As we head into the festive season, here are fitness expert and personal trainer Shawn O’Neil’s top three golf fitness-related presents for the golfer in your life
It’s that time of year when our focus shifts to Christmas presents and in keeping with the spirit of the season, here are three golf fitness-related purchases to treat yourself or the golfer in your life.
A launch monitor or speed radar is a great choice. You have loads of options here depending on how much data you want and how much money you want to spend.
You can go basic with just club and ball speed and smash factor – or get a few more metrics which can be really useful, particularly if you practise in a net or indoors. In the last few years, the price point has come down on these and even the cheaper ones have good levels of accuracy. If you’re serious about getting faster, you need to be measuring what you’re doing.
A set of resistance bands is a great purchase as they are extremely versatile, inexpensive, and take up little space.
Depending on the length and strength of the bands, you can use them for everything. They can add assistance or resistance for mobility work, add pattern assistance or instability to stability drills, and can be used in strength exercises or drills designed to increase speed. A mix of mini, long closed loop, and unclosed ones you can add handles to in a mix of strengths can take you a long way.
My final choice for 2025 is creatine monohydrate – which Rory McIlroy calls “hit it further juice”.
Creatine is safe and is the most widely studied supplement in the world. I won’t bore you with how it works here, but it is naturally occurring in the body and we get it from certain foods, but we cannot get an effective dose this way. The main benefit in terms of our training, in short, is that creatine replenishes our energy system at a much faster rate, meaning we can get more out of each set, more load, and more volume per session with quicker recovery. This means we can build strength and muscle quicker, which is great if you have limited training time. You only need 5g per day – though recent research shows a higher dosage can have cognitive benefits, especially when sleep deprived.
