How Fatigue is Affecting Your Gains!

There is a super common misconception in the training world that in order to “workout” we need to end a workout sweating, out of breath, and in pain.

But this couldn’t be further from the truth.. In fact, if you are consistently finding yourself in this position, you're probably hurting more than helping.

How Fatigue Affects Us in Training…

I’ve written before about the necessity of stress in training and how we need to stress our physical bodies in order to reap the rewards of adaptation.

But stress is different from fatigue.

When programmed and trained correctly, our workouts should create a level of stress, as well as a degree of short term fatigue, but shouldn’t compound into long-term fatigue effects.

When I was in college, I got unhealthily obsessive with my training. And I WAY passed that point of stress. I was consistently exhausted, fatigued, and tired. No longer was training aiding the adaptations I sought out, it was crushing them.

Now, let’s look at the golf swing.

It’s fast, powerful, and very rarely takes place under super large amounts of physical fatigue.

Training for the golf swing means tapping into adaptations such as strength and power.

Both of these require us to complete our training sessions under fairly low levels of fatigue and here’s why…

Our muscles have various units within them that will all play a slightly different role in our movement.

There are some units (Type 1), responsible for “conditioning” movement such as long distance runs, bikes, and swims. These same units struggle to create movement at high velocities and forces, but they can be active for long periods of time which makes them good for conditioning-esqe movements… AS GOLFERS, WE DON’T WANT TO USE THESE.

We do however want to tap into the other units (Type 2), which are responsible for velocity and forceful movements (cough, cough… your golf swing). While these can’t be active for long periods of time because they tire quickly, they are responsible for powerful movements like your golf swing!

Point is this: When training, we need to make sure we aren’t consistently completing sets in an extremely fatigued or tired state. We need strength. We need power. And in order to tap into these we need to complete movements with maximal levels of intent… which we can’t do if we are consistently fatigued.

How Fatigue Affects Us on the Golf Course…

When we try to complete a highly skillful movement under fatigue, we become less powerful, we become less consistent, and our kinetic chain will often get out of whack. Meaning… we’ll be worse (and more likely to get injured).

And nobody wants that.

We need to work to eliminate fatigue on the golf course. Doing so doesn’t mean completing HIIT workouts and crossfit until we are about to puke. It means we should focus primarily on increasing our force and speed reserves.