The Challengers Joey D

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Joey Diovisalvi: Every day, my day starts in the dark. The birds haven’t even woken up yet and I’m out there just getting players ready to get better.

On-screen text: The Challengers

A series about people who
QUESTION. ENGAGE. SUCCEED.

Joey D

Joey Diovisalvi: My name’s Joey Diovisalvi. I’m a biomechanics coach on the PGA Tour. How did I know I wanted to be in golf? I didn’t know. It just happened by accident. I wasn’t planning on it ever. Cuz golf wasn’t cool. I think that when you look at the history of what golf is, right, it’s feel, it’s technique, it’s all of the things that basically do not agree with strength and speed.

Spoken on-screen text: How is the body engineered to work?

Joey Diovisalvi: You will never ever get better unless you start to understand your body’s movements. So how you going to get there? Were you going to hit 150,000 more balls? That’s not going to help. Once you teach them that, then all that other old-school thinking—it’s gone. And now it’s time to show up. And this is where we start to get better.

Joey Diovisalvi: Create that stability, up over your head, rotate, and slam. Good. One more. This is the closest way that you can actually replace a tool with a club. So what I love about this drill is it gives us the opportunity to mimic the golf swing with something that’s a little bit of resistance that creates the opportunity to make your brain and body connect.

Spoken on-screen text: Where does power come from? Where does mobility come from? Where does flexibility come from?

Joey Diovisalvi: Where does the movement happen with strength? People don’t have enough ability to take their lower body and keep it stable and then their upper body and create rotation. So this is really golf-specific fitness, and it is absolutely necessary to get better at golf.

Mark Amuso: You can’t think your way through a golf swing—it takes a second and a half. You got to feel it. And to be consistent, you have to be able to hone those feelings to become real. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re the number-one player in the world or you just picked up a club yesterday—we’re all just golfers trying to get one notch better. And that’s what he’s tremendously talented at.

Joey Diovisalvi: We evaluate people through a process that’s very, very detailed and we understand, can they actually swing and balance? You can’t have power if you can’t swing and balance, and that’s what people don’t understand. But nobody talks about it because it’s not cool. It’s cool to talk about hitting a drive 400 yards. So it’s the thing we start with. That’s the first link, when we’re done with the table assessment and how the bones are moving and joints and muscles.

Spoken on screen text: We put them on a balance system.

Joey Diovisalvi: And once they’re swinging on that, we collect all of this data. The great thing about math is it’s never wrong. It validates what they have to do to get better. The balance is huge. Because if you’ve never worked on it, once you do, then all of a sudden you realize, gosh, I swing so much more efficiently and my swing speed increased, my ball speed increased, my smash factor increased. All the technical stuff starts to come into play, and that’s kind of cool. They’re winning more, they’re placing higher in events, they’re more confident than ever, and there’s less injuries. And I think when I look at that as a coach, that makes me believe that the work I’ve done over the last two and a half decades has made a difference.

Joey Diovisalvi: It’s bike, run, swim every single day, just to start the day, and the sun hasn’t even thought about coming up yet. But if I can lead by example, then you’ve got to really bring your A game when you come here, because I don’t have any ability to have anything less. Just doesn’t work for me. I’m actually training with them, which is very unorthodox. I think to out-train them in this environment is great for them, because it constantly raises the bar. They’re like, that old man is not going to take me down. And if they can’t get there, how are you going to get better? I just bring it to this level because it’s what I’ve done forever and it works.

Mark Amuso: Joey certainly wasn’t the first guy to lean on fitness training to help support better performance, but it was not widely adopted. And in the just over a decade that I’ve been with him, I’ve seen adoption at the tour level and at the recreational level go through the roof. And for professional golfers now, it’s absolutely mandatory. You just got to do it.

On-screen text: Joey D. has personally trained 3 world #1 players over 2 decades.

Joey D Golf’s clients have won more than 130 professional tournaments.

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Joey Diovisalvi: I’m not warm and fuzzy. I don’t hide it. But I can promise you that when you’re done working, I don’t know if we’re hanging a banner or winning the FedEx Cup, but we’re getting somewhere.

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