Scottie Scheffler’s success on the course starts with his work off it
It was not a shot that Scottie Scheffler would ever practice.
On the long, cliffside fourth hole at Torrey Pines during the second round of the Genesis Invitational in February, Scheffler’s tee shot had found an awkward spot on the lip of a steep fairway bunker.
The lie was unique, but not so bad that the No. 1 player in the world couldn’t find a way to make it work for him. Scheffler wasn’t just looking to get the ball out of the bunker — he grabbed a fairway wood — he wanted to get the ball as close to the green as possible. He adjusted his 6-foot-3 frame accordingly, placing his right foot on the grass skirt surrounding the bunker while most of his left foot appeared to hover above the sand.
Scheffler swung and made contact, still replicating his sliding swing, which made his left foot immediately slip and fall into the bunker while his right leg folded awkwardly beneath him. But his body held and so did his finish as the flushed ball soared through the air and landed near the green. Scheffler made par.
Don’t try this at home 😬 pic.twitter.com/ghJOVHa8LY
— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) February 14, 2025
“That is one of those [shots] where you’re just in an awkward position and I’ve got to take a weird stance and make a weird swing and somehow get the ball up there,” Scheffler said. “Sometimes I’m pretty good at that.”
The moment was a small glimpse into an underrated part of the Scheffler experience. Behind the elite ballstriking and the languid swing with the slip-and-slide feet, there is a foundation that has been built on not only otherworldly skill, zealous repetition and a commitment to technique, but also powered by an emphasis on fitness that has unlocked Scheffler’s best golf in the past three years.
“He wasn’t a gym rat initially,” Scheffler’s performance coach and trainer Dr. Troy Van Biezen told ESPN. “It took a couple of situations when he was in college to finally pull the trigger and realize he’s got to put some time in off the golf course to stay pain free and to compete at a high level.”
Last year, no one played at a higher level than Scheffler, who won the Masters and seven other tournaments. This year, after needing hand surgery following a cooking accident and missing his first two starts of the season, Scheffler has yet to win and has shown that even he is not immune to the game’s ebbs and flows. It’s another reminder that, as he begins his quest for a third Masters victory in four years, process is what he can hang on to, especially when it comes to his work before he reaches the first tee.
“In golf, you can’t control the wind, you can’t control the bad bounce, or even your swing sometimes,” Van Biezen said. “But we can control your fitness level; we can control everything.”
Van Biezen, a Dallas-based performance coach, still remembers when he and Scheffler began working together, and Scheffler was just another “little guy” at 14 years old. Like many junior golfers who saw Van Biezen in their early teenage years when they started experiencing back pain, Scheffler’s growth spurt from high school to college was a precipitating moment of his early career.
“When Mother Nature kicks in, it can create a lot of imbalances and asymmetries,” Van Biezen said. “Because the golf swing is based on repetitive movements to specific muscle groups, those imbalances, asymmetries can create pain and injury. … Scottie grew really fast and lost a lot of flexibility.”
Van Biezen, who is currently director of performance for the Dallas Stars, sees his role as a crew pit chief cleaning up those physical weak links through a focus on mobility, stability and strength. Van Biezen also worked with Jordan Spieth and Tiger Woods for a handful of years, which helped crystallize his philosophy and goals.
“I come from a hockey background so I’ve always been a proponent of big butts and big legs,” Van Biezen said. “One of the things Tiger said to me was, you know, physically, emotionally, mentally, he wants to be as strong Thursday morning as he does Sunday afternoon on the back nine.”
Because of the growth spurt, Scheffler’s freshman season at Texas went from promising to worrisome as he struggled to break par. At the time, Van Biezen worked hand-in-hand with Scheffler’s swing coach Randy Smith and Texas coach John Fields, to counteract those factors that were affecting Scheffler as he grew literally — 13 inches during a 14-month span — and figuratively, back into one of the best amateurs in the world.
Despite winning twice on the Korn Ferry Tour and getting his PGA Tour card for the 2020 season, Scheffler had trouble finishing tournaments, holding onto leads and simply not being able to turn good weeks into winning. Van Biezen was constantly looking for weaknesses, and a closer look at Scheffler yielded a harsh reality.
“From a cardiovascular point, he wasn’t at the level we wanted him to be, to be able to close out a win on Sunday afternoon,” Van Biezen said.
The solution? An offseason boot camp heading into 2021 to build up Scheffler’s strength, flexibility and power, but especially his endurance.
“We did a lot of metabolic training, a lot of burners after a workout, just really pushing him hard, really stressing the nervous system,” Van Biezen said. “So when it did come down to Sunday afternoon, especially at a major during these long weeks, he’d be ready to finish the deal.”
Van Biezen is the first to be wary in ascribing any superior importance to fitness alone, but as Scheffler’s game became sharper, his experience on Tour greater, the hyperfocus on his fitness was, in some ways, the cheat code that put Scheffler over the top — over and over again. In fact, over the past six PGA Tour events where he has held a 54-hole lead (not counting the 2024 Tour Championship), Scheffler has won all of them.
“We’ve just gotten to a point where I’ve been able to get rid of a lot of the aches and pains I used to deal with when I was in college,” Scheffler said in an interview talking about GolfForever, the fitness program he utilizes with Van Biezen. “And I’ve gotten to a place where my body, I feel like, is really healthy, but it was a long journey to get to a point where I was in balance for a long enough period of time where we could actually start building a little bit of muscle.”
As Scheffler has pointed out before, he’s not exactly trying to build an inordinate amount of power or speed to hit the ball farther. But understanding how to consistently move his body efficiently to mitigate pain and maximize the hyperspecific movements a golf swing calls for is as crucial as knowing how to flight a 7-iron.
“When I turn properly into my right hip, I can load and then push off and easily get all the way back on my left side versus kind of doing a reversal,” Scheffler said. “If I didn’t work out and do the things that I do in the gym to be able to play golf, I wouldn’t be able to sustain my body the way that I have been for the last 10 years.”
“How fast can you row in 30 seconds?”
Inside the gym where Scheffler trains in Dallas alongside fellow pros Tom Kim and Ryan Palmer, that’s often the challenge that taps into Scheffler’s competitive fire when he doesn’t have a club in his hands.
“Scottie loves to chirp in the gym,” Van Biezen said. “One time we had a strength day and Scottie had a weighted vest doing something called skater squats and Scottie is telling Tom, ‘You can’t do that’ and they pushed Tom to do it, so they go back and forth, fight each other and push each other.”
Van Biezen figured out pretty quickly that working with Scheffler would almost always require a component of competition to get the most out of offseason workouts and training.
These days, Van Biezen doesn’t have to be with Scheffler to know what he needs. He and his team know the tell-tale signs that are triggered when he isn’t able to load into his right side, causing his swing to fall into a reverse spine tilt and expose his back to potential discomfort. Whether on the range or on the course, Smith’s awareness of that specific issue is now second nature; he knows how to look out for it and they will often send Van Biezen a video or a text from the range so he can take a look and offer help.
“I started from ground zero with him,” Van Biezen said. “I’ve known Scotty for so long, I can see how his body moves, and then I kind of reverse engineer those movements and then we introduce exercise in the gym to basically either clean up that bad movement pattern or activate a certain body part or, or muscle groups.”
The group has a set of mobility exercises that Scheffler can go through to target the internal hip rotation and promote more of a turn instead of a tilt. While seemingly small, that subtle difference is gargantuan and can often mean the gap between a good ballstriking week and an elite one, the difference between second place and first.
Scheffler, Van Biezen, said, is curious about what he doesn’t know and isn’t afraid to ask why he’s being asked to do something in the gym. But once results have poured in, there has been no hesitation in embracing Van Biezen’s gospel of performance. In fact, the relationship between better fitness and better golf has led Scheffler to take some steps of his own, adding a cold plunge, red light therapy and the Normatec compression boots at home to hone in his recovery.
“Everybody wants the sexy part, they look at Rory or Tiger a long time ago, power, speed strength, plyometrics, box jumping, which we do,” Van Biezen. “But it’s the monotony of it. He’s come to realize that we have to stick with the corrective, the mobility, stability, foundation. He does that on a daily basis.”
Though Van Biezen isn’t always on the road with Scheffler, there is a routine that Scheffler typically follows during tournament weeks. Monday is usually the one and only heavy lift day. Tuesday is functional mobility day. Wednesday, which typically involves playing a pro-am plus some more practice, there’s no extra work. Once the tournament begins, his pre-round mobility routine will be fit around his tee time, allowing for any alterations should he need it.
“Your body is a dynamic entity. It’s always going to change whether it’s bad beds, plane ride, whatever,” Van Biezen said. “So we kind of read and react quite a bit week to week.”
If there was a last piece to the optimization puzzle, Van Biezen — also a nutritionist — has made sure to help Scheffler make strides there as well with the aid of another member of Scheffler’s close-knit group: Scheffler’s wife, Meredith.
“She is very health-oriented,” Van Biezen said. “She stays on it and makes sure he eats healthy. He gets it from me and he gets it from her, so he can’t really hide it.”
Eating right wasn’t a serious problem for Scheffler, but in that department, Van Biezen has become an educator, explaining the what and the why to Scheffler and allowing him at least some flexibility. Though the north star is always to build the best version of Scheffler before he ever hits a shot in competition, even the best player in the world has his weakness.
“He loves his pizza,” Van Biezen said with a laugh. “So we compromise, and I pick and choose when he gets to eat that.”
Source: espn.com