particular, chasing Scratch. I would say that people would really, really enjoy. Yeah, it’s basically about two guys in their late 30s with regular jobs, families there are never any gaps and they kind of come up with an idea one day Could we get to scratch in a year? And they start to document their progress and, yeah, it goes from there and they’re both hilarious, but it also has times where it’s serious and there’s some soul searching. That’s very good. I highly recommend it.
1:11:24 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Awesome, We’ll definitely check it out. And last piece what’s the best piece of golf advice that you’ve ever been given?
1:11:41 – Mike Carroll
It’s pretty cliche, but I saw it depends. I’m going to go with two. So number one is that you can’t get away. If you want to get really good at golf, you can’t get away from the importance of ball and striker.
1:12:00 – Jeff Pelizzaro
You have to hit a lot of greens.
1:12:03 – Mike Carroll
If you look at the statistics between greens and regulation and average store hand-to-hand count, that relationship is very true. You have to get good at hitting the ball. You have to get used to making a lot of boring cheap-blood prayers. Obviously that requires a lot of work and time to put into it, but in terms of how somebody could maybe improve tomorrow is just trying to be present and actually follow the mantra of one shot at a time. What that means is that you’re not allowing how previous shots in the route have wiped or what the outcome of the upcoming shot might mean for your score or your handicap or place in the tournament affect how you approach the current shot.
Hearing Try and treat each golf shot as a separate entity. Something that I try and do when I’m playing it might sound kind of weird but I guess like a land-shot or something that I have is I try and be the world’s best caddy to myself. I try and essentially talk to myself in a way that if I was working for my best friend or my player and trying to have them do as well as possible over each shot in the round, that’s kind of the way that I try and approach it.
1:13:26 – Jeff Pelizzaro
That’s probably helped save you from trying to make a few of those hero shots out of the trees cutting a ball around 100%, like I would say.
1:13:36 – Mike Carroll
An area where I’ve had to get better on the golf course and I still fall into a trap is getting too aggressive with second shots on pair of fives, what I’d not in a great position off the tee or there’s trouble over on the green because you’re thinking these are the holes where you should make birdie, should be up around the green in two, and then all of a sudden it can be really hard to make prayer. Scott Flossus has a product system called Decade which has some really good stuff about that for any kind of very keen golfers.
1:14:18 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Yeah, we actually just had Scott on the show just a couple of weeks ago.
1:14:22 – Mike Carroll
Yeah, his stuff is really really fantastic.
1:14:25 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Really. Yeah, it’s awesome. All right, my friend, this was awesome. I’ve been sitting and talking to you for another couple of hours, but this has been so great to finally meet you in person, kind of, and get to know you. But pick your brain a little bit and I know the 18STRONG crew is totally going to go check out all of your stuff if they’re not already on your platforms. But can’t thank you enough for the time and just keep up doing the great work, man.
1:14:48 – Mike Carroll
Thanks, jeff I appreciate it.
1:14:53 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Thanks for listening to the 18STRONG podcast and if you found this episode helpful, don’t forget to share it with your friends. And, of course, go follow us over on Instagram at 18STRONG. Thanks again. We’ll catch up with you next week. Stay great hard, practice smart and play better golf.
Transcribed by https://podium.page