At the end of the power post we left off with a question. When a golfer’s power is low, why? Is it because they cannot produce enough force, or because they cannot produce it fast enough?

That question matters because the two answers lead to completely different training. One golfer needs a bigger engine or horsepower. The other has the engine and needs to learn to accelerate it quickly.

Strength testing is how we find out which one you need more of.

Strength Is Not the Goal

Let us be clear about something up front. Limit and maximal strength are not the end goal. An adequate amount of strength, however, is the foundation everything else sits on. Winning a golf tournament is not totally dependent on how much you can squat.

Think of it as the size of your gas tank. Power is how fast you can burn through it. A bigger tank does not automatically make you faster, but a tank that is too small puts a hard ceiling on everything above it. You cannot express force quickly if the force is not there to begin with.

Strength does not make you fast. It raises the ceiling on how fast you can become and handle that speed.

Strength also does something power testing cannot show us. It tells us whether your body can handle the loads it takes on when swinging, round after round, season after season. That is the durability side of the equation. This is VERY important and something that is not taken into consideration much, especially in cases where, for example, a young junior golfer has high levels of clubhead speed but low levels of strength. In that case it is not if they will break, but when. Again, another topic for another time.

The Five Tests

We test strength across the whole body, not just the parts that look impressive in the gym. Each test tells us something specific about your golf.

Upper Body Push

How much force can you produce pushing away from your body? The pushing muscles stabilize the arms and chest through impact and help control the club through the hitting zone. Studies have shown that the pec and chest muscles produce high levels of work during the swing, especially with driver, and that is part of the equation of what we are looking at here.

D1 college golfer testing how much force the upper body can push, measured against bodyweight.

Upper Body Pull / Core

The pulling side, which most golfers neglect. Pulling strength supports posture, protects the shoulders, and holds the upper body together through the transition. When this is weak relative to the pushing side, positions get harder to hold. The core and upper body pulling muscle groups are inextricably linked, so they are lumped together into one group.

Korn Ferry / PGA Tour Americas player testing upper body pulling and core strength.

Lower Body

The base of everything. Lower body strength determines how much force you can put into the ground, and the ground is where the swing starts based on what we know from physics. This is also the test that most often explains a distance ceiling.

Female professional player testing lower body strength split squat.

PGA Tour winner testing single leg strength via sandbag one leg squat.

Hip Abduction

The muscles on the outside of the hip that control the pelvis and keep the lower body stable while it rotates. They also show high levels of activity during the swing, for many other reasons. Weakness here can lead to inefficient transfer of force, low back and knee pain, decreased clubhead speed, and more.

Grip

Your only connection to the club, and one of the most underrated tests in golf. Grip strength influences how well you control the face, and it also happens to be one of the best general markers of total body strength and long term health we have.

The Strength spoke, broken into its own radar. Each score is compared to the field.

Reading the Chart

Same principle as the power radar. We look at the height of the numbers and we look at the shape.

A player who is strong everywhere except hip abduction has a specific problem, not a general one. A player whose push far outpaces their pull has an imbalance that will eventually cost them speed, or leave them with postural issues, neck pain, and more. A player who is average across the board but has excellent power is telling us something entirely different than a player who is strong across the board with average power.

That last one is the whole reason we test both.

Putting Power and Strength Together

Now we can answer the question from the last post.

Low power, low strength. The engine is the limiter. Build strength first and power tends to follow, because you are raising the ceiling that everything else lives under.

Low power, good strength. The force is there but it is coming out too slowly. This golfer does not need more weight on the bar. They need to train speed and rate of force development, and they usually see changes faster than they expect.

Good power, low strength. This one deserves attention. The golfer is producing high output on a base that cannot fully support it. It works, right up until it does not. This is a load tolerance and injury risk conversation as much as a performance one. We see this a ton in juniors.

Good power, good strength. On track. Now we are looking at the other spokes to find what is left. But we still train and build resilience to the forces of the sport.

Four golfers, four completely different programs, and none of it is guesswork. It comes from two charts.

What Comes Next

Power tells us what you produce. Strength tells us what you have to produce it with. But neither one tells us whether you can control it.

You can be strong and powerful and still lose energy because your body cannot hold the positions the swing demands. That is stability, and it gets its own deep dive next.