I think it’s human nature to believe that if something is good for you, then more of it is even better. Unfortunately, as the saying goes, “too much of a good thing is actually a bad thing.” For example, everyone knows that apples are good for humans, but if you eat too many apples, it will cause digestive issues, weight gain, and blood sugar spikes. That makes sense, and everyone knows not to eat too many apples. But why do we not apply that same principle when it comes to exercise?
Most people go to the gym with a goal and think they can reach that goal quicker by doing more exercises, more sets, or more days in the gym. Unfortunately, doing that will only put you further away from your goals.
Let’s say you have a goal to gain muscle. You build the plan or have a professional build the plan for you. You go to the gym, complete the workout, and think, “I can do one more set; I’ll be fine.” However, lifting weights only tears down the muscle, it doesn’t build it—your recovery does. That extra set you just did made it that much harder for your body to recover and rebuild that tissue.
So, what does this word “recovery” actually mean?
1.) Rest Time: First, you need time in between training each muscle group. A minimum of 48 hours of rest is a good starting point. Some people will need more, though, based on other stressors in life. This element is straightforward and should be easy to follow.
2.) Sleep: The next focus is sleep. Most people need a minimum of 7–8 hours of sleep, not just to function normally, but to actually repair the tissues you just trained. During sleep, your body goes to work, healing the needed tissues and getting rid of toxins within the body. Therefore, slacking on your sleep is the last thing you should do if your goal is muscle gain.
3.) Nutrition and Hydration: The last recovery focus is your nutrition and hydration. Do you actually know how many calories, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats you eat throughout your day? Or how much water you consume? These are pivotal factors when it comes to how well you recover. If you are undereating and under-hydrating, your body has no nutrients to send to the muscle to repair itself bigger and stronger. You will just break down the tissues even more, and that’s when a potential injury happens or people simply quit and say, “that doesn’t work.”
So, what is optimal?
If we are sticking with the muscle gain goal, optimal is 3–4 days in the gym per week, no more than 45 minutes to an hour, and lifting close to failure on 1–6 sets per muscle group per week—that’s it. This approach gets you in and out of the gym quickly to prioritize the thing that actually matters: recovery. This will allow you to increase weights over time rather than using the same weight over and over and over again, never getting stronger.
Now, this can be applied to anything in life, but let’s apply it to golf and making swing changes.
When making swing changes, because we assess the body, we need to optimize the body first. So, we assign a corrective exercise. Should you do this exercise non-stop, all day, every day? Well, based on what we learned above, the answer to that is NO.
Optimal means performing the exercise to your best ability, working on the position you need to get to, and getting close to failure on 1–2 sets of the exercise—that’s all. Now, some corrective exercises don’t use weights or load, but that still means we can go to mechanical failure. This is when the form breaks down from how your coach wants you to perform the exercise. If it’s 3 reps, stop there; if it’s 10, stop there; if it’s 20, you may need to check your form, or we may need to move on from the exercise to make it more difficult, or increase the load.
If you performed them correctly, your nervous system is now engaged and ready to use what you just changed in your body. Now it’s time to perform your golf drill, again, until mechanical failure. Once you’ve done these, your body is starting to learn the positions you are trying to get into. After that, you hit 10–20 balls from the same positions. That’s about where your body will reach mechanical failure, meaning you will not be able to repeat the same swing at a certain ball number you have hit.
Over time, you would increase the load or reps to create progressive overload in the body, meaning the body can handle more stress over a long period of time. This follows the same principles outlined when the goal was building muscle.
So, the moral of the story is: More of a good thing is not better; optimal amounts of a good thing are better. Set your plan, execute daily, don’t do more until your body is ready, and of course, recover hard.
