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Twenty-six days have passed since Tiger Woods won the U.S. Open Championship in a playoff over Rocco Mediate while in obvious pain, and 19 days since he had surgery to repair a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee.
Larry Holt, a retired professor of kinesiology in the School of Health and Human Performance at Dalhousie University in Halifax, has been paying close attention to Woods's career. Holt's research and observations have lead him to a conclusion that he knows is hardly mainstream.
"His type of injuries were self-inflicted," Holt said in a recent interview, "and are not related to practising or playing golf, but through his non-specific training that has virtually no positive influence on how he plays the game."
Holt is the lead author of Scientific Stretching for Sport-3S and a new book called Flexibility: A Concise Guide to Conditioning, Performance Enhancement, Injury Prevention, and Rehabilitation. He has not worked with Woods, nor does he have any more knowledge of his injuries than what Woods has revealed publicly. Woods said shortly after winning the U.S. Open that he had suffered a double stress fracture in his left leg before the championship and that he had torn an ACL, the major stabilizing ligament in the knee, while running the week after the 2007 British Open.
Woods told CBS last weekend that he doesn't know when he will return to competition, let alone begin his rehabilitation. "I've been laid up pretty much every day, all day," he said, "moving from the bedroom to the couch and back to the bedroom and maybe a few bathroom stops along the way, but that's pretty much how my day goes."
In Holt's view, Woods put too much stress on his lower body over the years by lifting weights, adding muscle and therefore weight to his upper body. Holt said that Woods "placed his ectomorphic body [long and slender, like that of a marathon runner] through intense resistance training, bringing out the mesomorphic [muscular, "ripped" look by nature] component, adding muscle tissue, body weight that increased the forces on landing every time he ran. The stress fractures had nothing to do with golf, and neither did the knee problems."
Holt added: "Look how many golfers get stress fractures. Not many. It makes no sense. It's the running with the added weight on his upper body [that led to Woods's stress fractures]. He's a basically lean guy who has put on upper-body mass. It's like putting a 20-pound sack of sand on your upper body. When he runs, it stresses his lower body. His body and legs are designed for a guy 20, 25 pounds lighter.
"But Tiger feels he has to do these things to be a complete athlete. I think he's losing sight of his real goal, which is to be the greatest golfer. He thinks he has to be the greatest athlete."
Holt has consulted with the Calgary Flames and the defunct Minnesota North Stars and Quebec Nordiques, along with the Canadian Swimming Association. He is a past president of the International Society of Biomechanics in Sports. He wrote a book called An Experimenter's Guide to the Full Golf Swing. Holt is no fan of what he calls the "optimization" myth in sports, which suggests that athletes can improve by becoming stronger.
"You have to ask the question, 'What are the demands of a sport?' I'm not against non-specific training [such as heavy lifting], just against doing things that cause injury or predispose a person to them, without any evidence that the exercise program actually improves performance."
He added: "Doing intense muscle bulking exercise has not been shown to improve anyone's golf game and may contribute to injuries if the program is one of progressive resistance training, where more mass and more strength are expected to continuously develop."
Holt pointed out that, according to an article in the August of 2007 issue of Men's Fitness magazine, Woods weighed only 158 pounds when he won the 1997 Masters by 12 strokes. His weight fluctuates now between 182 and 185 pounds.
