GolfForever Trainer Spotlight: Meet Andrea Doddato, Golf Digest Top 50 Golf-Fitness Trainer
Andrea Doddato has been involved with professional golf for the past 30 years, 23 of which has been working in golf fitness, training over 50 tour players. Featured on ESPN, The Golf Channel, Golf Digest, Golf Digest Schools, Golf Week, Golf Week for Her, PGA Tour Radio, TPI Presenter and Speaker. She grounds herself in the biomechanics of the golf swing/body connection focusing on correcting swing flaws through various restorative methods.
Andrea Doddato has spent a career changing the way golfers think about fitness
Long before Andrea Doddato made a career out of fitness, she was a 14-year-old girl watching ESPN on a day home from school.
Growing up in upstate New York, Doddato loved being active. She built forts, climbed trees and played just about any sport she could. But her family lived far enough from town that going to a gym wasn't practical.
Then she stumbled across the popular 80s and 90s instructional fitness and exercise series “BodyShaping” on ESPN.
Doddato was fascinated. She went to Kmart, bought a weight bench and began working out at home. It wasn't about appearance. She wanted an edge.
“I wasn't the most talented. I wasn't the fastest,” Doddato said. “But I wanted to do anything I could do to jump higher, run faster – anything to gain an edge.”
When her soccer coach challenged the team to return after summer vacation capable of doing 50 consecutive push-ups, Doddato went to work. By summer's end, she was the only girl who could do all 50.
Those early workouts foreshadowed a career that has now spanned more than 35 years.
Doddato worked as a trainer during college while spending summers caddying on the LPGA. After college, she worked at Golf Channel in production, but something didn't quite fit.
Co-workers and those walking by her in the grocery store routinely asked her what they should eat, how they should exercise or what Doddato did to train her own body.
Eventually, the answer became obvious.
Why not combine fitness and golf?
That wasn't necessarily an easy sell in 2001. Golf-specific fitness was still relatively new, particularly on the women's professional tours. Doddato remembers golfers worrying that lifting weights might make them stiff, damage their swings or even cause injuries.
Tiger Woods helped change everything.
“Tiger took our industry to the next level, the golf fitness industry,” Doddato said. “He was a pillar of fitness.”
Young players saw Woods’ success and followed. Gradually, training became less an oddity and more an essential part of golf.
Doddato’s career evolved, too. She attended golf biomechanics school and initially worked extensively with elite players. Today she is one of the key instructors for GolfForever and her clients range from 5 years old to 91.
And that's changed how she thinks about fitness.
Rather than simply building strength, Doddato begins by assessing what an individual’s body needs. One person might lack mobility. Another might need stability. Sometimes a joint restriction prevents a golfer from moving properly.
“It's more about mobility and stability than anything else,” she said.
Once golfers understand why they're struggling to make a particular movement, Doddato often sees a lightbulb go on.
“When people see the results on the golf course, everything speaks for itself.”
GolfForever has become another important tool in that process.
Doddato, a Top 50 Golf Fitness Professional in America by Golf Digest, uses the GolfForever Swing Trainer with virtually every client at some point, appreciating its versatility and ability to help golfers feel movements that can be difficult to replicate with a club.
“GolfForever is a no-brainer,” she said. “There are 100 different things to assess and work on with it.”
Her work has taken GolfForever beyond her own clients, too. Doddato has twice traveled to Hualalai in Hawaii to conduct GolfForever-specific training classes and has shown golf instructors how the Swing Trainer can complement their own teaching.
More than three decades after beginning her career, Doddato once assumed she might be doing something completely different by this point in her life. Instead, she's more fascinated by her profession than ever.
Golf fitness is no longer reserved for elite players looking for a competitive advantage. It's for golfers who want more distance, better movement, fewer limitations – or simply the ability to keep playing the game they love.
“This career that I've had, I've been in it for over 35 years now, and it keeps getting better and keeps evolving,” Doddato said. “The sky is the limit with golf, golf fitness and what it all entails.”
