The young back & resilience

Counting Swings: The Workload Nobody Adds Up

Try this after your junior’s next practice week.

Count the full-speed swings. A large bucket is seventy-plus balls, most hit with driver intent. Add the rounds, the lesson, the “just twenty more with driver.” Multiply by the week.

Most parents land somewhere in the many hundreds — every one a near-maximal rotation, mostly in one direction, through a spine that’s still being built. Golf is a rotational power sport that has never admitted it.

Why the total is the number that matters

Young backs adapt to workload the way all tissue does: gradually, when the load looks like what it already knows.

What they punish is the ambush. Tournament summer arrives, practice doubles, a new coach adds a range block — and a growing back that handled every individual piece meets the sum all at once. That’s typically when the morning stiffness starts, and stiffness in a young golfer’s back is a signal, not a rite of passage.

The one-direction problem

Every other rotational sport at least alternates tasks. A junior golfer rotates hard the same way, rep after rep, year after year. The lead hip and the trunk absorb an asymmetric bill that nobody itemizes.

Two protections are boring and proven: strength that funds the rotation, and deliberate work in the other direction — a few counter-rotation throws for every bucket. Symmetry is measurable; we measure it.

The habit: add it up, roughly

Once a season, estimate a normal week’s full-speed swings and write the number down. Before tournament summer or a new practice plan, compare the coming load against it — before the week happens, not after the back complains.

The framework: no surprise weeks. If the coming week is heading toward twice normal, trim something optional — or plan the week after as genuinely light.

What this is not

It’s not an argument for hitting fewer balls forever. Repetition builds golfers.

It’s an argument for building the schedule the way you’d build the athlete: deliberately, with strength underneath so the body can afford the reps it’s asked for. And if you’re wondering whether your golfer’s trunk matches the volume it’s carrying, an assessment answers exactly that.

This article supports our deeper guide: The young back & resilience.