Today’s topic is the concept of the Stretch-Shortening Cycle. This process happens when the muscles fire to stretch and through contraction. This allows for explosive power. The muscles use their elasticity and build energy as they fire to stretch and into the powerful contraction. This quick fire reaction is what leads into bursting power. It has to be quick. You can not use the power of this cycle if your motions are to slow or positions are held. Let’s take a look!
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Golf Pros Featured:
Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard
Video Duration: 3:15
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Hi guys, and welcome back. Hope your instruction is going fantastic. In this video we’re going to talk about a concept that really plays into every aspect of the swing when we’re talking about getting speed and getting power.
It’s called the stretch-shortening cycle. All this means is when you have your muscle fibers, they’re kind of interlocked like this. As you stretch these muscle fibers, they’re going to build their potential to be able to fire even a little bit harder.
So as you stretch out a muscle, it should be stretched and as soon as it gets as fully stretched as much as you’re going to stretch it, then it immediately needs to fire. We can never really hold anything in the golf swing.
Let me give you a couple reasons, a couple examples of how this plays in the golf swing, and how this is going to help you to get more distance. A lot of your players have the wrong idea when it comes to lag, for example.
Let’s imagine that I’m setting up this shot, they think I’m going to set the wrist early, hold on to lag, hold it all the way through, get forward shaft lean coming through the shot, and I’m just going to hold it the entire time.
Not how it works, we know that’s not how it works, but if you want to relay to them how from a biomechanics standpoint why that’s disadvantageous, you don’t want to do that, is when I’m going back I want to have very little wrist set.
As I’m starting down, I’m going tom ax out my wrist set. My forearms are fully stretched, the bottom of my forearms are, and then as I’m coming through the shot, I’m going to immediately start to fire those to get to the straight line release.
So what I’m doing is I’m stretching the muscle, and then immediately firing the muscle to get speed to the shot. Now if I hold on to that, what I’m doing is I’m stretching, holding, and then I don’t have the power.
A good example, probably one you’ve heard before if you’re familiar with the stretch-shortening cycle, is if I’m going to jump up and grab a rebound in basketball, I’m not going to stretch my legs, stay down her for five minutes, and then jump back up because I’ve lost that reflex kind of thing.
I’ve lost that extra elasticity, that extra speed and power that’s built up in the muscle. I want to go ahead and come down as soon as my legs are fully stretched, then I’m going to immediately jump back up. You can put that to the test.
Go ahead and squat down to the bottom of your jump, hold it there for about five seconds, and then try to jump up, or even two seconds and try to jump back up. I guarantee you’ll jump shorter than if you go down and then right back up, because your muscles are going to be able to fire a little bit faster.
One more example of how this works in the swing. In my downswing, I’m going to be flexing my legs, the muscles in my legs, and then immediately going to fire those.
So as I start my downswing, my legs are going to start to bend into the ground and then as I come through the shot and into my straight line release, I’m pushing into the ground to get the butt end of this club to whip up.
So I don’t want to start with my legs already bent, stay there, and then come down, and then try to push up. Wouldn’t make much sense, I’ve got to have my legs nice and tall, relaxed, and then as I start down I’m flexing them and then immediately releasing those to be able to get the muscles of the legs to work more powerfully.
So that’s the stretch-shortening cycle. Those are two examples. There’s probably hundreds of examples of how you could use this in the golf swing, on basically every muscle that’s working to get more speed and to get more power.
But that’s the introduction to it, you can apply this to a lot of different things. Hope you guys are doing great, and I’ll see you all soon.
