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The Secrets Issue
It's one of the game's most closely guarded secrets. But we found out how golf's No. 1 player got in?and stays in?such great shape
The debate about whether golfers are athletes ends with Tiger Woods. We've watched him metamorphose from a gangly, 155-pound 21-year-old into a chiseled, 180-pound 28-year-old. But the question is, how did the No. 1 golfer in the world sculpt a body like that without anyone ever detailing the transformation? You're telling me there are published photos of Area 51 but we can't get one picture of Woods on an ab machine?
Apparently the first rule of Tiger Woods' workout routine is, you don't talk about Tiger Woods' workout routine. It's as if he hands out nondisclosure agreements to anyone within a pitching wedge of his treadmill. And, as other golf writers have told me countless times, you can forget about asking him directly. That's one part of his very public life that he still keeps private. Even this magazine, for which Tiger Woods writes instruction articles, has yet to produce a single page of specifics on what he does to stay in shape.
Somebody had to get to the bottom of this mystery?and I figured it might as well be me.
The quest begins
PGA Tour players, despite living all over the world, are a close-knit group. They stay in the same hotels. They dine together. They go on vacations together. So my quest began by asking many of Woods' fellow tour pros what they knew. Mark O'Meara, Curtis Strange, Jay Haas?I went from player to player. Some avoided the question like their wives had just asked them, "Do I look fat?" Others played dumb and said they had never seen him in the gym. The ones who had seen him weren't that helpful. Typical was Joe Durant. "I was working out at my hotel at Westchester last year, and he was on the stair climber," Durant said. "He was just kinda killing some time, going through the motions. He was on 30 minutes or so. I left to go pass out, so who knows how long he was there after that?"
Tiger's look-alike
The man in these photos is not the world's No. 1 golfer. He is Mark Taborn, a 27-year-old professional model and actor who happens to look an awful lot like Tiger Woods.
Taborn, who lives in Los Angeles, makes about 100 appearances a year as Woods, showing up at everything from golf tournaments to sales conferences. He'll pose for pictures, scribble some autographs ("I sign 'Tiger,' in quotes") and sometimes even give a little speech. One place you will never mistake him for the real thing: on the course. Taborn took up golf only a couple of years ago and plays to a 22-handicap.
Working as a Tiger look-alike, he pulls in "over $100,000 a year," says his agent, Tom Star of Star Entertainment Worldwide in Las Vegas. Has Taborn ever met Tiger? "No, but I'd love to," he says. "I'd tell him, ?You've been such a blessing in my life. You've paid a lot of my bills.' "
My next thought was to find a gym where Woods had worked out to see if someone could give me an eyewitness account. During the week of the 2003 and '04 Masters, I discovered, Woods had shown up at Omni Health & Fitness gyms near Augusta National. He was there three or four times each week and worked out for about an hour each time, representatives of these facilities told me. "What he did was different each time,'' said Dave Boyd, who was the Omni rep assigned to Woods in '03. "I tried not to stare, but I noticed he was doing a lot of reps [repetitions] with light weights, like on the leg-press machine and our biceps-curl machine. It looked like circuit training."
"Did he do anything radical? Anything out of the ordinary?" I asked.
"Sorry. Just a regular workout."
And so it went. I tried his caddie, Steve Williams, I tried more players, I tried business associates like Greg Nared, his liaison at Nike, I tried his personal trainer and physical therapist, Keith Kleven. Each time I asked the question, I might as well have been trying to sell them X'd-out golf balls.
My favorite brushoff came from the man himself. I waited for two hours while he practiced at the Wachovia Championship in May. Finally, Woods finished putting and started walking toward the clubhouse. I ran up, introduced myself and said in one, long breath, "Sorry to bother you I'm working on a story for Golf Digest and I know you haven't talked about this in the past but would you be willing to share some information about your workout routine with me?"
Without slowing his pace, Woods' head swiveled toward me, we made eye contact, and he said, "No." Then he started laughing and kept right on walking.
He limbers up by focusing on his legs and trunk. Later, stretch bands increase strength and flexibility.
The jackpot
There's always a point in the movies when the hero looks defeated. Cue the slow, sad music as he/she begins to contemplate the end. Not long after my run-in with Tiger, I could swear I heard that music wafting over my cubicle.
Then I caught a break. I had gathered a notebook full of information on people who might know what Woods did in the gym, and I thought I had contacted them all. But after going through the pages one last time, I discovered I had overlooked the name of a person who has worked out with Woods on many occasions.
He was my only hope. I tracked him down by phone and asked the same question I had asked dozens of others.
To my surprise, he said he'd tell me what he knew?provided I didn't reveal his name. Because this is the Secrets Issue, and because I was desperate, it seemed like a reasonable request.
Turns out there is a lot more to Woods' routine than what his fellow pros see him doing during tournament weeks?which is mainly just 30 minutes of cardiovascular work and another 30 minutes of strength training.
When he is not competing, Woods typically spends three or four hours a day, five times a week, in the gym. For these high-intensity workouts, said my source (let's call him Deep Bunker), he varies the focus of each session from strength training to improvements in cardiovascular performance. He usually starts with 30 minutes of some kind of cardiovascular warm-up exercise such as pedaling on a stationary bike. Then he'll perform a 30-minute session of total-body stretching, focusing on the muscles of the legs and trunk. A trainer assists him with physical therapy, manipulating his body to prepare the joints for the rigors of swinging a golf club as violently as Woods does. Everything from the kneecaps to the vertebrae are prepared for battle.
For Woods, a typical three- or four-hour workout combines light cardio exercise and some heavy lifting.
Then it's back to cardiovascular exercise. In the gym, he varies the machines he uses for this, including a treadmill, a stair stepper and a climbing machine that focuses on his upper body. Woods "loves to run, and will jog usually three to four miles, and almost always on grass,'' Deep Bunker said.
When Woods finishes his cardio workout, he moves to strength training. On high-intensity days, he lifts 80 percent of his maximum weight doing exercises such as the bench press, the shoulder press and squats. (Some people who have seen him work out estimate he can bench-press about 300 pounds.) One of the reasons Woods added 25 pounds to his frame is that he focused his weight training on lifting heavy weights in sets of six to eight repetitions.
His training involves almost anything you find in a gym?weight machines, free weights, dumbbells, medicine balls and various items for stretching and balancing, such as inflatable rubber "physio" balls and foam cylinders. But what Woods does differently from a typical weight lifter, says Deep Bunker, is that he tries to perform various exercises in movements and positions that mimic the golf swing. He works on his golf posture and grip strength while, say, lifting dumbbells.
Woods also performs many exercises that build core strength. This term, relatively new to fitness, means strengthening the muscles that stabilize your body. Core training involves keeping the torso in place while taking your limbs through different movements. This allows you to improve the muscles of the abdomen and back, key muscles needed for the twisting the body withstands during the golf swing. For instance, Woods may kneel on an inflatable ball and perform an exercise like a dumbbell curl while trying to maintain his balance on the ball. He also anchors long rubber bands to fixed positions and performs movements similar to the golf swing.
To end each session, he'll stretch out again to cool down. It's an important part of his routine?and besides, it's not as if he's in any hurry to get out of there. "He'd go for six hours in the gym if he could," Deep Bunker explained. "It's no secret how much he loves the gym."
Not anymore.
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