‘It was see food, eat food’: 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, Zalatoris believes he’s better equipped to play golf at its highest level. His body, he says, now won’t succumb as easily to injury, as it had multiple times since turning pro in 2018, and he’ll be able to swing at top speeds with lesser effort. 

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

“I would have to take a couple days off and rest my back, or get a bunch of treatment. Not doing that anymore. It’s hard when you’re limiting your practice to then go out and play against the best players in the world. So now I think the beauty of it is 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? It took some work.

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

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

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

The diet, he said, broke down this way:

— “It was 200 grams of protein daily,” Zalatoris said on the video. 

— “It varied anywhere between 3,000 and 4,500 calories a day,” he said. “I needed to get 4,500 at least three times a week. When you weigh a buck nothing, you just need to find a way to put on weight. So at the start, 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 could that look like? Think of high protein foods such as chicken and turkey. (It’s here where we’ll note to consult your own dietician first, should you be interested in trying something similar.) 

“You know, I really wanted to make sure that I’m setting myself up for the next seven, eight years,” Zalatoris said on the video. “Because right now, at 28 years old, this is — it’s go time.”

Editor’s note: GOLF.com recently published another story on Zalatoris — headlined “Will Zalatoris gained 19 pounds in 4 months. But not for the reason you might think” — and that article can be found by clicking here or by immediately scrolling below. 

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Will Zalatoris’ season ended last year in the middle of August in Colorado. He stepped off the scale that week at 163 pounds and, at 6-foot-2, was as wiry as ever, fully aware that he was set to get even skinnier. That’s what he’d grown accustomed to, dropping five to 10 pounds during the offseason months in the fall. 

Only, he didn’t want to lose any weight. In fact, he wanted to gain weight.

And a lot of it. 

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

But this was about more than just his waist. 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 in a row. The past 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 that I had throughout the year, my best weeks were always the first of a stretch, and I always loved playing one, two, three weeks and building in a rhythm,” he said. “And the events that I’ve won as a professional, it’s been in like the third or fourth week. And just, by the third or fourth week, I was down a couple miles an hour in swing speed, I didn’t really feel very good, I wasn’t driving it great, and it’s just hard to play out here like that. I knew I needed to get stronger. It wasn’t so much about the speed; I know that the speed will come. I needed the stability to make sure that I was able to do what I’m doing.”

By that he means swing hard and not hurt himself, which has been an ongoing saga for Zalatoris in recent years. The 28-year-old, who stormed onto the scene with six top 10s in his first nine major starts, battled herniated discs toward the end of 2022, eventually pulling out of the 2023 Masters and quickly resorting to a microdiscectomy surgery. He took months away from the game to heal before returning at the end of 2023. Last spring nearly featured a victory at the Genesis Invitational, but quickly devolved into more pain as Zalatoris battled a hip injury throughout the summer. 

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

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

“I think the best way I could describe how I’m feeling compared to where I was before this weight gain was I thought I was at my 100 percent, and it still didn’t feel good,” Zalatoris said. “I would have to take a couple days off and rest my back, or get a bunch of treatment. Not doing that anymore. It’s hard when you’re limiting your practice to then go out and play against the best players in the world. So now I think the beauty of it is 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 toward feeling better for Zalatoris. He admitted Thursday he feels so good, it’s like he didn’t even have surgery. And while it remains to be seen how these changes show themselves on leaderboards moving forward, he hasn’t had a cortisone shot — a pain killing injection he relied on in recent years — since August, another sign that the quick fixes are hopefully a thing of the past.

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