How This Gym Regime Transformed Matt Fitzpatrick's Game

It's well documented by now that Matt Fitzpatrick has added distance to his prodigious accuracy. But how did he do it? There's more to it than simply heading to the gym and lifting weights.

In the article below, the Englishman's strength and conditioning coach Matt Roberts shares some of the secrets behind the gains that helped him become one of the best drivers in the game, as well as a few things to watch out for if you're looking to undergo a similar transformation...

Matt made huge progress before Covid struck, but then he was stuck in England with no gym. He’s quite lean by nature, and he can lose weight and muscle quite quickly. However, in January of this year, he didn’t play any tournaments, which allowed us to have a good ‘pre-season’ of gym loading. 

He’s at the point now where he can train hard. For example, at the Scottish Open, we were able to do an upper body session after his round. It was hard, but we adjust the volume so instead of five sets, we did two or three.

We split gym sessions up: leg session one day, upper body the next; then we do some golf core exercises for recovery. Off weeks, he’ll train five days a week, normally taking the weekend off. Tournament weeks it tends to be core recovery Monday, Tuesday upper body, Wednesday legs, and then, depending on tee times, we’d probably do another leg session – and he likes to do keepy uppies with a football between sets! 

You can get strong in the gym but it might not necessarily transfer to the course. This is where The Stack has helped. It’s basically a shaft with adjustable weights on. 

In 2018, his club speed was 108mph. The target is 120mph, but there are certain limiting factors. Matt isn’t built like Dustin Johnson, so we have to be mindful not to keep pushing and pushing, otherwise something might go. 

For the first 12 months of using it, because we’d just come out of Covid, I had to give Matt a lot of treatment on his neck, and it was also affecting his iron play. It meant Mike had to come in on the technical side and correct a few problems. We have to make sure the gym metrics match up with the loading from The Stack because they have to work in sync.