Main Image: SuperSpeed Golf

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By Rob Schaefer

You can’t have a discussion about sports technology today without including athletes in that conversation. Their partnerships, investments and endorsements help fuel the space – they have emerged as major stakeholders in the sports tech ecosystem. The Athlete’s Voice series highlights the athletes leading the way and the projects and products they’re putting their influence behind.

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LPGA player Cheyenne Knight sits No. 49 in the Rolex World Rankings and 23rd in the 2023 LPGA Race to the CME Globe. In July, she notched her second career tour victory – and first since 2019 – at the Dow Great Lakes Bay Invitational alongside partner Elizabeth Szokol.

En route to that win, Knight noticed tangible improvements in her swing speed and drive distance thanks to her work with SuperSpeed Golf, a company that utilizes data and targeted speed training to increase swing speeds. SuperSpeed’s core offering is a three-piece set of weighted clubs designed to reprogram a players’ neuromuscular reaction time by training from both their dominant and non-dominant side.

“My partner (for the Dow Great Lakes Bay Invitational) Elizabeth hits it pretty far, she’s probably one of the longest on tour,” Knight said. “We were kind of joking around, she’s like, ‘Man, Cheyenne! You’re hitting it out here kind of close to what I do.’”

Knight first purchased a SuperSpeed set in college, and officially signed on as a partner in 2023. The company, which started signing player ambassadors earlier this year, had between 700 and 1,000 player clients as of late June.

As for Knight, SuperSpeed reports that her ball speed increased by nearly 10 miles per hour – from 128 to 136-137 – within two months of adopting her focused speed training regimen.

Here, Knight discusses her work with SuperSpeed and using technology as a tool in her training.

On the motivation to first purchase a SuperSpeed set…

Growing up [as a golfer], it was kind of different as to what kids are taught now. I think now kids are just taught to swing as hard as they can and then figure out where it goes later. But when I was growing up, and I feel like for my generation, it was more, ‘You need to hit it straight.’ And then you saw the shift, I think starting with Bryson [DeChambeau], that really made people think about speed. With SuperSpeed there was a market for that, to help you hit it further. I bought the set and watched the instructional videos on their website. That’s how it got started.

On using the program…

I was lucky enough to do it with the SuperSpeed team and they showed me everything. You make it your own. There’s different things. You have the speed sticks – there’s light, medium, heavy, and then a counterbalance stick. There’s different series of swings that you do on your dominant and non-dominant side.

It doesn’t take that long – you do a few swings with each, like a step-and-swing, and there’s a radar that tells you how fast you’re swinging it. And the goal is to swing the heavy one close or the same as you do the light one. There’s other equipment that they also offer that helps you with your grip strength and these little discs that help you use the ground better. I think with that you’re just really trying to learn how you need to incorporate speed, because using the ground, pushing off the ground is a really big leap in power.

On the specific improvements with SuperSpeed…

I hit the ball pretty straight, but I’m not one of the longest hitters on the LPGA. I feel like you can only benefit from [SuperSpeed]. It doesn’t change the mechanics of your swing, it just teaches you how you can hit the ball further and gain some speed. I just used it as a tool.

I just wanted to see some gains in my swing speed and my club head speed. And if I could gain a few miles per hour, I would hit it further off the tee and kind of just have some different clubs into the greens. When you increase your club head speed and your swing speed, you generate more spin, so that would help my irons too, just being able to generate more spin and hold some of the greens more – because I’m usually coming in sometimes as a longer club than the other girls.

On feedback from SuperSpeed…

When I spent the day with them, I saw some gains in my club head speed and ball speed. I think, for me, swinging on my non-dominant side was really good. Just learning how my body works, and you’re on the force plates and seeing where I lose some of my power. The kind of stuff I already knew – I don’t load that well into my right side in my backswing. But seeing it from a different perspective and technology definitely helped. Me swinging lefthanded, it really gets my muscles engaged and learning how to load a little bit better by swinging on my non-dominant side.

By John Portch

David Dunne recalls a conversation with a player from his time serving as Performance Nutritionist at Harlequins.

“It was the day before a Premiership game and I remember sitting down with one of the players,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute. “He knew exactly what he needed to do regarding his nutrition and had every opportunity to do it. He just looked at me and said: ‘look, I know what to do’. The food is literally in front of him and he said: ‘I’m not going to do it’.”

At this point it dawned on Dunne that education alone was not enough to influence the food choices of an athlete.

“It’s a gaping hole in academia,” he continues. “All these practitioners– myself included – are able to give others the correct information but do not necessarily know how to coach and influence change.”

Back in 2015, Dunne decided to explore the worlds of behavioural science and intervention design. “It doesn’t make me a world-renowned expert,” he is keen to point out, but, “what I would do on a day to day basis now would be completely different to what I would do back in 2014.”

Dunne worked at Quins between 2013 and 2020 and his current day job is as the CEO of Hexis, an AI-powered personalised nutrition app that he co-founded. Additionally, he serves as a performance science consultant for golf’s DP World Tour and Team Europe at the Ryder Cup.

Here, we explore the question of interventions and delivery as well as the need for nutrition and other disciplines to “play the game differently”.

Too much focus on education

As we speak, Dunne touches upon the pioneering research of Louise Burke and Ronald Maughan (“the mother and father of sports nutrition”) dating back to the 1980s, as well as the initial wave of sports nutrition, where the emphasis was once on supplements, to the more contemporary focus on food. “If you look at the last 20 years, there’s been a huge increase in knowledge generation,” he says.

“As a discipline we’re young. We’re like an infant that’s just learned to walk and it’s probably just at that stage where we’re starting to understand the intersection between not just knowing the information but understanding how to deliver that information. People may disagree with me, and they’re welcome to, but that’s my stance on it.”

How does Dunne feel this tends to manifest in sport? “The biggest problem is that education is our main tool. So we go into a classroom, we stand in front of a group of people or we sit down and we have a conversation with somebody. Essentially we give them information, but we know that education has little bearing in many instances on someone’s actual behaviour. Like that player, you might know exactly what to do, but it doesn’t mean that you’re going to do it.”

In addressing the issue, he cites the examples of Meghan Bentley of Leeds Beckett and Dan Martin of Liverpool John Moores Universities. A strand of their research investigates the means of nutritional intervention and delivery beyond education. “But it’s a minority at the minute,” says Dunne. “I think that’s just a reflection of where we are as a discipline.

“We’ve started to recognise that behaviour change is important, and maybe implementation science more broadly, but we still haven’t fully understood design science. If you were to go to any conference now, I’m confident we’d see a little bit of behavioural science, which is great, but I’m not confident we’re going to see design science.”

Dunne sees both as useful for addressing performance gaps from different angles. “Behavioural science is looking at it from a more theoretical perspective; ‘this person needs to do X’. Design science starts from an empathetic perspective; ‘what does this person feel, say and do?’ I think the integration of those things is incredibly important if we are to avoid past mistakes. How do we bring to life what we’re seeing in the lab with real people who have real emotions that vary consistently across environments, across contexts, and across the time of the day?”

The growth of performance nutrition in professional golf

Dunne explains that there are certain sports, such as cycling, where nutrition has long held a seat at the top table of performance. Golf, however, tended to be agnostic until relatively recently. He says: “I think it’s growing and key players are starting to recognise it, which is really important.”

It was in his role at the DP World Tour that Dunne was first approached by Europe’s 2018 Ryder Cup captain Thomas Bjørn to serve the team. “He wanted to bring more of a performance focus to the environment. He wanted more sports science, nutrition, strength & conditioning, physio etc. It was very well-received by the players.” Dunne and his colleagues will remain as service deliverers ahead of the 2023 edition of the Ryder Cup at Marco Simone Golf and Country Club in Guidonia Montecelio near Rome.

The nutrition-related issues facing golfers, who may travel to 20-plus tournaments per year, are manifold, from executing travel strategies and the realities of restricted food availability (at hotels, courses and airports) to general immunity and the maintenance of energy levels. Says Dunne: “A 7am tee time might mean a 3am start and a round can take five hours. How do they fuel before and during that to maintain the correct energy and not suffer cognitive decline during the round?”

There is, however, the problem of scale in the delivery of nutrition services on the DP World Tour. “In any tournament week you could have approximately 150 players,” he adds. “For some, it might be their first event, for others it might be their 500^th, so naturally you build relationships with people you see more regularly but, ultimately, there will be missing data.”

He believes that some of these key questions can be addressed through technology. “We should use computers for what they’re good at and free coaches up to do what they’re good at. For a nutritionist, that’s being human, listening, building relationships and having conversations with individuals. The technology can then deliver that support at scale.

“Imagine athletes come to me on the DP World Tour, we could sit down, we could have a really good conversation, understanding what their problem is that we need to work on. As they leave, the technology maybe something that can travel with them consistently for as long as they need it. They may still have a question and they may come back, but they’ve now got more information than if they had just left with a PDF.”

It is not just golf that could benefit. “Athletes desire a high level of personalisation but the problem facing practitioners is that of both time and scale,” says Dunne. “They could be dealing with squad sizes of up to 60 individual athletes and, to deliver daily, personalised, periodised plans that can adapt in real time as training schedules get modified, becomes an impossible task.

“That’s where technology is ready to step in and help enable and empower athletes to be able to get that level of detail on a consistent basis while supporting practitioners by freeing up their time.”

His app, Hexis, uses AI to support athletes, coaches and practitioners at scale. “If we look at what we’re doing, which is helping people to understand how to fuel their bodies according to their demands, that’s where artificial intelligence can be powerful.”

Simply put, it’s easier to open an app at any time than call your nutritionist. This could make all the difference given how people experience both peaks and troughs in motivation on a daily basis.

“So maybe I’m preparing to train this evening and I wonder what I should eat now to help me perform. At that time, a nutritionist might not be available at the end of a phone. You can’t rely on being able to call somebody at all times of the day and, being a practitioner who’s received the WhatsApps, who’s received the phone calls, it’s not fundamentally scalable across large squads. So we need to find a way to enable and empower the athlete to understand what to eat at that moment and make the most of that motivation peak, so when that motivation is a little bit higher, the barrier to entry is much lower because you just pick up your phone, you can click on Hexis, and just go ‘OK, this is what I need to do’.”

Nutrition, like any other performance discipline, needs to demonstrate its value and show a return on investment. Dunne believes technology and AI will be crucial to fulfilling that aim.

“No one wins and loses in nutrition, but we do need to find ways to play the game differently and evolve.”

Main image courtesy of Full Swing

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By Tom Friend

Jon Rahm may have won the Masters weeks and months ahead of time… in his basement.

Leading up to his four-stroke victory in Augusta in April, Rahm relied on a trio of tech-savvy products from Full Swing that helped turn his borderline weaknesses into strengths. It only goes to show that golfers not only win majors with the clubs in their bag, but with actuator modules, infrared line scan cameras and proprietary apps.

“I had been looking into the best way to practice all aspects of my game at home,” Rahm has said of his decision to install Full Swing’s devices, and, as a result, his sprawling home in Arizona is now one of the epicenters of golf.

In one corner of his house sits an approximate 4-by-8 sliver of sophisticated turf that is actually a high-tech “Virtual Green” simulating the quick 12 to 14 breaks of Augusta National. Immersed with dozens of actuator modules — which move to recreate downhill, uphill, right breaks, left breaks, crests, valleys and hills — the interactive putting green enabled Rahm to zero in on one of his main concerns heading into the Masters.

“Jon just wanted to work on little short left or righters,” Ryan Dotters, CEO of Full Swing, told SBJ. “Because that’s what he kind of struggled with in the past. So we put a smaller Virtual Green in for him. He wanted a nice little square one.

“That’s just what he wanted to focus on to get better: these four to five foot putts that are left or right breakers. And we got [the Virtual Green] down to where it’s super fast, it’s Augusta fast in there…We got that one to the 14 [break] that he needed for the Masters.”

Other adaptive putting greens on the market can tilt left and right or forward and back. But none are said to have Full Swing’s patented actuator modules that can simulate any break on any course in the world with the click of a button. The Virtual Greens, which vary in size and are priced between $70,900 and $95,400, are equipped with an accompanying computer, whose software can replicate subtle, moderate or severe breaks on request.

Only about 400 of them have been on the market so far — “It’s expensive to make, expensive to ship, expensive to install,” Dotters said —but Rahm, Tiger Woods and Jason Day actually own three of those 400 — and have all become Full Swing ambassadors. Woods, in fact, has equity in the company.

In another corner of Rahm’s basement is what had Woods originally buying in: the Full Swing simulator. The company, in fact, was birthed circa 2019 with simulators in mind, and early iterations that included highspeed ION3 cameras drew the interest of Rahm’s tech-centric coach Dave Phillips.

As co-founder of the Titleist Performance Institute in Oceanside, Calif., Phillips began offering his insights to Dotters and the company’s engineers on how to advance their Full Swing simulator further. At around the same time, Rahm was living in his home overlooking an Arizona golf course, baking through 110-degree practice rounds. Looking for a cooler, indoor solution, Phillips steered Rahm to the Full Swing simulator, as it continued ideating the latest technology.

Then, last September, the company released its Pro model simulator that leveraged infrared line scan cameras to create virtually a latency-free experience. The overhead ION3 camera tracks the golf ball on impact, and as the ball crosses the infrared line, it triggers the computer to instantly mimic the shot — producing ball speed, launch direction, launch angle and a visual of the ball flight in real time.

Other simulators generally do not have the ability to track a ball without delay because the devices first calculate ball flight, then rotate the screen to where the ball should land and then provide an image. The difference in elapsed time may seem minor, but to a pro like Rahm the Full Swing Pro was a breath of fresh air…less than 110 degrees.

As a result, he was able to replicate Amen Corner at Augusta over and over to prepare for the Masters, and when the weather was amenable, he’d then retreat outside to train with Full Swing’s third and most recent innovation, the KIT Launch Monitor.

Released originally in December of 2021 with incremental input from Woods, the KIT Launch Monitor — placed in close proximity behind the golfer — used a dual radar system to track a ball from impact-to-landing-to-roll while also identifying the dimple dispersion off the front face of the ball along with rotation and seam. The litany of metrics included spin rate, spin axis, ball speed, attack angle and more. But the statistic Rahm most cared about was: carry.

Dotters asked Rahm questions such as: “How can we make these better? What does the interface look like? What’s the app looking like?” Rahm provided feedback, and a new, improved version. “[It was] a 3-to-4-year project that took a lot of testing and a lot of capital to get right,” Dotters says. It was delivered to Rahm months before the Masters.

“The screen was a big one for Jon,” Dotters says. “He wanted to just turn around look and see what the numbers were. But it really came down to carry numbers for him. He needed those to be exact. And we’ve done a really good job of being pinpoint accurate with carry. Whether it’s 350 with a driver or 60 yards with a wedge, carry is just Jon’s biggest metric.

“Sometimes he doesn’t need to hit it 320, he needs to back it down. So he needs to know those carry numbers and we’ve learned we are really good at this. So I think what I can relay —through his conversations with me and his testing — is that it gave him a leg up at the Masters.”

And a certain green jacket.

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

Main image courtesy of Hexis

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By Joe Lemire

David Dunne has worked broadly as a performance nutritionist in elite sport, helping clubs at the highest ranks of professional soccer, rugby and basketball as well as Team Europe in golf’s Ryder Cup and Olympians in disciplines ranging from fencing to canoeing.

Through that experience, Dunne saw numerous innovations aiding sport science peers as they collected data and provided insights on athletic readiness and training loads, but there was nothing comparable for his field. That realization prompted the founding of Hexis, an AI-powered personalized nutrition app.

“Although wearables had rushed ahead and people were harvesting continuous physiological data from other sources, nutrition had really lagged behind,” said Dunne, the company’s CEO. “Everything was still a tracker and calorie counter. So we decided to take some of the advancements in sports nutrition in elite sport, which were really centered around predictive nutrition and understanding how to periodize intake, according to the load and demands of the day.”

After launching publicly in Q3 last year, Hexis has attracted more than 500 paid subscribers, of which more than 10% are professional and Olympic athletes. Endurance athletes are the most represented group. In mid-April it launched an integration with Apple Health to ingest more objective data for custom meal plans and also an in-house food tracking feature that Dunne believes will improve upon what’s available at MyFitnessPal.

Users are onboarded by sharing info about their sport, lifestyle, sleep patterns, weight, body composition, typical meals and training schedule and their goals. The duration and intensity of training is considered in generating a meal plan automatically. One recently added feature, Live Energy, evaluates intake versus expenditure at a micro level.

“If, for example, this went from being a light session into a hard session, everything pretty much updates on the fly as though I was your nutritionist in your pocket and how I would manipulate things,” Dunne said.

A desktop dashboard for team nutritionists to monitor an entire roster is in development. That’s an acute need in the field, as the best nutrition plans are personalized, which necessarily requires more time and effort. Augmenting a nutritionist’s resources to be more efficient is what helped bring together two of Hexis’ co-founders in the first place.

Dunne, whose longest team stint was with the Harlequins in Premiership Rugby, and British Cycling’s lead nutritionist, Sam Impey, both did their PhD work at Liverpool John Moores University and often crossed paths at industry events.

“Whenever we’d catch up, normally over a beer at a conference, and it was quite weird how often we’d see similarities in the challenges that we faced, even though [cycling and rugby are] dramatically different sports — but the issues of nutrition around scalability,” Impey said.

Their sub-disciplines within performance nutrition were different — Impey focused on carbohydrate periodization and physiological changes to the muscle whereas Dunne is a behavioral scientist with an expertise in the use of technology — but they both identified that same need.

While holding a postdoctoral position at the University of Birmingham, Impey began exploring the application of his PhD research around the timing of carbohydrate intake to help the body best adapt to training. Proper nutrition can increase the benefit of exercise, helping people get fitter, faster. He said he had compiled “a reasonably interesting Excel sheet” and thought he’d bounce some ideas off Dunne.

“I’ll never forget his face when I showed it to him,” Impey recalled, “because he was like, ‘Wow, that’s interesting.’ And he said, ‘Look, I’m actually doing the the same thing.’ But I think he was nine, 12 months, further down the road than me.”

Image courtesy of Hexis

They joined forces, along with three other co-founders: Rodrigo Mazorra Blanco, the director of engineering and CFO; Xiaoxi Yan, who leads data science; and Carmen Lefevre-Lewis, a behavioral scientist who is also a UX research manager at Meta. Impey praised the executive team’s diverse experience and its “strong and encouraging check-and-challenge culture.”

Though most of the team’s experience is in Europe, Dunne’s CV includes a stint as a performance science consultant for Orreco — winner of SBJ Tech’s Best in Athlete Performance for 2022 — where he provided in-person support to client teams, including a two-year stint helping out periodically with the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks.

As with many startups, Hexis draws on elite sport experience to design and develop the product so it’s suitable for professional athletes, but the app is accessible for anyone who trains regularly.

“The reason we built Hexis and where we thought we could really cause a shift in behavior is more around planning,” Impey said, explaining that most tools available are retrospective, but they want to target prospective action.

“Adherence is obviously the golden nugget for everyone,” Dunne said, noting that team spends extensive time exploring ways to engage with all kinds of users who respond to different messaging and prompts at different times of day.

As prevalent as the technology is, one area Hexis has not delved into is machine learning. “When it comes to physiology, we don’t want the system to make a mistake and learn from its mistake,” Dunne said. “We feel there’s pretty good rules around exercise metabolism and biochemistry that, with the development of AI and expert systems, we can give a right and a wrong answer.”

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

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By Joe Lemire

Dylan Frittelli grabbed a share of the golf world’s attention in November 2020 at the rescheduled Masters when he finished the first round tied for the lead. Most notable was his length off the tee, an improvement in driving distance that persisted through the 2021 season. In fact, Frittelli gained 18 yards in average distance — by far the most on the PGA Tour that year.

Such power can come with a cost in accuracy, however. Until recently, when he began working with Cory Jez and his new TourIQ golf analytics business, Frittelli had no way to objectively measure the holistic impact on his game.

“I wouldn’t have any clue how to go about it,” Frittelli said. But he was able to ask Jez, “Have I actually improved my overall ball striking? Or does missing a few more fairways actually hurt me?”

“He did a deep dive in the analysis,” Frittelli continued, “and he basically found out it was almost a break-even, but then my wedge play was much worse out of the rough. So he was like, ‘Look, you’re hitting it much farther down, but you’re in the rough more.’ And between him and my coach, we decided, OK, maybe I’m going to toggle back a bit on driving distance.”

Golf is a data-rich sport, particularly with the PGA Tour’s Shotlink system generating several metrics per shot (and with an upgrade expected soon). TourIQ has more than 12 million Shotlink-tracked shots in its database. But golfers are independent contractors who don’t have the pooled resources to establish the necessary data infrastructure or hire analysts and developers to mine for insights.

That’s the need Jez is trying to fill. He is a former Director of Basketball Analytics for the Utah Jazz who then held a similar role foe Austin FC. That’s where he met Frittelli, a University of Texas graduate who had befriended some of the MLS club’s executives. Jez developed TourIQ to analyze and visualize data across four modules: a player’s own game analysis, course profiles, hole strategy recommendations and a schedule optimizer that can recommend which tournaments a golfer enters.

“It’s exactly what I would build for an NBA team, but it’s just built for a PGA Tour golfer instead,” Jez said. “For one-tenth of that cost, you can get 95% of the benefit.”

Photo: TourIQ

There are two tiers of access. Platform partners can use the portal for a fee in the low five figures while consulting partners receive additional individualized analysis for a flat fee plus a commission based on Tour earnings.

Jez is the founder and CEO while his software engineer is Phil Baker, whose day job is as the Assistant Director of Baseball Systems for the Cleveland Guardians. TourIQ’s advisors include BreakAway Data co-founder Steve Gera and StatsBomb founder Ted Knutson. They draw on their experience in pro team settings to inform not only the relevant data science but also the communication of the findings.

“I quickly realized in those roles that, obviously, the Moneyball part — building the predictive model to value the player — is definitely part of the job,” Jez said, “but so much of the job is, how do you get this information to your stakeholders in a really quick, easy-to-consume, easy-to-integrate way? How do you get a head coach to use the model?”

Two years ago, Frittelli spent considerable time working on his putting. After a couple months of practice, Frittelli wondered how it really translated to his performance.

“I knew my putting was bad — bad relative to the other guys — but I didn’t really have a metric to tell whether it was getting better or worse,” he said.

There are so many variables in terms of greens and pins to sift out the signal from the noise, but Jez built a model to determine that Frittelli’s putting was, in fact, improving.

Photo: TourIQ

“There’s a bit of evidence here: now I know what I’m working on helps,” Frittelli said. “Previously I would just go on feel and I’d be looking at it like tournament to tournament or day by day. And it’s really hard to have that sort of bird’s eye view and know if you’re getting better when you’re just looking at small snippets of data.”

TourIQ normalizes the data to account for course variations and strength of tournament field, using 24- and 76-round moving averages as the default comparisons for recent play and baseline performance. The schedule optimizer identified two courses in particular for Frittelli to enter: the Sanderson Farms Championship in Jackson, Mississippi, and the World Wide Technology Championship in Mexico.

The 17th green at the Waste Management Phoenix Open proved a good case study in hole strategy. It’s a drivable par-four, but the second round’s pin location in the back-right corner mandated a different approach: hit to right of the green rather than straight ahead. Frittelli followed suit and made a birdie.

Photo: TourIQ

Generally, Frittelli said, his own experience and the accumulated wisdom of his long-tenured caddie are sufficient. But some of TourIQ’s more counterintuitive recommendations are worth jotting down in his yardage book.

“That’s what I always tell him, ‘I want to find anomalies,’” he said. “It doesn’t help if you tell me to miss it in the right rough here or left rough there. That’s obvious on most holes. But if there’s a random one that says ‘hit it in a different fairway’ or ‘hit it in this fairway bunker’ that gives me an edge that I wouldn’t think about, that’s where he comes in big time.”

“We can essentially give players the cheat sheet on how to play this hole when the pin’s front, when the pin’s back,” said Jez, noting that impact of a shot or two improvement per round. “Being able to make more informed decisions on those margins might be the difference between keeping your [Tour] Card or not. You take a missed cut, and you replace it with a 20th [place] — and you’re a guy who is a middle-of-the-field type of player — and that has really big implications.”

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

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By Joe Lemire

Two hours before world No 1 golfer Scottie Scheffler teed off for the first round of the PGA Championship in May, he walked into one of the PGA Tour’s mobile Technogyms to see his performance guru, Troy Van Biezen.

A trained chiropractor with a focus on sports biomechanics, Van Biezen does some treatment on the training table before Scheffler begins his warm-ups. For the vast majority of that time—85%, Van Biezen estimates—the recent Masters champion is clutching GolfForever’s new SwingTrainer, a 44.5-inch, asymmetrically-weighted training bar with attachments that either replicate the feel of a driver or a club head that’s 2.5 times heavier for training. There is also a detachable resistance band for a wide variety of exercises. 

“When we’re on the road, SwingTrainer is an integral part of our warm-ups and our training throughout the week,” says Van Biezen, who has worked on the PGA Tour for 20 years with Jordan Spieth, Zach Johnson, Ryan Palmer and others. “What I try to do in a gym, which is under a controlled environment, is just mimic the movement patterns that we want to have Scottie integrate into his golf swing. The SwingTrainer has been a very versatile, durable tool that we can apply those movement patterns under a light load but generating that neural pathway pattern to get that brain working on certain movements we want to get him into.” 

GolfForever is the spinoff of chiropractor Jeremy James’ BackForever program, and the SwingTrainer launched in November as a training tool to complement the library of video content in the program. Scheffler, who has been training with Van Biezen for a decade in the Dallas area, recently joined Justin Leonard as a GolfForever ambassador, calling the SwingTrainer “critical” to his Tour preparation. 

James, whose practice is based in Aspen, Colorado, welcomed patients suffering from chronic back pain for weeks or even months at his facility. Recognizing the challenge and expense of his location, he sought to distribute his message further, first by writing a book and then by recording streamed video content. Many of his most active users were golfers, which spurred the development of the GolfForever package that launched in 2019. 

“Golf does a very predictable set of things to your body,” James says. “From a biomechanical perspective, it’s a repetitive, asymmetrical motion, and if you’re not in great shape or if you’ve had injuries in the past, it’s going to wear your body down.” 

For the first couple of years, GolfForever relied primarily on resistance bands, but James sought to more precisely target the core muscles that generate and resist the rotational forces created during a golf swing. “We didn’t invent the idea of asymmetrical bar training—that had been in the fitness world for a while—but we took that concept and we made it specific for a golfer,” James says. 

The SwingTrainer helps golfers open up the joints in all three planes of the swing, Van Biezen says, referring to the sagittal (left/right), frontal (front/back) and transverse (top/bottom) planes. He’ll have Scheffler do a side lunge with a rotation, a Bulgarian squat while doing a unilateral push or a single-leg overhead press, all while incorporating the SwingTrainer. 

“With Scottie, he’s very, very strong,” Van Biezen says. “It’s just now, with the GolfForever, what I really like about is it just helps a lot with the stability and mobility patterns. It’s just a really high-beneficial, low-risk training tool. I think golf fitness has probably gone down one extreme where you get the Olympic lifting and all that kind of stuff and guys really getting hurt. I’ve always said the game of golf is a marathon, not a sprint. And so these guys can play for a long period of time and perform at a high level if they just keep themselves healthy.” 

Van Biezen says he believes strongly in rigorous baseline testing to track movement patterns and detect asymmetries. He uses 3D motion capture regularly and employs massage therapists and strength coaches at his facility. There is also a golf shop and hitting bay with club fitting and repair, making it a one-stop destination. Scheffler first visited around the age of 14 or 15 and has kept coming back, much like Spieth, the 28-year-old who ascended to a world No 1 ranking in 2015.

“What’s going on with Scottie right now, it’s kind of like Groundhog Day for me with what happened with Jordan around the same time,” Scheffler says. “They both had a little bit of low back issues, and that’s why they first came in. Then they both just realized, for injury prevention, they have to start doing stuff off the golf course.” 

Last season, Scheffler had eight top-10 finishes in his 29 starts but no wins. In fact, he had never won a tournament prior to the WM Phoenix Open in February—which began a streak of four wins in six tries, culminating in his Masters victory. Van Biezen pushed him hard in the offseason to strengthen his upper body and core but also build his endurance so that he was as fresh during the back nine on Sunday as he was the front nine on Thursday. By a small margin, his fourth round average a year ago was his worst, and his first round was his best. 

“We’re just beginning to see everything come together finally,” Van Biezen says. 

This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.

By Sarah Evans

• Harness the athlete’s internal drive, create a realistic vision.

• Encourage your athlete to be their own best coach.

• Create a belief that no matter what happens your athlete will rise from setbacks.

Cultivate a clear vision

Cameron McCormick, who has coached an array of PGA and LPGA players, has been Spieth’s coach since the latter was a 12-year-old dreaming of winning golf’s most prestigious major, the Masters. He saw in Spieth “the drive and determination that fuels the necessary ability to do work,” as he told the 2016 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in New York, and worked to support Spieth’s goal of winning the Masters for almost a decade. Spieth possessed what McCormick called the “internal drive that sees a future reality,” making the link between Spieth’s drive and vision of the future. The youngster set his goal very high from a young age and, with the right support, was able to chase his Masters dream without being afraid to aim high. In 2015, aged 21, Spieth became the youngest player to win at Augusta since a 19-year-old Tiger Woods in 1997.

Self-belief and resilience

McCormick explained that one key way of being able to bounce back from a defeat or bad performance is “a self-belief that no matter what happens I will rise again”. He emphasised the critical importance of self-talk, and “signal-to-noise management”, whereby the noise that exists has a decided advantage, i.e. taking in the jeers from Augusta or playing forward negative situations in your mind versus the signal that you want to control. “Be a creator of the scene in your mind, not a viewer of what you are experiencing,” he said. McCormick is able to measure this with the athletes by reframing the scenario and creating perspective. It is a centring process, and needs to be repeated and cultivated consistently over time.

He then spoke about the round briefings he has with Spieth and how he uses these as an opportunity to “pump his tyres” and how Spieth is then able to build his self-belief. It is all about the principle of reinforcement, the more you think about and talk about something happening, you increase the probability of it taking place, which works, of course, both positively and negatively. Therefore, playing a highlight reel, remembering your strengths and building positive self-talk before competition is paramount.

The Three C’s – Collect, Correlate, Correct

McCormick‘s goal, although it seems counterintuitive, is to make himself redundant to the athlete. He fosters a sense of self sufficiency amongst the players, and sets out to educate them on how to be their own best coach. McCormick only wanted his players to come back to him when they really needed his help. He calls this process the three C’s: collect the clues, attribute a correlation or causation, then close the loop with a correction. This ability for the athletes to figure it out themselves and “dig it out of the dirt” is critical when their contact time is at a minimum.

Get buy-in from key influences

Athletes rely upon a good support system and McCormick understands how important it is to filter his core coaching messages through the key influences in an athlete’s life. Done well, those messages will resonate beyond the coaching session itself. McCormick called it “the rule of 168”. There are 168 hours in a week and he might only get one hour with an athlete. “Therefore that hour needs to be high octane and have longevity over a week or two-week period so when they come back, you’re not in the same place,” he said.