Early this year, THE GYM of Montvale began offering a new program for recreational golfers. The program includes a series of workshops and individualized golf training sessions conducted by Pete Kandel, a Titleist Performance Institute (TPI) certified expert and golf fitness instructor.
According to Kandel, THE GYM of Montvale has a robust number of members that play golf recreationally, so offering a program like this made sense. “At our gym, the crowd we have are affluent and they’re not young,” he said. “If we can prolong their game and keep them injury free, they’ll play longer, and you enjoy the game more when you play it well.”
The Titleist Performance Institute is a leading educational organization dedicated to the study of how the human body functions in relation to the golf swing. Kandel explained the program is extremely reputable, with the goal of improving golfer’s physical performance by producing a more efficient, repeatable and powerful swing, while reducing the chance of injury.
According to Kandel, golf and physical fitness go hand in hand. “Tiger Woods came onto the scene in 1986 and proved to everybody that fitness will definitely make you a better golfer,” he said. “He came in and changed the way golf is looked at from a fitness aspect.”
Kandel explained the program features two focused approaches for improvement, the first of which is a body screening, which uses video to identify personal body swing characteristics and their cause-and-effect on the golf swing. The assessment data is used to design a customized individual plan to improve the golfer’s swing.
The other element is a series of Body Swing Connection Workshops, which focus on common body swing disconnections and their corrective exercises.
Through the program, THE GYM Montvale hopes to offer support to athletes as they age and to help them continue to thoroughly enjoy the sport they love.
“As we age, the recreational golfer doesn’t have a team of pros watching every swing and trying to go through why he’s swinging, why he’s not as good,” said Kandel. “Everybody’s always looking to get better, it’s a very challenging sport, and we just have to take each person as an individual, because each person has a different demeanor, a different physical capability, and that’s what we address.”
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Rachel Zabonick-Chonko is the editor-in-chief of Club Solutions Magazine. She can be reached at rachel@peakemedia.com.
