Bear
07-12-2008, 02:51 PM
After a double stress fracture and torn ACL caused the world's best golfer to leave the sport indefinitely, some experts are questioning whether Woods's weight-training regimen has caused more harm than good
LORNE RUBENSTEIN
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Canada's National Newspaper
July 12, 2008
Twenty-six days have passed since Tiger Woods won the U.S. Open Championship in a playoff over Rocco Mediate while in obvious pain, and 19 days since he had surgery to repair a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee.
Larry Holt, a retired professor of kinesiology in the School of Health and Human Performance at Dalhousie University in Halifax, has been paying close attention to Woods's career. Holt's research and observations have lead him to a conclusion that he knows is hardly mainstream.
"His type of injuries were self-inflicted," Holt said in a recent interview, "and are not related to practising or playing golf, but through his non-specific training that has virtually no positive influence on how he plays the game."
Holt is the lead author of Scientific Stretching for Sport-3S and a new book called Flexibility: A Concise Guide to Conditioning, Performance Enhancement, Injury Prevention, and Rehabilitation. He has not worked with Woods, nor does he have any more knowledge of his injuries than what Woods has revealed publicly. Woods said shortly after winning the U.S. Open that he had suffered a double stress fracture in his left leg before the championship and that he had torn an ACL, the major stabilizing ligament in the knee, while running the week after the 2007 British Open.
Woods told CBS last weekend that he doesn't know when he will return to competition, let alone begin his rehabilitation. "I've been laid up pretty much every day, all day," he said, "moving from the bedroom to the couch and back to the bedroom and maybe a few bathroom stops along the way, but that's pretty much how my day goes."
In Holt's view, Woods put too much stress on his lower body over the years by lifting weights, adding muscle and therefore weight to his upper body. Holt said that Woods "placed his ectomorphic body [long and slender, like that of a marathon runner] through intense resistance training, bringing out the mesomorphic [muscular, "ripped" look by nature] component, adding muscle tissue, body weight that increased the forces on landing every time he ran. The stress fractures had nothing to do with golf, and neither did the knee problems."
Holt added: "Look how many golfers get stress fractures. Not many. It makes no sense. It's the running with the added weight on his upper body [that led to Woods's stress fractures]. He's a basically lean guy who has put on upper-body mass. It's like putting a 20-pound sack of sand on your upper body. When he runs, it stresses his lower body. His body and legs are designed for a guy 20, 25 pounds lighter.
"But Tiger feels he has to do these things to be a complete athlete. I think he's losing sight of his real goal, which is to be the greatest golfer. He thinks he has to be the greatest athlete."
Holt has consulted with the Calgary Flames and the defunct Minnesota North Stars and Quebec Nordiques, along with the Canadian Swimming Association. He is a past president of the International Society of Biomechanics in Sports. He wrote a book called An Experimenter's Guide to the Full Golf Swing. Holt is no fan of what he calls the "optimization" myth in sports, which suggests that athletes can improve by becoming stronger.
"You have to ask the question, 'What are the demands of a sport?' I'm not against non-specific training [such as heavy lifting], just against doing things that cause injury or predispose a person to them, without any evidence that the exercise program actually improves performance."
He added: "Doing intense muscle bulking exercise has not been shown to improve anyone's golf game and may contribute to injuries if the program is one of progressive resistance training, where more mass and more strength are expected to continuously develop."
Holt pointed out that, according to an article in the August of 2007 issue of Men's Fitness magazine, Woods weighed only 158 pounds when he won the 1997 Masters by 12 strokes. His weight fluctuates now between 182 and 185 pounds.
He questions whether Woods's bigger muscles have "added anything substantial to his game." Holt pointed out that Woods frequently misses fairways with the driver when he tries for extra distance. Holt doesn't pretend to be a swing coach, but he believes the speed with which Woods snaps his lower body to the left is an issue, because, according to him, Woods's natural ectomorphic frame can't support the movement.
"Golfers and other athletes often don't get the connection between their working out and their injuries," Holt said. "They sometimes set themselves up for injury on the course by working in the weight room."
Holt is aware that his ideas are controversial. The fundamental question is: Are his ideas valid? Can intense strength training harm even a golfer as strong as Woods? Might it have contributed to Woods's injuries?
Holt referred to golf as a "sedate" game, except for the desire many players have to maximize clubhead speed, and said "the idea that you have to be in great shape to play great golf is ridiculous. Tiger just duelled it out with an overweight, mid-40s guy [Mediate] who couldn't pass a fitness test. People just won't see what is plainly in front of their eyes."
It's clear that Woods's trainer, Keith Kleven, believes his client's program is not the culprit in his injuries. Kleven could not be reached yesterday at his institute in Las Vegas. However, he told the Men's Journal that Woods's training program aims for "balance, control, endurance and speed," and that it includes extensive stretching, manipulation and mobilization of his muscles and joints, involving "everything from his cervical spine to his toes."
Marvin Tile, the past chief of orthopedic surgery at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto and professor emeritus of surgery at the University of Toronto, responded to Holt's views this week. He said what happened to Woods is "a difficult read" because, for one thing, "You're dealing with the most famous athlete in the world and you're only going to know what he tells you." He, like other orthopedic specialists, is baffled by Woods's stress fractures and also by the manner in which he tore his ACL.
"I'm not sure how he tore his ACL running," Tile said. "That's unusual for an athlete in good shape. The main way an ACL tears is by hyperextension, as in skiing. But the knee is mostly flexed in running. There are a lot of unknowns with what's going on here."
With those caveats, Tile addressed Holt's views.
"I don't agree with what he says about the cause of Tiger's injuries," Tile said. "I think it's a stretch to say his upper-body weight caused the stress on his knee. But I do agree with him that knee injuries aren't common in golf, and that you don't have to be in great shape for golf. But I don't think it's a straight line from there to Tiger."
Chris Broadhurst, the head athletic therapist at the Toronto Athletic Club and most recently the head athletic therapist for the Phoenix Coyotes, also doesn't think Woods's upper-body workouts have caused his injuries.
"I don't think it would be fair to Tiger to say that any imbalance was created through his training," Broadhurst said. "Golfers do have to be leery of muscle imbalances, though. Are you tightening in a way that would put stress on your joints? Are you putting too much stress on your hips? Tiger's profile has been pretty good up to this knee incident."
Jeff Handler, who holds a degree in exercise science and has been Mike Weir's trainer since 2005, also weighed in.
"I don't agree with any of this," Handler said of Holt's views. "There isn't one athlete in pro sports, in hockey, basketball, baseball or golf who isn't trying to get stronger. Are Tiger's injuries a result of golf? No. Are they a result of his conditioning? No. A change in his physique? No."
Handler also doesn't agree with Holt's central premise that Woods's increased upper-body weight led to his knee and leg injuries. "Keith [Kleven] understands as well as anybody that if you add weight through increased muscle mass to the upper body that you have to balance it with lower-body work," Handler said. "Tiger's glutes and quads and hamstrings are much stronger than they were. Keith is one of the best in the business. There's no way he would allow Tiger to put on 20 pounds of upper-body mass without lower-body improvement. We all do foundation-based exercises that aren't golf-specific."
Holt, however, argued: "That is exactly the problem. Just about every trainer sets up a program that maximizes all parts of the body and all systems. In their view, a balance is maintained because intense exercises for all the gross musculature have been prescribed and followed. There's no consideration of the interactive effects of these programs. Increasing one dimension might negatively impact another, which might end up decreasing performance in the specific sport."
In this contentious arena, it's impossible yet to come up with a reasonable conclusion. There aren't any randomized, double-blind studies about the effect of intense training on performance.
"You can't take half of the Boston Red Sox and put them on a training program and leave the other half out," Tile said. "But my feeling is that if you did, there would be no difference in the groups. In golf, pot-bellied guys also shoot subpar."
Woods will surely continue to work out hard once he's ready to resume training, although he may well modify his program. That's his nature. He decided long ago to treat golf as a sport. "I let other people treat it like a hobby," he told the Men's Journal. "It would be asinine for someone not to work out and go play football. It doesn't make sense for golf, either."
Holt remains unconvinced. For him, intense resistance training for golf not only doesn't make sense. For him, it's nonsense.
I found this article to be very interesting. And do you think Tiger could be using PED's?:eek:
LORNE RUBENSTEIN
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Canada's National Newspaper
July 12, 2008
Twenty-six days have passed since Tiger Woods won the U.S. Open Championship in a playoff over Rocco Mediate while in obvious pain, and 19 days since he had surgery to repair a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee.
Larry Holt, a retired professor of kinesiology in the School of Health and Human Performance at Dalhousie University in Halifax, has been paying close attention to Woods's career. Holt's research and observations have lead him to a conclusion that he knows is hardly mainstream.
"His type of injuries were self-inflicted," Holt said in a recent interview, "and are not related to practising or playing golf, but through his non-specific training that has virtually no positive influence on how he plays the game."
Holt is the lead author of Scientific Stretching for Sport-3S and a new book called Flexibility: A Concise Guide to Conditioning, Performance Enhancement, Injury Prevention, and Rehabilitation. He has not worked with Woods, nor does he have any more knowledge of his injuries than what Woods has revealed publicly. Woods said shortly after winning the U.S. Open that he had suffered a double stress fracture in his left leg before the championship and that he had torn an ACL, the major stabilizing ligament in the knee, while running the week after the 2007 British Open.
Woods told CBS last weekend that he doesn't know when he will return to competition, let alone begin his rehabilitation. "I've been laid up pretty much every day, all day," he said, "moving from the bedroom to the couch and back to the bedroom and maybe a few bathroom stops along the way, but that's pretty much how my day goes."
In Holt's view, Woods put too much stress on his lower body over the years by lifting weights, adding muscle and therefore weight to his upper body. Holt said that Woods "placed his ectomorphic body [long and slender, like that of a marathon runner] through intense resistance training, bringing out the mesomorphic [muscular, "ripped" look by nature] component, adding muscle tissue, body weight that increased the forces on landing every time he ran. The stress fractures had nothing to do with golf, and neither did the knee problems."
Holt added: "Look how many golfers get stress fractures. Not many. It makes no sense. It's the running with the added weight on his upper body [that led to Woods's stress fractures]. He's a basically lean guy who has put on upper-body mass. It's like putting a 20-pound sack of sand on your upper body. When he runs, it stresses his lower body. His body and legs are designed for a guy 20, 25 pounds lighter.
"But Tiger feels he has to do these things to be a complete athlete. I think he's losing sight of his real goal, which is to be the greatest golfer. He thinks he has to be the greatest athlete."
Holt has consulted with the Calgary Flames and the defunct Minnesota North Stars and Quebec Nordiques, along with the Canadian Swimming Association. He is a past president of the International Society of Biomechanics in Sports. He wrote a book called An Experimenter's Guide to the Full Golf Swing. Holt is no fan of what he calls the "optimization" myth in sports, which suggests that athletes can improve by becoming stronger.
"You have to ask the question, 'What are the demands of a sport?' I'm not against non-specific training [such as heavy lifting], just against doing things that cause injury or predispose a person to them, without any evidence that the exercise program actually improves performance."
He added: "Doing intense muscle bulking exercise has not been shown to improve anyone's golf game and may contribute to injuries if the program is one of progressive resistance training, where more mass and more strength are expected to continuously develop."
Holt pointed out that, according to an article in the August of 2007 issue of Men's Fitness magazine, Woods weighed only 158 pounds when he won the 1997 Masters by 12 strokes. His weight fluctuates now between 182 and 185 pounds.
He questions whether Woods's bigger muscles have "added anything substantial to his game." Holt pointed out that Woods frequently misses fairways with the driver when he tries for extra distance. Holt doesn't pretend to be a swing coach, but he believes the speed with which Woods snaps his lower body to the left is an issue, because, according to him, Woods's natural ectomorphic frame can't support the movement.
"Golfers and other athletes often don't get the connection between their working out and their injuries," Holt said. "They sometimes set themselves up for injury on the course by working in the weight room."
Holt is aware that his ideas are controversial. The fundamental question is: Are his ideas valid? Can intense strength training harm even a golfer as strong as Woods? Might it have contributed to Woods's injuries?
Holt referred to golf as a "sedate" game, except for the desire many players have to maximize clubhead speed, and said "the idea that you have to be in great shape to play great golf is ridiculous. Tiger just duelled it out with an overweight, mid-40s guy [Mediate] who couldn't pass a fitness test. People just won't see what is plainly in front of their eyes."
It's clear that Woods's trainer, Keith Kleven, believes his client's program is not the culprit in his injuries. Kleven could not be reached yesterday at his institute in Las Vegas. However, he told the Men's Journal that Woods's training program aims for "balance, control, endurance and speed," and that it includes extensive stretching, manipulation and mobilization of his muscles and joints, involving "everything from his cervical spine to his toes."
Marvin Tile, the past chief of orthopedic surgery at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto and professor emeritus of surgery at the University of Toronto, responded to Holt's views this week. He said what happened to Woods is "a difficult read" because, for one thing, "You're dealing with the most famous athlete in the world and you're only going to know what he tells you." He, like other orthopedic specialists, is baffled by Woods's stress fractures and also by the manner in which he tore his ACL.
"I'm not sure how he tore his ACL running," Tile said. "That's unusual for an athlete in good shape. The main way an ACL tears is by hyperextension, as in skiing. But the knee is mostly flexed in running. There are a lot of unknowns with what's going on here."
With those caveats, Tile addressed Holt's views.
"I don't agree with what he says about the cause of Tiger's injuries," Tile said. "I think it's a stretch to say his upper-body weight caused the stress on his knee. But I do agree with him that knee injuries aren't common in golf, and that you don't have to be in great shape for golf. But I don't think it's a straight line from there to Tiger."
Chris Broadhurst, the head athletic therapist at the Toronto Athletic Club and most recently the head athletic therapist for the Phoenix Coyotes, also doesn't think Woods's upper-body workouts have caused his injuries.
"I don't think it would be fair to Tiger to say that any imbalance was created through his training," Broadhurst said. "Golfers do have to be leery of muscle imbalances, though. Are you tightening in a way that would put stress on your joints? Are you putting too much stress on your hips? Tiger's profile has been pretty good up to this knee incident."
Jeff Handler, who holds a degree in exercise science and has been Mike Weir's trainer since 2005, also weighed in.
"I don't agree with any of this," Handler said of Holt's views. "There isn't one athlete in pro sports, in hockey, basketball, baseball or golf who isn't trying to get stronger. Are Tiger's injuries a result of golf? No. Are they a result of his conditioning? No. A change in his physique? No."
Handler also doesn't agree with Holt's central premise that Woods's increased upper-body weight led to his knee and leg injuries. "Keith [Kleven] understands as well as anybody that if you add weight through increased muscle mass to the upper body that you have to balance it with lower-body work," Handler said. "Tiger's glutes and quads and hamstrings are much stronger than they were. Keith is one of the best in the business. There's no way he would allow Tiger to put on 20 pounds of upper-body mass without lower-body improvement. We all do foundation-based exercises that aren't golf-specific."
Holt, however, argued: "That is exactly the problem. Just about every trainer sets up a program that maximizes all parts of the body and all systems. In their view, a balance is maintained because intense exercises for all the gross musculature have been prescribed and followed. There's no consideration of the interactive effects of these programs. Increasing one dimension might negatively impact another, which might end up decreasing performance in the specific sport."
In this contentious arena, it's impossible yet to come up with a reasonable conclusion. There aren't any randomized, double-blind studies about the effect of intense training on performance.
"You can't take half of the Boston Red Sox and put them on a training program and leave the other half out," Tile said. "But my feeling is that if you did, there would be no difference in the groups. In golf, pot-bellied guys also shoot subpar."
Woods will surely continue to work out hard once he's ready to resume training, although he may well modify his program. That's his nature. He decided long ago to treat golf as a sport. "I let other people treat it like a hobby," he told the Men's Journal. "It would be asinine for someone not to work out and go play football. It doesn't make sense for golf, either."
Holt remains unconvinced. For him, intense resistance training for golf not only doesn't make sense. For him, it's nonsense.
I found this article to be very interesting. And do you think Tiger could be using PED's?:eek: