What does fitness have to do with golf? Best-selling author and performance expert KC Craichy explains with the help of the co-founders of the Titleist Performance Institute.
Audio Transcription
KC: Welcome to Living Fuel TV. I’m KC Craichy. What in the world does fitness have to do with golf? Today I have a special guest, Dr. Greg Rose and Dave Phillips co-founders of Titleist Performance Institute known as TPI. Guys, what in the world does fitness have to do with golf?
Dr. Rose: You know what, we get asked that all the time as our golfers athletes and it’s amazing if you were to look at the spectrum of sports out there golf, I think, would not be on the top list of people’s list of who are the best athletes but if you think about it now, golf has changed a lot radically, a lot in the last 15 years and now if you can’t hit the ball, Dave, with 190-an-hour ball speed you got a disadvantage. And let me tell you something KC, to get a 190-mile-an-hour ball speed, which by the way is the fastest moving ball in sports, you need explosive power. So, we’ve got huge athletes in the game now.
KC: Explosive, power and precision.
Dr. Rose: Yeah, putting the two together even harder.
KC: So, now you’re going on eight years or ten years actually.
Dr. Rose: TPI is going on it’s tenth year here coming up pretty soon. Same as Living Fuel.
KC: Yeah, that’s incredible. So, how is that TPI got started and how’s it been received in the golf world?
Dave: Well, it got started back in 2002, we kind of got together and actually before that, started working on the concepts of looking at the body and how it related to golf swings. As a golf professional myself, it was one of those things where you knew the body was important but you really didn’t know what to do with it. We knew we had one and then when I met Greg, Greg was really the first person that was physically assessing players and telling me what they were capable of doing. That made so much sense as a golf professional cause I was dealing with players where I’d be working on their golf swings and I was telling them what I wanted them to do but they couldn’t do it. So, I would just try something else. And so when I started realizing that by looking at the body and relating it to what they can do, now I can build a golf swing around what their capable of doing. So, that’s when this whole fitness and the body started to come together. That’s when we presented kind of our concept to Titleist. As a company they’ve been extremely supportive in helping us develop this and in 2004 they gave us the opportunity to move here to San Diego and build the Titleist Performance Institute.
KC: People are coming here from all around the world.
Dr. Rose: KC, we get to take care of the health, fitness and nutrition of all of our players and we got players in virtually over 40 countries and it’s amazing, almost 8,000 players use Titleist products competitively around the world so we’re pretty busy and that’s why we started our advisory board. That’s where we met you because nutrition’s a huge piece to golf, huge piece for performance.
KC: You got to be able to think clearly. You got to be able to have energy. You can’t have crashes and so on and so forth.
Dr. Rose: We got all the blood sugar problems that go on for playing for four or five hours, even six hour rounds sometimes, so we got our blood sugar problems. We got all the chemicals, pesticides. It always makes you laugh, the guys that take care of the golf courses and they do a great job of doing this but they wear those white suites and they spray the greens, and Dave knows this, as soon as they roll off the green they go OK it’s safe, come on. And why are you wearing a suit? So, obviously there’s all the chemicals that create all the antioxidant needs that we need for our golfers and then like you said, mental clarity, mental focus. One of the first things that goes down, starts raising your scores and just, hey, how about our guys are athletes now too, so fueling their engine to make them hit the ball better.
KC: Fantastic. So your chiropractic background, you knew movement, you know how the body worked, you took that and golf and you put it together and trial and error to come up with a system that’s really obviously working for a whole lot of people now.
Dr. Rose: It is and it’s pretty simple. Basically all we do is we take each player through a screen, we assess what their body can do. Once we know what their body can do we get an idea of what’s the best way for them to swing and what’s the best way for them to work out and then we look at all the other factors that help them become better athletes and nutrition is obviously a big piece.
KC: And so you’re actually helping their golf game but you’re also extending their life. So, you’re doing great work there guys.
Dr. Rose: I’ll say one little funny thing about golfers. If you tell a golfer, hey, if you eat better you’re going to live longer they won’t do it. If you tell them, hey, if you eat better you can hit the ball farther and play better, they’ll do it and then health is a byproduct which is always a great thing.
KC: I’m going to start telling you guys exactly that. Well guys, thank you so much. It was awesome having you. God bless you and have a great day.
