Fix Your Body, Fix Your Swing: The Revolutionary Biomechanics Workout Program Used by Tour Pros

Advance Praise for Fix Your Body, Fix Your Swing : “I've witnessed first-hand the way Joey works with his players. His workouts are practical, relevant, simple, and entirely golf-specific. This book perfectly captures his passion for---and knowledge of---golf fitness.” ---Zach Johnson, 2007 Masters Champion “Golf fitness has had a huge impact on professional golf over the past ten years. This book will let you in on our plan to play better and have a longer career. Get to work.” ---Davis Love III, 1997 PGA Champion and one of the all-time money leaders on the PGA Tour “The science of golf has evolved so much. Joey's twenty-first century approach to the sport will allow any player---at any level---to improve his or her game.” ---Jim Nantz “Joey keeps his players fresh in mind and in body---and the fitter you are, the better you’ll feel, and the lower your scores will be.” ---Ian Poulter, 2004 and 2008 European Ryder Cup Member Joey Diovisalvi is the head strength, conditioning, and biomechanics coach at the PGA Tour Academy at TPC Sawgrass. He has been on the PGA Tour for over ten years and has worked with dozens of pro players, including Vijay Singh, Ryuji Imada, Pat Perez, and Chris DiMarco. He worked with Vijay Singh for seven years, helping him to become the number one golfer in the world. He lives in Jupiter, Florida. Steve Steinberg is a fitness writer and a contributing editor at Men’s Journal magazine. His work has appeared in GQ, Best Life, and Smart Business magazines. He’s also a certified personal trainer and the owner of Black Belt Fitness Personal Training in Waltham, Massachusetts. This is his second book. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. FIX YOUR BODY, FIX YOUR SWING 1 Who Is Joey D.? or ... Why Are You Reading This Book? J oey D.," Vijay Singh said with a giant smile on his face. "You sounded taller over the phone."The first time I met Vijay Singh, he insulted me. I instantly liked him.This was back in 2001. He'd heard some good things about me and thought maybe something about this unorthodox golf coach with some unorthodox training methods could help him take his game to the next level. Vijay and I worked together for a few months, and in March 2002 he notched his first tour victory in almost two years by winning the Shell Houston Open by a comfortable six strokes.He invited me to fly back to Ponte Vedra, Florida, with him on his plane."What would it take to get you to work with me exclusively?" he asked me. Before I could even start to consider the offer, he added, "I know I can be the best player in the world."In 2002, everyone just assumed that Tiger Woods was invincible and would be number one in the world for as long as the sport of golf interested him. Vijay Singh was a PGA Tour Rookie of the Year in 1993, but had managed just a single tour win since 2000. Here he was, though, telling me that he thought he could be number one. Most people would have laughed at his prediction, but I knew how hard a worker he was. In the time I had been with him, he'd just about kill himself whenever we worked out. I respected his work ethic immensely, but I also knew that trying to overtake Tiger would be going up against some stiff odds. I knew something about facing insurmountable odds, though.I sold my training facility in south Florida and moved north to Ponte Vedra.In September 2004, Vijay outshot Tiger Woods and Adam Scott by three strokes to win the Deutsche Bank Championship in Norton, Massachusetts. As a result, he leapfrogged over Tiger and into the number one spot in the world. Thanks to hard work and a team of dedicated and knowledgeable professionals, Vijay had made good on his prediction. In April 2005, when he was elected into the World Golf Hall of Fame, Vijay thanked several people in his acceptance speech. I was one of them. I sometimes wonder what it was that made me uproot my life to go work with him, and I always come back to what he said to me on that flight from Texas: "I know I can be the best player in the world."Something about his confidence and determination reminded me of someone. NEW JERSEY As a kid, I would never accept anything but 100 percent of myself. I played football in junior leagues and developmental leagues, and I recognized early on that I was stronger and faster than the other kids. Physically, I was pretty lucky in my genetics. But mentally, I just approached the game differently from my friends. The way I thought about things was completely different from anybody else's. I'd see things that no one else saw. I recognized I was a leader because I had no fear of anything at all. That could have been a good thing or a bad thing, but it made me relentless in just about anything I did.I never wanted anyone to drive me to football practice, for example. I wanted to ride my bike to practice because, I used to think, if I rode my bike, I would already be ahead of the curve when I got there. And if we didn't win a game, I would come completely unglued. Everybody would leave to do whatever they did after a game, and I would just stay there doing drills and running for hours. I grew up in Manalapan, New Jersey--a typical suburb in Monmouth County. In the late summer, I knew that football season was right around the corner, and I would run up and down the hills. It'd be light out when I started, and eventually the sun would go down and it would be dark and I'd still be running. It'd be nine at night and I'd still be out there. I used to tell myself, "I need to be faster. I need to be in better shape than anybody else when I get to the first day of practice."When the season started, I was always in the best shape I could possibly be in. Couple this with my natural skills, and I was a monster on the field. They'd put me on the bench after the first half because I was destroying people. Opposing coaches constantly questioned my age, saying I had to have been much older than I said I was.I'm not sure where this extreme work ethic came from. I come from an average middle-class family. Everybody worked and everyone had this dream and vision to better himself. You were taught from the beginning that hard work was the key to success--on the field, in the classroom, everywhere. My dad was demanding about grades. If I wasn't on the honor roll, I couldn't play any sports. It drove me to understand the importance of education. And since I was so driven about getting in the best shape I could be in, it was natural for me to start learning as much as I could about how the body worked.From a young age, I started studying what I could do to make myself a better athlete. I knew it was more than just pure strength--more than just how much I could bench-press or how much I could squat. Being an athlete was about knowing how to use that strength in motion. The strongest guy on the field is just the strongest guy on the field unless he knows how to use that strength in the particular sport that he's playing. By then, I had branched out from just playing football. I had started wrestling and began studying martial arts. I was continually amazed at how these lighter-weight-class wrestlers and my martial arts instructors--at maybe 130 pounds--could do these incredible things with their bodies. They generated the same amount of strength and power and explosiveness as much bigger guys. I started to become obsessed with figuring out where this ability came from. How could these small individuals have this power and transfer it through movement and have such amazing results? In my head, I began to think about how these movements and movement patterns could be applied to other sports with similar results. That's when I started to really understand movement strength.Unfortunately, both my research and my football career were about to be put on hold. SETBACKS Two months before my eighteenth birthday, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. A biopsy later revealed that the cancer had spread and had developed into lymphatic cancer. Despite all the work I had put into my training and into my body, I had a terminal disease. I saw a ton of doctors and surgeons, and at the end of most of these visits, someone in a white coat with a serious expression on his or her face would ask me what I'd like to do with the next--and final--ten months of my life. All of a sudden, at eighteen years old, everything I had ever dreamed about was gone. It was surreal. All of these specialists were telling me that I was going to die, but I still felt great. I felt as if I could run through walls.I approached my sickness the way I'd approached just about everything else up to that point in my life. Because of who I was, I wasn't simply going to lie down. I couldn't. It just wasn't part of my makeup. Eventually, I found a doctor who was willing to take a chance on surgery. He told me about an invasive and difficult procedure. He said he was willing to try it because he was convinced I was strong enough to handle it. I thought back to the long and painful hours I'd spent in the gym and running those hills. All that time I thought I had been training for football.Then the real game began. I went into the hospital and they did all of these extensive tests and scheduled me for major surgery. They told me that the procedure would take a certain number of hours, but when they went in, they found a lot more problems than they expected. I was fighting for my life. I made it through the surgery, but no one was sure if they got all of the cancer or if it had spread somewhere else.Chemotherapy treatments started and the months started to go by. At the time, chemo wasn't outpatient for most people. I had to be in the hospital seven or ten days at a time. Over a year and a half, I went from a ferocious 218-pound teenager that was going to take the football world apart to an emaciated 140-pound kid. On top of the weight loss, the chemo affected all of my senses. I lost all of my senses. I had no sense of taste. I had no sense of feeling. I had no strength. I was sick constantly. It was a nightmare. But I survived.Call it destiny, the work of God, whatever. I don't want to get caught up in all of that. My personal belief is that it wasn't really my time to go. With a clean bill of health, I now had to rebuild what was left of my body. I spent the next eighteen months strengthening and reteaching my muscles how to do the things that they used to do so effortlessly and naturally. My body bounced back. (If you're a collector of old muscle magazines, which would immediately make me very suspect of you, check out the August 1991 issue of Robert Kennedy's Muscle Mag International . It has a feature on me and my illness, recovery, and subsequent success as a trainer.) At age twenty-two, I had fought back and conquered a terminal illness. My dream of playing college or pro football, though, was gone. SOUTH FLORIDA In the mideighties, I moved down to West Palm Beach. I figured that if I had built--and then rebuilt--my body using principles I'd developed, it was time to see how these theories worked on other people. I'd helped out people in the gym all of my life, but Florida would give me access to a different breed of client--the pro athlete. A lot of NBA and NFL guys spend their off-seasonsdown there, and with around half of the Major League Baseball teams doing their spring training in the surrounding areas, it just seemed like the place to be. The challenge was getting the first few athletes to understand and believe in what I was ... Read more