There are many ways to enhance your golf game. Chances are you haven’t tried them all. In the case of this list of unconventional training equipment, you may have missed an opportunity to increase your strength and conditioning with almost every item.

We’ve all heard of kettlebells (of course), but the rest may be pretty new to you. At Tampa Strength we use each of these methods on a daily basis to help our clients to enhance their golf game while also improving their functional strength, conditioning, mobility, and lifelong durability.

If you aren’t using all of them, don’t worry! The goal with these training tools and the methods they employ is to master their use, just like you’re trying to do with the sport of golf. If you know what you’re doing, you can use each of these workout tools for hundreds of exercises and literally endless workout variations.

As you know, golf involves a lot more than just swinging a club. Really improving your performance on the course requires enhanced strength, power, and endurance.

Beyond that, you want to play the sport beyond your fifties, right? That requires an aspect of physical ability that most people ignore until it is too late: mobility.

For that reason, you’ll find a few tools in here that don’t have anything to do with strength or power, what most people consider the “fun stuff”. Instead, they seek to improve your golf game through enhanced mobility, durability, and flexibility.

1. Kettlebells

Everyone has heard of kettlebells at this point, but you may not know the specific benefits you can gain when it comes to enhancing your golf game. While they can be used for standard exercises (like presses, squats, lunges, etc.), the shape and unique weight distribution of the kettlebell makes them ideal for ballistic training.

Ballistic training involves powerful, explosive movements to move the weight from one point to another. This motion requires full body strength, power, and coordination to start and end each exercise.

Just like your golf swing, you can’t move the weight very well using just your arms or just your legs. Exercises like the Swing, Snatch, Clean, and High Pull involve full body motions that require your muscles, bones, and tendons to work together.

For this reason, enhancing your golf game with kettlebells is a no brainer. However, you need to use ballistic exercises and you MUST USE proper form. Find a good coach locally or watch our tutorials by joining us online to get started.

Core Use: Ballistic Training and Power Enhancement

2. Steel Clubs

Steel Clubs, also known as heavy clubs or “club bells,” are quite possibly the oldest training tools known to man. As the first weapon ever devised, we’ve been swinging them for a while.  Their use can enhance strength, conditioning, rotational coordination, grip and upper body mobility.

What makes steel clubs unique as a training tool is the offset weight and the length. The weight ranges from 5 to 45lbs in most cases, and is heavily offset away from your grip. For this reason, controlling the weight requires additional grip strength, body control, and proprioception. All core abilities that can enhance your golf game.

Just like most of the tools in this article, steel clubs can be used for every aspect of your training. Even so, for the purpose of this article we’re going to give you a specific objective: upper body mobility and coordination.

These specific enhancements can be achieved using two exercises, the 360 and the 10-to-2. If you look up the word “Gada” you’ll find ancient persian wrestlers swinging huge clubs around their heads. In most cases they are doing these two drills.

The rotational motion of the exercises enhances your wrist, elbow, shoulder, and upper back mobility while also requiring grip strength and coordination. Obviously, enhancing these specific aspects will improve your golf abilities.

Core Use: Rotational Training and Upper Body Mobility

3. Sandbags

When most people think of improving their golf game, they probably think about improve strength and power for their swing. Fortunately, that’s exactly what you get when you train with sandbags.

The sandbag is an extremely simple yet endless versatile tool. Everyone from pro football players to strongmen to military personnel use sandbag training to improve strength. The strength you gain from sandbag training goes beyond what you can achieve with a “fixed weight” like a dumbbell, barbell, kettlebell, or steel club.

With sandbag training, you get functional strength with an unwieldy object. When you use an unpredictable weight you get the added benefit of core engagement, stabilizer muscle use, and awareness when you’re training. All of these things make using a predictable, fixed tool (like a golf club) easier to handle because of your enhanced body awareness.

To balance out the power and mobility you’ll achieve by using kettlebells and steel clubs, we’re going to use sandbags to build functional strength.

Like the other tools we recommend for enhancing your golf game, sandbags can be used for hundreds of exercises. Even so, at Tampa Strength we’ve found three core drills that will give you the most strength-bang-for-your-buck.

These three exercises are: Sandbag Shouldering, Sandbag Get Up (also called the Turkish Get Up), and the Bear Hug Squat. Video demonstrations for these exercises can be found in our exercise database. Each exercise involves a full body movement to transition your body and the sandbag itself throughout each drill. Grab the heaviest weight you can handle and get to work.

Core Use: Core Strength Training and Full Body Strength Development

Conclusion for Golfers

If you want to enhance your golf game, you can do it using nothing but these three tools, some competent instruction, and the willingness to try something more unconventional than you can expect in your local big-box gym. Find a local trainer to ensure your form is correct and give you a proper program, or sign up for our online program to get started today.