The Leading Edge in Golf Training

The POWERGROOVE Exponential Resistance Trainer is without peer as a golf swing trainer. Kellion began as a company determined to provide a solution to the intractable difficulties of the golf swing. We represent a basic re-thinking of how the golfer learns and/or develops the golf swing. Through a marriage of physiological analysis and mechanical design innovation, we are able to offer golfers truly remarkable improvement. The foundation of the Kellion system is the POWERGROOVE, and its application is universal—it works for:

1. The novice
2. The normal golfer who wants to spend “golf time” on the golf course or driving range, and not have to put a lot of effort into working on technique to remedy the frustrations encountered there
3. The advanced player seeking to master the game
4. The professional level player

The POWERGROOVE is a professional quality, commercial grade unit. It is suitable for:

• Golf Course Facilities
• Golf Schools and Training Centers
• Golf Gyms
• Academic Golf Programs
• Golf Teachers and Trainers
• Touring Pros
• Other Competitive Players
• Avid Golfers

Kellion’s new paradigm for developing the golf swing is to directly train the golfer’s body to perform automatically—not only properly, but also very powerfully. It is founded on two elements:

• Highly targeted muscle strengthening that is both golf-specific and accomplished via golf swing motion. This method of muscle development is uniquely efficient, correct, and effective.
• Neuromuscular conditioning that in essence programs unconscious muscular reflexes to fire correctly in sequence—automating the golf swing as never before possible.  This is commonly called “muscle memory,” and the POWERGROOVE creates it to an unprecedented degree, overriding bad habits as if they never existed, grooving the swing like regular golfers dream of, and offering rarified levels of control to accomplished golfers.

Swing training and the “golf muscles”
The golf swing is an odd physical movement, employing muscles that we don’t use in that way for any other purpose. This presents a particular challenge for the non-professional golfer. The affected muscles are simply not sufficiently conditioned for the demands of the swing. But even at the professional level the complexity of muscle interaction and the causal relationships (that result in one thing happening as opposed to another) are not particularly well understood. At Kellion our analysis of muscular function in the golf swing has been exhaustive, and our tools and training system reflect that unique comprehensiveness. But this is not the physiological treatise, so we will take an obvious case in point to illustrate the disparity between an average golfer and a Kellion user.

What happens at the point of impact determines trajectory, and control of that critical interaction between clubface and ball rests largely upon the wrists—the larger applicable muscles in the forearms and the small muscles in the wrists themselves, and also to a lesser extent the hands. But the wrist strength needed for good control here is a highly specialized kind of strength. For us, the classic example is putting a 6’2” 200+lbs muscular guy on the POWERGROOVE at a lower-medium resistance setting, and watch him fail to be able to bring the wrists through the point of impact (wrist release)…and then have our 5’ 120lbs female demonstrator step in and do it no problem—because of specialized muscle development.

Wrist strength is a particularly weak spot for golfers, but the same principle applies to all of the golf muscles. Over the years there has been some attention to muscle strengthening, and recently the concept of “golf fitness” has enjoyed some vogue. But the hard fact of the matter is that in order to obtain any serious performance improvement, the muscles have to be specifically conditioned as they actually operate during the “demand phase” of the golf swing—the downswing through the wrist release (which is the peak demand point). Critical to this capability are two requirements, both of which are fulfilled by the POWERGROOVE’s technological advances:

• True tracking of the downswing arc with adjustable resistance. This is accomplished by two pulley-cars acting as resistance delivery vehicles, gliding independently and traveling at different rates of speed.
• A type of resistance that mirrors the demand pattern of the muscles in operation. This is accomplished by a new type of resistance we call exponential—a kind of “super”-progressive resistance that describes a logarithmic curve, starting at a low ratio, then increasing smoothly, and culminating in steeply rising peak.  It’s the exponential resistance that puts the most intensive training where it needs to be—in the impact zone.

Tracking the downswing arc through the wrist release with exponential resistance accomplishes muscle strengthening that is acutely golf-specific, real-world (i.e., it translates fully into performance on the golf course), and extremely efficient (needing only brief sessions). Kellion originally designed the technology of the PowerGroove for this highly specific function—to give golfers the proper, specialized muscle strength necessary to hit the ball exceptionally well. However, using it as a research tool, we then began our analysis of the neuromuscular dimension of the golf swing.
Neuromuscular Conditioning, or “Muscle Memory” Reprogramming

In Kellion’s PowerGroove model a deeper underlying training occurs at the same time the muscles are being strengthened—because of the remarkable nature of the body’s neuromuscular system.

Remember learning to walk? No? How about learning to ride a bike, or catch a ball, or play a musical instrument, or swim? What do these all have in common? They are activities that you once had to deliberately work on, though now your body seems to control and perform the bulk of the motions for you without your attention. That’s because when you were working on them, your neuromuscular system was learning the program—the nerve sensors in the muscles and the subcortical brain communicating back and forth, refining the interaction and settling upon the long-term automatic response pattern.

One aspect that is important for our purposes is this: The robustness of the neuromuscular program depends upon the level of muscle stimulation (sensor triggering) that created it.  Obviously, repetition plays a big role as a source of stimulation. But a graduated program of stress upon the muscles (resistance) as they perform the movements that are being patterned creates a far more powerful form of stimulation, because it triggers the sensors (proprioceptors) more definitively each time.

Some additional pieces of the puzzle:

• Human body movements are controlled by both our conscious (cortical) and unconscious (subcortical) minds.
• Our consciousmind operates up to approximately six tenths of a second. The downswing happens in approximately a quarter of a second. Thus the conscious mind cannot attend the event of the downswing. The golfer is at the mercy of whatever unconscious coordination of swing movement he or she has developed.
• This is why it is so difficult to learn the golf swing—because it is performed mostly by the unconscious mind.
• Because a golf club is fairly lightweight, swinging it does not provide much neuromuscular stimulation. Normally, then, the golfer must therefore rely upon repetition to achieve coordination of the swing. Professional golfers hit huge numbers of balls in the effort to master the swing.
• An effective golf swing comes naturally to almost no one.
• Unless the golfer can thoroughly assimilate technique from a knowledgeable source and repeat it more or less perfectly over and over and over without fail, repetition is going to program in some bad swing habits—especially since there are instinctive responses to the golf swing which engender bad swing habits!

The POWERGROOVE is a golf swing neuromuscular programmer par excellence. It is this capability that most sets it apart as the centerpiece of a new paradigm for learning and mastering the golf swing, where the body is directly trained to perform the correct sequential muscle firings automatically. In fact, given the muscular complexities of the golf swing, it could be viewed as the answer the golf world has been waiting for.