How Derek Rebuilt His Body Around Golf

Derek has spent three decades reshaping what it means to compete. Golf fitness is his latest form.

At twelve years old, Derek Lacelle landed his first job at a golf course outside Ottawa. He cleaned clubs, picked the range, and shagged balls through the morning, then played nine holes in the afternoon before his parents came to collect him. A junior membership cost two hundred and fifty dollars. Mondays meant lessons. Everything after that meant golf.

By eighteen he was carrying a three or four handicap. University pulled him away from the game for a while, the way it does. He came back to it in his mid-twenties, and he has never really left it since. That is the thread worth pulling, because it runs through everything Derek has done in the thirty years since he first picked a range: at his core, he is an athlete. The form keeps changing. The identity does not.

From the Range to the Gym Floor

Derek spent close to fifteen years as a personal trainer before he ever wore a uniform. He started broad, the way most trainers do, then found his niche in golf and built it into his own venture, DL Golf Fitness. Ottawa gave him a ready audience for it: a city full of golfers with the time and the means to invest in their game, and a growing appetite for training built specifically around the swing. He earned his TPI Level 3 certification, added the Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist credential, leaned into corrective work, and learned to read how a body moves through the golf swing and what it takes to help it move better.

That question, how the body moves and how to make it move better, has stayed with him ever since. It is the same question DRVN is built to answer.

“You want to be a powerful athlete. You have to be explosive. You have to be strong.”

A New Command

When Derek moved into Canadian Forces Morale and Welfare Services, his relationship with sport shifted from competing to building. Ottawa is the hub for Canada’s military headquarters, home to thousands of members, and as a Sports Coordinator and fitness instructor with Personnel Support Programs, Derek’s work is to keep them moving: coordinating sport and fitness events, supporting members as they prepare for their annual force evaluation, and running competition from the regional level up through the national championships. He already leads golf fitness programming for military members across the Ottawa-Gatineau region.

Golf holds a strong following inside the forces, and Derek has made it his mission to grow it. Canadian military golfers compete base against base across the country, and the very best go on to represent Canada internationally through CISM, the International Military Sports Council. Wherever the game shows up in the forces, he wants golf fitness to show up alongside it.

When His Body Asked for Something Different

For years Derek trained in a CrossFit style, and he competed hard, including on the floor at Wodapalooza in Miami. It built a serious engine. It also added up. Between his back and his wrist, he had collected the kind of wear that a lifetime of high-impact, high-volume training tends to leave behind, and coming home from Florida he was simply tired of being sore.

He wanted something he could sustain. He found it in DRVN. The lower repetitions, the core and anti-rotational work, the movement sequencing he had not been doing in his everyday training: the change showed up fast. His back pain faded. He kept getting stronger at the sport he cared most about. And he found room to add back the things a beat-up body had crowded out.

“This is something that, as I am getting older, I can sustain. I can still get stronger. I can get better at the sport I want to get better at.”

Why DRVN

Ask most people to picture golf fitness and they will picture rotation: bands, cable stacks, chops. Derek sees further than that. To him, a golfer is an athlete first, and athletes need to be powerful, explosive, and strong enough to move real weight. DRVN gives him the major lifts and the super-sets he wants, then layers in the golf-specific work on top. Just as important, it trains the body evenly. The single-arm and single-leg work builds stability and closes the imbalances that years of purely bilateral training can quietly open up.

It is also for more people than the scorecard suggests. DRVN runs on tracks, a performance path, a lifestyle path, and a thirty-minute option for the time-crunched, so the program flexes to the athlete rather than the other way around. One of the coaches Derek trains alongside, a woman managing several injuries of her own, took to the anti-rotational core work immediately. She is not a golfer. As Derek tells it, that is the point.

“You do not have to be a golfer to follow this program. This is lifestyle.”

Coaching the Next Generation

Derek coaches roughly four classes a week out of Orleans CrossFit on the east side of Ottawa, and he still takes on personal-training clients. He also serves as a strength and conditioning coach for the Ottawa Valley Golf Association’s junior development team, working with elite young golfers between eleven and eighteen through the off-season, alternating in-person and virtual sessions. The plyometric and power work at the heart of DRVN has become part of what he brings to those kids, planting the athlete-first mindset early.

What Comes Next

Derek’s next move is a golf-specific specialty class at his gym, most likely a standing Sunday-morning session, opened up beyond the membership to Ottawa’s wider golf community. The demand is there to be captured: more than thirty courses sit within a short drive, and Derek has already watched older members wander over mid-workout to ask what he is training for. The answer, more often than not, gets them reaching for their phone to look up the app.

It is a familiar pattern for anyone who has watched Derek work. He believes in the program because it has worked on him, and belief like that tends to travel.

DRVN Certified Pro

Derek Lacelle is a DRVN Certified Pro. He pursued the certification as professional development and worked through the curriculum coach by coach, marking the pieces that spoke to the golfers he serves and the ideas he wants to carry into his community. The credential complements the qualifications he already holds and gives structure to a philosophy he was already living.

Three decades on, Derek is still an athlete. The only thing that has changed is how many people he is bringing with him.

Find Derek Lacelle

Derek Lacelle is based in Ottawa, Ontario, and coaches out of Orleans CrossFit on the city’s east side. View Derek’s profile or find a certified coach near you in the DRVN Golf directory.