Published On: January 25, 2025Categories: Programming

Written by Cole Hergott

A few years ago my Athletic Director strolled into Sparta (the nickname we use for our weight room), and approached me about an opportunity, “Hey Cole, how would you feel about working with a new breed of athlete in Sparta?” I was confused by his question and figured he was going to tell me that one of our former athletes had a baby or something like that. He then followed that question up with “We are getting a disc golf team!” 

“Sweet!” I thought. 

“Wait, what is disc golf?” 

I’ve heard of it through some of our volleyball players playing it in the summer and I’ve gone on walks with my wife’s family that were around a disc golf course here in Langley (BC), but I had never actually seen it played. So I knew that if I was going to be training these athletes, I needed to do some homework.

But, where to begin?

Well, I started with the NSCA Journal. I went into the archives and searched for the keywords “disc golf”. Nothing.   So I headed to some blogs I frequent to search their archives (T-Nation, TeamBuildr, TrainHeroic, Simplifaster, etc). Nothing.  I headed to some forums I’m a part of to see if any coaches there had worked with disc golf. One worked with ultimate frisbee, but no disc golf.  Now what? Well, it was time to use my critical thinking skills and go back to the basics taught in every coaching class or sport science degree, do a needs analysis of the sport.

With nothing else to go on for help, I headed to YouTube and watched MANY videos on throwing form, tournament rules, as well as exercises from coaches or physios working with disc golfers.

That was good enough to get me started (I thought) and I worked out a plan for this group of athletes I had never seen before. To my surprise (and luckily for me) we only had a small group of athletes in the first year. Four to be exact. With a small group, it was very easy to connect with each of them, see what they wanted to improve, and work on individual tweaks to the program. As 3 out of the 4 had never really done any structured strength training, we stuck with the basics. We did goblet squats, push-ups, chin-ups, some single leg work, hinging, and some core & arm training. See an example of one of my first programs below (Figure 1). 

Figure 1. Initial disc golf program.

 

Low and behold their elbow and shoulder pain (most common concerns in disc golf) started to disappear and their throws started to travel further. This was an exciting start!  The following season we had a bigger team (6 athletes) and the ones I trained the year before now had a year of consistent training under their belts. In that year, aside from even more YouTube videos, I also played a couple rounds myself to understand the throwing mechanics and energy demands of the sport, along with PEPPERING the athletes with questions each time they came into Sparta. There is always more to learn (as I am still finding out…).

The group’s progress continued. We started to place better at the Collegiate Disc Golf Nationals and we attracted even more athletes to join us. That leads us up to this past summer. Our team had grown to 9 (5 men, 4 women) and a majority of them had been training with me for over 2 years. They had crushed and outgrown the basics of goblet squats, basic bodyweight push-ups, and bodyweight chin-ups. Some were able to front squat 2 plates (225lbs) and benching close to that as well. Elbow pain was starting to creep back in as the loads in the weightroom grew and their throwing volume did as well (See Figure 2 for a program sample from the recent season).

Figure 2. Sample of golf disc program during the most recent season.

 

I knew I needed to level up my game and continue to enhance the programs I was giving our gang. I reached out to a few coaches on social media who were putting out content for disc golfers and had some really good conversations through that endeavour. After that, I started adding in more baseball-like arm care work and educating our gang on the importance of warming up before going for a round on the course, as previously they would simply start thorwing as hard as they could without any preparation. 

Through my learning, I discovered that disc golf is a very unique sport that takes movements from a variety of common sports and places them all in one. 

  • A backhand throw is similar to a slap shot in hockey in terms of the full-body rotational demands (different from throwing a normal frisbee). 
  • A forehand throw is similar to a baseball pitch/throw, more specifically a sidearm throw.
  • The energy demands are very similar to regular golf in terms of one high powered (but very precise and technical) action, then you walk and wait for others.

So what you get with disc golf is a very unique sport, one with athletes who usually have a very low training age and are willing to do anything to get rid of their elbow pain so they can continue to throw the bombs on the weekends. 

Now I know pretty much none of you reading this are working with disc golfers, but I wanted to share this experience so you could learn a few things:

  1. If you are looking to be a “niche” coach, disc golf is a very underserviced group. There are a lot of them, the sport is growing fast in popularity, but in my experience they don’t train yet so there is lots of room to help them get out of pain and improve their game- fast.
  2. If you are working with a sport you don’t know much about, get curious. Look online, find articles, chat with coaches, chat with the athletes.  All of it is useful and will help shape your program over time.
  3. Some things won’t be in the research and you will have to wing pieces until you have developed enough coaching experience to see what works and what doesn’t.
  4. Most sports look somewhat like other sports. I mean, human beings can only move and express force in so many ways (without hurting themselves…) So finding common actions from various sports is a great place to start when working with unknown sports/athletes. 

And that’s it! In a future article I plan to do a deeper dive into what I actually do with our disc golf team and why. That way those of you actually working with disc golfers can learn more about that. That way when you Google Search “Disc Golf Strength & Conditioning Programs” something comes up for you unlike it did for me!

Peace.Gains.

Author Bio

Cole is in his 6th year as Head S&C at TWU where he operates as a one-man-show and coaches 300 athletes in a 1000 square foot old classroom.  He has found many ways to keep things flowing efficiently and effectively which has allowed Spartans to punch above their belt. 

 

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