Resistance Training: The Overlooked Health Guideline

Ask most golfers about their fitness, and they'll tell you about their cardio how many steps they got in, whether they've been for a run, and how their walking pace is coming along. Ask them about strength training and the conversation usually goes quiet. It's the part of fitness that gets nodded at and then quietly ignored.

What the guidelines actually say:

The 2026 UK Chief Medical Officers' physical activity guidelines are pretty clear on this. Adults should be doing muscle-strengthening activity on at least two days a week. If you're over 65, the advice goes a bit further and adds in work on balance and flexibility too. It's not a complicated message. But it's one that rarely gets the same airtime as "move more" or "get your heart rate up." Most people can tell you roughly how much cardio they should be doing. Far fewer could tell you the same about strength work even though it's sitting right there in the same set of guidelines.

Why it actually matters:

This isn't just about building muscle for the sake of it. Strength training does a lot of quiet, unglamorous work in the background of your health. It helps:

• Maintain muscle mass and strength as you get older.
• Keep your bones strong and reduce fracture risk.
• Improve balance and everyday physical function.
• Support healthy blood sugar regulation.
• Make ordinary daily tasks easier.
• Slow down the physical decline that comes with age.

And none of that requires a barbell, a squat rack, or a gym membership you'll feel guilty about not using. Bodyweight exercises, resistance bands, a couple of dumbbells all of it works, as long as the muscles are genuinely being challenged and that challenge builds over time. A lot of golfers get better, more consistent results from a simple home exercise setup than they ever did at a gym they visited only twice a month.

Why golfers specifically should care:

For golfers, strength training pulls double duty. On top of everything above, it's what actually builds:

• Rotational power and clubhead speed.
• Better control and stability through the swing.
• The kind of fitness levels that let you play and practise week after week without your body wearing down.
• The physical resilience to handle a full season, not just one good round.

This is really the whole idea behind a proper golf fitness program. It was never about chasing one impressive lift in the gym. It's about building strength, mobility, and control that carry over onto the course and stay with you round after round. Strength work on its own isn't the full picture either pairing it with mobility exercises and some of the best stretches for golf keeps the joints and soft tissue moving the way a golf swing actually asks them to. A solid golf mobility workout alongside your strength sessions does more for a golfer's body over a season than either one does by itself.

The gap between knowing and doing:

Here's the honest bit. Almost everyone reading this already knows resistance training is worth doing. Knowing that has never been the problem. The problem is life, work, family, travel, golf itself all pulling at the same couple of hours a week that strength training needs. It's easy to plan a session on Sunday night and just as easy to let it disappear by Wednesday. This is really where a Golf Fitness Trainer, or a virtual personal trainer, earns its keep. Not by handing you more information you've got enough of that already, but by giving you structure, reminders, and a bit of accountability around what you already know you should be doing. That's the thinking behind Smart Golf's email reminders. They prompt you when a session is due, so training gets planned into your week instead of squeezed in if there's time. Then the Smart Golf leaderboards does the rest it makes your consistency visible instead of something only you know about:

• Birdie (–1): completed on the scheduled day.
• Par (0): completed late, but before your next session.
• Bogey (+1): session missed.

If you've got three sessions planned for the week, your target is –3. Simple as that. The leaderboards isn't there to make you feel bad about a missed session. It's there to give you something a to-do list can't: quick feedback, a bit of accountability, and a target that makes sense the moment you glance at it. There's decent evidence behind this too: well-designed gamification and social incentives genuinely do help people stick with physical activity. It's the same reason a scorecard keeps you more engaged on the course than simply "trying to play well."

Two days a week, done consistently:

The guideline itself is simple: two resistance training sessions a week, minimum. The hard part was never understanding that. It's doing it, week after week, when everything else in life is competing for the same time. That's the gap Smart Golf is built to close: a golf fitness program with the reminders and tracking built in, so strength training stays visible instead of becoming the thing you meant to get to. From Recovery to Peak Performance, Choose Smart Golf. Log In & Start Your 14-Day Free Trial Today. Lindsay Smart Chartered Sports Physiotherapist DP World Tour Physiotherapist | Founder, Smart Golf