Pro used this diet to gain ’20 pounds of muscle’

Will Zalatoris wants to say it was fun, then he almost immediately adds two letters.

“It wasn’t fun, he said.

To be clear, the results ARE. Over the past four months, after adding what he says is “20 pounds of muscle” to a body that had been 163 pounds, The barber believes he is better equipped to play golf at the highest level. His body, he says, will now not succumb to injury as easily as it has so many times since turning pro in 2018, and he will be able to swing at top speed with less effort.

“I think the best way I can describe how I feel compared to where I was before this weight gain was I thought I was at 100 percent and I still didn’t feel good,” Zalatoris said Thursday after the first round. . play in sentrythe PGA Tour’s season-opening event.

“I would have to take a few days off and rest my back, or get a series of treatments. You don’t do that anymore. It’s hard when you limit your practice to go out and play against the best players in the world. So now I think the beauty of it is that I’m trying to do this for longevity, I’m not doing this for distance. If you look at my numbers, they’re all the same, but it feels so much better.”

So how did he gain his weight?

He began a training program with performance expert Damon Goddard and followed a specific diet that he recently detailed to the Tour social media team. Below is the video and below we’ll offer some thoughts.

“It was a lot of protein, a lot of exercise,” Zalatoris said in the video. “Eating until I felt full and then eating some more.

“I had to do it. I needed more stability for my back. It just felt like all year I was reacting and not being able to be proactive about it. And now, you know, if you think about it, over my last four to five years, I haven’t had an offseason – either I’ve been rehabbing a back injury or I’ve been playing. So, you know, I only played twice this fall, so I can be at home and put on some muscle and, more importantly, work on my game.”

The diet, he said, was divided as follows:

“It was 200 grams of protein a day,” Zalatoris said in the video.

“It was somewhere between 3,000 and 4,500 calories a day,” he said. “I had to get 4,500 at least three times a week. When you weigh nothing, you just have to find a way to gain weight. So in the beginning, it was see food, eat food.”

– “The biggest thing,” he said, “was just trying to find a way to get to 200 grams of protein and not do it with more than 40 grams per sitting.”

What might this look like? Think high protein foods like chicken and turkey. (This is where we’d make a point to check with your dietitian first if you’re interested in trying something similar.)

“You know, I really wanted to make sure that I’m set up for the next seven, eight years,” Zalatoris said in the video. “Because now, at the age of 28, this is – it’s time to go.”

Editor’s note: GOLF.com recently published another article on Zalatoris — titled “Will Zalatoris Gain 19 Pounds in 4 Months. But Not for the Reason You Might Think” — and that article can be found by clicking here or by moving immediately below.

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Will Zalatoris’ season ended last year in mid-August in Colorado. He stepped off the scale that week at 163 pounds and, at 6-foot-2, was as nervous as ever, fully aware that he was determined to get even leaner. That’s what he was used to, dropping five to 10 pounds during the off-season months into the fall.

It’s just that he didn’t want to lose weight. In fact, he wanted to gain weight.

And a lot of it.

“I was tired of people telling me I have a 22-inch waist and all that stuff,” he said Thursday from the Sentry season-opening event in Maui.

But it was about more than just his waistline. Zalatoris needed to create a better operating weight for himself to be able to play at a high level, at a high speed, and for three or four weeks straight. The last few years had taught him that he didn’t have the stamina to power through the heat of a PGA Tour season.

“If you look at the weeks I’ve had throughout the year, my best weeks have always been the first and I like to play one, two, three weeks and build into a rhythm,” he said. “And the events that I’ve won as a professional, it’s like in the third or fourth week. And just, in the third or fourth week, I was down a couple miles per hour in swing speed, I wasn’t really feeling too good, I wasn’t driving it well, and it’s just hard to play here like that. I knew I had to get stronger. It wasn’t so much about speed; I know the speed will come. I needed the stability to make sure I was able to do what I’m doing.”

By that he means swinging hard and not hurting himself, which has been an ongoing saga for Zalatoris in recent years. The 28-year-old, who burst onto the scene with six top 10s in his first nine major starts, battled herniated discs late in 2022, eventually pulled out of the 2023 Masters and quickly turned to microdiscectomy surgery. He took months away from the game to heal before returning in late 2023. Last spring he almost had a win at the Genesis Invitational, but it quickly turned into more pain as Zalatoris battled a hip injury all summer .

Which brings us to the end of his season in Colorado, where he decided enough. Zalatoris took up a training program with performance expert Damon Goddard and has spent the past four months bulking up, first mentioning it to reporters during a December appearance in South Africa. When he stepped on the scale in Dallas before heading to this week’s Sentry event, she weighed in at 182 pounds: an increase of 19 pounds in just four months.

The benefit of the added weight, he said after shooting an eight-under round to start his season, is that he feels he has maintained the carry distances he seeks without going “110 percent” on the ball, putting less stress on him. his body.

“I think the best way to describe how I feel compared to where I was before this weight gain was I thought I was at 100 percent and I still didn’t feel good,” Zalatoris said. “I would have to take a few days off and rest my back, or get a series of treatments. You don’t do that anymore. It’s hard when you limit your practice to go out and play against the best players in the world. So now I think the beauty of it is that I’m trying to do this for longevity, I’m not doing this for distance. If you look at my numbers, they’re all the same, but it feels so much better.”

It’s been a long journey to feeling better for Zalatoris. He admitted Thursday that he feels so good that he didn’t even have surgery. And while it remains to be seen how those changes play out on the leaderboards moving forward, he hasn’t had a cortisone shot — a painkiller he’s relied on in recent years — since August, another sign that quick fixes are hopefully a thing. of the past.

“The ceiling is something I wanted to keep raising,” Zalatoris said, “because I knew if I was sitting at 160 pounds and trying to hit it 300 yards here, that’s not a recipe for longevity.”

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