Golf Speed Training & Why It's Guaranteed to Work

When we think of speed training in golf, we think of swinging a club-like object faster than you can swing your own driver. Since your driver is the longest, lightest club in your bag, that’s the one you swing the fastest.

That’s whats known as overspeed training, and while it’s only part of the puzzle, overspeed training is a huge part of golf’s speed training puzzle.

When you overspeed train, you train your central nervous system to move faster, which then gets your body used to moving at those speeds, which unlocks faster speeds with your normal clubs.

“Just like long-distance running, you have to run farther to train your body to run farther,” Mooney said. “Swinging faster trains those small fast-twitch muscles and your nervous system. It's basically a workout for those pieces of your body.”

No matter what product you use for overspeed training, if you stick to the training protocol, you will gain club head speed. That’s true for any player, young or old, already fast or notoriously slow. 

Players who have never speed trained can expect their biggest gains to come in the first few weeks of training. How big those gains will be depends on a few things.

Factors like a player’s physical ability, the training protocol and product they use, and what their speed and technique is like before training all play a role in determining gains. 

So how much speed could one expect to gain in say, two months of training?

“A lot of people can clean up their technique with speed training,” Attanasio said. “Those people with poor technique are going to likely – when they do clean it up – gain more.”

“That range could be anywhere from two miles an hour of club speed, which is six yards, to, we have people who have gained 12 miles an hour of club speed in two months, which is like 35 yards. It is such a wide range,” Mooney added.

So that’s overspeed training in a nutshell. In addition to overspeed training, golf speed training as a whole encompasses anything that helps you swing a club faster. That could be working out, or swinging the driver that’s already in your bag as fast as humanly possible.

After snatching those initial gains, there is still plenty of speed to be gained. Contrary to the mythical “plateau” theory, which suggests you could continue training for months without noticable gains after your first big uptick, people who stick with their speed training program should expect to see continual improvements as long as they train.

“We have typically seen that there's not as much plateaus as the industry says,” Attanasio said. “Just take me for instance. In the last two years, I have gained 45 miles an hour ball speed, and that's starting at 200 miles an hour.”

While top-end speeds may plateau for periods of time, there is a push-pull effect.

For example, Attanasio described a player whose top-end speed is 110 mph and cruising speed, the speed they actually swing on the course, is 102. During what some would call a “plateau,” that top-end speed may stay at 110 mph, but the cruising speed creeps up to 103, 104, and 105 mph.

“This is the push-pull we always talk about,” he added. “When your ceiling pushes up, it pulls the base up. And when your base pushes up, it pushes your ceiling up.”

Let’s not lose sight of the overarching goal that drives every golfer: lower scores.

All of our training efforts revolve around shoot lower scores. So how does swinging an odd-looking golf-club-like aid impact your scorecard?

Anecdotally, distance gains are intimidating enough that golf’s governing bodies, the USGA and the R&A, have moved to roll the ball back. That right there should be enough to tell you that distance is an advantage.

There are, of course, statistics to back this up.

Arccos – one of the on-course game and stat tracking leaders – published data that illustrates just how much of an advantage you can gain by hitting the ball farther.

Of players who gained 10 or more yards, 81% gained strokes, or in other words, started shooting lower scores, and 65% saw improvements of one stroke or more. Meanwhile, 44% improved by two or more strokes, and 17% improved by four or more strokes.

In other words, if you gain 10 yards or more – which it’s a pretty safe bet that you will if you use any overspeed training product and follow the prescribed training program – there’s almost a 50% chance you’ll improve by two strokes, and about as good of a chance that you’ll improve by four or more strokes as there is that you won’t improve your scores at all.

There are two main concerns that always arise when golfers consider speed training. They are injury and loss of accuracy.

Let’s start with injury, since that’s the most legitimate drawback to speed training. The fact is, you can, and people do, get injured from speed training. 

If you’re overspeed training, or plan to begin an overspeed training program, pepper in some strength training if you aren’t already doing that. If you can’t get to the gym, even a couple days a week at home, will work. Dry squats, push-ups, and sit-ups are an easy way to strengthen your legs, core, and upper body, which will not only help you gain speed, but help protect you from injury.

“If your muscles, joints, ligaments, and tendons aren't strong enough to swing faster, when you do inevitably swing faster, you're either, A, not going gain speed, or, B, you're going to injure yourself,” Attanasio said, adding that if you’re already working out regularly, then you don’t need to worry about changing that up. 

We mentioned earlier that the Speed Toad, Mooney and Attanasio’s overspeed training product, is unique. There are two reasons for that, and one of them is that theirs is the only overspeed training product that doesn’t prescribe swinging anything heavier than your driver (the other is that you use your own driver shaft with their product).

One reason they don’t prescribe swinging anything heavier than your actual driver is specifically for injury-prevention. The heavier the thing you’re swinging is, the more strain it puts on your body. The duo calculated the impact of swinging heavier and lighter objects, and found that even by swinging slower with a heavier object, there is significantly more strain on the body than swinging something that’s lighter, at a faster speed.

“When you're swinging something lighter, it's less taxing on your body,” Attanasio said. “So, while it does stress your nervous system more, you don't get hurt by stressing your nervous system. You get hurt by stressing your muscular system and by stressing your body.”

Added Mooney: “And that's why Sam and I, for a year and a half, haven't swung anything heavier than our driver, and neither has any Speed Toad user because our plan doesn't call for that. In general, for injury prevention, that gets back to what Sam was talking about, having a solid base level of strength from the gym.”

While the injury concern is real, players’ concerns about losing accuracy in exchange for distance are unfounded. The logic is simple. The faster your top-end swing speed is, the less effort you have to exert to hit shots of any distance. In other words, your new controlled swing churns out as much or more distance as your old all-out swing.

This could mean hitting a pitching wedge instead of a 9 or 8-iron, or it could mean swinging at 75% effort instead of 90% effort. If you played out either of those scenarios 100 times, you’d see tighter dispersion patterns (better accuracy) with a shorter club and a more controlled swing. 

It could also mean that instead of hitting your driver 250 yards, you’re now hitting it 275 yards, with the same amount of effort. All of these scenarios explain why players who gain distance almost always shoot lower scores.

You don’t have to sweat the impending rollback. You can take matters into your own hands and gain way more distance than the USGA is preparing to take from you. Train safely, and your golf game will change for the better, guaranteed.