Squats for Golfers

Squats and deadlifts are great examples of “non specific” exercises that have great utility for golfers. The squat is a fundamental movement pattern that is excellent for training strength and mobility in the lower body, and stability in the trunk / core.

There are two areas of research, one in golf, and the other in general longevity that illustrate the value of lower body strength. While squats certainly don’t have to be an exercise you use in your training, I think it’s something that should always be included when feasible.

Below, I’ll go through the muscles involved, technique keys, how to handle knee and back concerns, which version to pick, how to program it, and what it does for clubhead speed, injury prevention and aging. There’s also a section on belts and shoes, and strength standards broken down into age and gender.

Muscles worked

The squat is primarily a knee extension exercise. There is also hip extension, and the trunk is working hard to maintain posture.

Squat technique keys

The cues below are for the barbell back squat. Goblet squats, front squats and the other versions follow the same basic pattern.

<barbell squat video to be inserted here>

1. Set up the rack. Set the hooks so the bar sits around mid-chest height. You should be able to get under it and squat it off without going up on your toes. Set the safety bars just below the lowest point of your squat, so they catch the bar if you can’t stand up but don’t touch it on a good rep. Do a squat with the empty bar inside the rack to check the height.
2. Set the bar. Rest the bar across the traps in your upper back, below the bony part at the base of your neck. Squeeze your shoulder blades together and pull the bar down into your traps to give the bar a solid shelf. If the bar is hurting the bony part of your neck, it’s too high.
3. Unrack the bar. With your feet under the bar, brace and stand straight up to lift it off the hooks. Take two small steps back with each foot, just enough to clear the hooks. Don’t walk the bar out any further than you need to.
4. Set your feet. About shoulder width apart, toes turned out slightly. Find the stance where you can squat deepest while keeping your heels down, and feel most powerful.
5. Brace. Big breath into your belly, then tighten your trunk like you’re about to get punched. Hold it on the way down.
6. Sit down between your hips.
7. Go as deep as you can control. Aim for at least the top of your thighs level with your knees, as long as your back stays in position and your heels stay down.
8. Drive up. Push through your whole foot. Chest and hips should rise at the same rate.
9. Finish tall. Stand up straight at the top, then reset your breath and brace before the next rep.
10. Re-rack the bar. After your last rep, walk forward until the bar touches the uprights, then lower it onto the hooks. Aim for the uprights rather than the hooks so you don’t miss them. Only let go once the bar is resting on both sides.

Common mistakes

• Heels lifting. Weight shifts onto the toes. Try a slightly wider stance or put your heels on small plates or a wedge.
• Hips shooting up first. The legs straighten and the chest drops, turning the squat into a good morning. Keep your chest up and drive your hips and shoulders up together.
• Cutting depth. Loading the bar heavier than you can handle and only going a few inches down. Lower the weight and keep the range consistent from set to set and rep to rep.
• Losing the brace at the bottom. Relaxing the trunk at the bottom lets the lower back round under load. Hold your breath and brace through the hardest part of the rep.

Variations

Not everyone needs to use the barbell back squat, and it may not be the best variation for everyone. A good squat variation is one you can load progressively without pain, and where you feel like the legs are the limiting factor. Here are the main options.

Sets and reps

Due to the enormous amount of muscle mass being used, squats are hard work, and they get harder the deeper and heavier you go. When using a barbell and squatting heavy weights relative to your strength level, I recommend leaving one to three reps in reserve on each set. If using a lighter weight and doing something like goblet squats or split squats with dumbbells, you can push a little bit closer to failure.

• Sets: Two to four working sets after a few lighter warm-up sets. Squats need a good warm-up, so don’t rush them.
• Reps: Three to six reps when the squat is your main lift. Five to eight reps for goblet squats, split squats and other assistance versions. This is a general guide, not a strict rule.
• Frequency: I tend to program at least one bilateral squat exercise per week and one split squat exercise per week as main exercises on different days. I avoid putting heavy barbell deadlifts and heavy barbell squats in the same workout.
• Progression: Once you hit the top of a rep range with a certain weight with good form, add 5 to 10lbs, and start from the bottom of the rep range again. For example, start with 100lbs x 3 reps. Once you can do 100lbs x 6 reps, add 5 to 10lbs, so you are now back to 105-110lbs x 3 reps. Build this up to 6 reps. Repeat this cycle over and over again.
• In season: Drop to 1 to 2 working sets per workout, keep the weight heavy, and reps at 3 to 5 per set. It’s not heavy weight alone that causes most soreness and fatigue. It’s grinding through really slow reps close to failure, and doing high rep sets where you “feel the burn”.

Are squats safe for your knees and back?

A lot of people worry that squats, especially deep squats, are bad for the knees. You’ll also hear that your knees should never go past your toes.

The research doesn’t support either idea. A review of more than 160 studies found no evidence that deep squats are more harmful to the knees than half or quarter squats when the technique and load are appropriate (Hartmann et al., 2013). The same review raised the concern that half and quarter squats done with much heavier loads may put more stress on the knees and spine over time.

Keeping the knees behind the toes doesn’t make the squat safer either. When researchers restricted forward knee travel, knee torque dropped by 22% but hip torque went up by more than 1,000%, with the trunk leaning further forward (Fry et al., 2003). The stress didn’t go away. It moved to the hips and lower back.

If you have knee or back pain, or restricted upper body mobility, there’s no need to force a deep barbell squat. Choose a variation and depth you can do without pain, start conservatively, and build up slowly. As with the deadlift, most problems come from loading the bar too heavy too soon.

Benefits of squats for golfers

Clubhead speed

How the legs and feet interact with the ground is a key factor in generating clubhead speed. If you’ve listened to any of my podcasts with Dr Kwon or read my research reviews you will be familiar with this. Strong legs allow a more forceful interaction with the ground, increasing the angular momentum generated by the body, which can then be passed onto the club. The legs are the first and strongest link in the “golfer – club system”. The more force we can push into the ground, the more force is returned into our body from the ground. The timing and direction of when we apply this force is critical, but so is the ability to produce enough force in the first place.

A 2024 meta-analysis pooled 20 studies covering 569 golfers to see which physical qualities are associated with clubhead speed (Brennan et al., 2024). Lower body strength, which included the 1RM back squat, had a small association (0.47). The strongest association in the paper was jump impulse (0.82).

Jump impulse is the total force applied to the ground during a jump. It reflects both how fast you take off and how much body mass you accelerate to do it. Two golfers who jump the same height won’t produce the same impulse if one is heavier, because the heavier golfer is accelerating more mass. Squats build both sides of that. They make the legs stronger, and they add muscle mass. Maximum strength also feeds explosive strength, especially in less trained golfers, so getting stronger in the squat lays the base for more power.

Training research is more limited. In a small study of college golfers, an 8-week program built around heavy barbell lifts, including the back squat, improved squat strength and average clubhead speed more than a bodyweight and rotational program, though peak clubhead speed didn’t change significantly (Oranchuk et al., 2020).

None of this proves squatting will add speed on its own. Squats and strength training in general should be done in conjunction with other explosive physical training such as jumping, and swing speed training.

Swing mechanics are also critical. This is the main determinant of how much of your physical strength you can transfer to the swing.

Injury prevention

The golf swing puts a lot of load through the legs, hips and lower back, in a very repetitive fashion. A 2024 systematic review found the lower back was the most common injury site across all golf populations, and that for recreational golfers, lower limb and trunk strength endurance were risk factors for injury (Garrett et al., 2024).

Your legs absorb and produce a lot of force in every full swing, and the lead leg in particular braces hard through impact. Squats build the quads, glutes and adductors that control that. They also build strength endurance in the legs and trunk, the exact quality the review flagged in recreational golfers. Barbell back squats in particular also do a good job of strengthening the lower back.

Holding on to muscle, strength and power as you age

We lose muscle as we age, and most of that loss comes from our fast-twitch fibers. What’s less well known is where in the body we lose it from.

One study used whole-body MRI to measure muscle in 468 adults aged 18 to 88 (Janssen et al., 2000). Compared with men aged 18 to 29, men over 70 had about 25% less lower body muscle but only 6% less upper body muscle. For women it was 22% less in the lower body and 11% less in the upper body. That’s close to six times as much muscle missing from below the waist as above it in men, and around three times as much in women.

A later study measured every individual muscle in the lower body of young and older men (Fuchs et al., 2023). The older men had 24% less thigh muscle, compared with 15% less in the hips and glutes and 12% less in the lower leg. Within the thigh, they had 30% less quad muscle, compared with 18% less in the adductors and 15% less in the hamstrings. The quads didn’t just shrink along with everything else. They made up 52% of the thigh in the young men and only 48% in the older men, so they shrank faster than the muscles around them.

To avoid this, the quads need to be worked! Your calves get worked every time you walk, and most people keep walking into old age. The quads need harder work to be challenged, like squatting, jumping, sprinting and playing sport, and that’s exactly what tends to fall away as we get older. It’s use it or lose it. The quads are the main muscle the squat trains.

The good news is that muscle responds to heavy training at any age. In one study of older adults, heavy strength training increased maximal strength by 68% and Type II fiber size by 66% (Wang et al., 2017). The squat is one of the best ways to give your quads the heavy work, and it also trains the movement behind getting up from a low chair, off the floor or out of a bunker.

Extra tips: belts and squat shoes

Lifting belts

The same belt logic from the deadlift article applies here. A belt gives you something to brace against, so you can create more pressure in your trunk. That stiffer trunk lets your legs and hips push harder. It’s a tool for lifting more weight, not for preventing injury.

Squat shoes

Squat shoes have a raised, solid heel. They work like squatting with your heels on small plates, letting your knees travel further forward so you can stay more upright and squat deeper. They’re useful if your heels lift or you struggle to reach depth. Flat, firm shoes are fine if you don’t have that issue. Avoid soft running shoes, as they make it harder to stay stable under load. The soft foam cushioning that is beneficial for running is precisely what you do not want under your feet when lifting.

A typical squat session

Big compound movements are best suited to being done early in a workout, but also well warmed up. I will do the Fit For Golf warm-ups, some jumping and med ball throwing, and then move to the biggest strength lift of the session.

Here is an example of how I would build up to my “working sets” of squats. At the moment I am doing “pause squats” where I try to pause at the bottom of the lift for two seconds.

• 135lbs x 5 reps
• 185lbs x 3 reps
• 225lbs x 3 reps
• 235lbs x 3 reps
• 235lbs x 3 reps

There is no way I could just go straight to the heavier weights without some progressively heavier “build up” / “warm-up sets”. The body needs to be prepared.

Of course, these weights are not suggestions for you, it’s just to illustrate the structure of a training session. Use weights based on your own strength level.

Exercises done after the first main lift for the lower body and upper body don’t need warm-up sets as they are generally lighter, and you are now really well warmed up and primed.

Strength benchmarks for the squat

How strong should your legs be? These are the squat numbers I use as targets for golfers.

They’re 5 rep max (5RM) benchmarks, the most weight you can lift for 5 good reps, for the back squat to breaking parallel. That means the crease of your hip drops just below the top of your knee at the bottom of every rep.

BW means bodyweight. For a 180lb golfer, a 1.5xBW squat is 270lbs.

Treat the levels as markers of relative strength, not entry requirements for good golf.

Level 1. ~6 to 12 months of training. You’ve built a solid base and can squat to depth with good form.

Level 2. ~1 to 3 years of training. Strong compared to the general population, with plenty of leg strength to support high clubhead speed.

Level 3. ~3 to 5+ years of training. Advanced. Training is a priority, and you’ve stuck with a well designed program built on progressive overload and hard work.

The standard numbers are for golfers up to around 45 to 50, and the 60+ numbers are 20% lower. Strength drops by roughly 1 to 1.5% a year after 50, which adds up to about 20% across that gap.

Remember too, the more excess fat you have, the harder strength benchmarks relative to a certain bodyweight are.

Strength Training For Golf – The Fit For Golf Guide explains everything you need to know about strength training for golf.

The bottom line

Strong legs push harder against the ground, help protect the knees and lower back through thousands of swings, and keep everyday movements easy as you get older. Pick a squat variation you can do without pain, get good at it, and keep adding weight slowly.

Ready to start training?

Squats work best as part of a complete program. The Fit For Golf App puts that together for you, with the sets, reps and progression laid out.

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References

• Brennan A, Murray A, Mountjoy M, Hellstrom J, Coughlan D, Wells J, Brearley S, Ehlert A, Jarvis P, Turner A, Bishop C. Associations between physical characteristics and golf clubhead speed: a systematic review with meta-analysis. Sports Med. 2024;54(6):1553-1577.
• Fry AC, Smith JC, Schilling BK. Effect of knee position on hip and knee torques during the barbell squat. J Strength Cond Res. 2003;17(4):629-633.
• Fuchs CJ, Kuipers R, Rombouts JA, et al. Thigh muscles are more susceptible to age-related muscle loss when compared to lower leg and pelvic muscles. Exp Gerontol. 2023;175:112159.
• Garrett JM, Beaumont PL, van den Hoek DJ, Veugelers K, Schmitz M, Bennett H. Injury profiles of elite, semielite, and recreational golfers, and their associated risk factors: a systematic review. J Strength Cond Res. 2024;38(6):1157-1176. doi:10.1519/JSC.0000000000004787
• Hartmann H, Wirth K, Klusemann M. Analysis of the load on the knee joint and vertebral column with changes in squatting depth and weight load. Sports Med. 2013;43(10):993-1008. doi:10.1007/s40279-013-0073-6
• Janssen I, Heymsfield SB, Wang ZM, Ross R. Skeletal muscle mass and distribution in 468 men and women aged 18 to 88 yr. J Appl Physiol. 2000;89(1):81-88.
• Oranchuk DJ, Mannerberg JM, Robinson TL, Nelson MC. Eight weeks of strength and power training improves club head speed in collegiate golfers. J Strength Cond Res. 2020;34(8):2205-2213. doi:10.1519/JSC.0000000000002505
• Wang E, Nyberg SK, Hoff J, et al. Impact of maximal strength training on work efficiency and muscle fiber type in the elderly: implications for physical function and fall prevention. Exp Gerontol. 2017;91:64-71. PMID 28222199.