Exercise

There are a lot of debates about whether golf is a true “sport.” Tired of hearing people whine, I’ve decided to make “fitness” and “exercise” the focus of this week’s Numbers Game – the true “sport or not” debate can wait for another time.

What is not debatable is the fact that you get quite a bit of exercise in golf-related activities. How much? I’ll break down my previous year and see just how many calories I burned and maybe how to change a few things to burn a few more.

Distance
A lot of people walk for exercise. Mark Twain called golf “a good walk spoiled.” Golf courses vary in length and terrain so it is hard to estimate the amount of walking you are spoiling. Just for the sake of an example, let’s use a 6500-yard golf course. If we put that in miles, it would be:

6500 yards * 3 feet per yard / 5280 feet per mile = 3.69 miles

Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t play golf in a straight line. Also, there isn’t anyone to take me to the next tee. I’ve never measured the actual distance or amount of steps taken, but I would bet that there is at least an extra 50% added in there. So lets say the total distance walked is:

3.69 miles * 1.50 = 5.54 miles

OK, so we have a distance walked… and walking is good exercise but some of us tote our bags. Some of us have a pull cart. Some of us ride. So how do we account for that and get an idea of how many calories we are burning not walking those miles, but swinging our clubs as well? Thank goodness for the web.

Calories
I found multiple sites that gave caloric values to golfing while riding, carrying or using a pull cart. I came across CalorieLab.com, a website that lets you enter your weight and get an approximation on the amount of calories you would burn for each activity. This wasn’t done on a distance, but a per-hour basis. Heck, they even had a category for hitting balls, which I do quite often per year.

I took my last year of golfing and golf-related activities and compiled the below chart for the amount of calories I was burning per round.

               Walking        Riding        Hitting Balls
Rounds           25            25               45
Avg time (hrs)   4.5           4.5              1
Calories/hr      300           220              177
Total calories   33750         24750            7965

I burned a total of 66,465 calories in golf-related activities last year. Not too shabby! However, I take issue with a couple of these numbers. First is that walking only burns an extra 80 calories per hour over riding in a cart – I find this a bit hard to believe.

I split my time between carrying and walking because most courses down here only let you ride in the morning. Outside of restrictions, I’ll carry any chance I get. So I have a good idea on the amount of effort in both and how I feel after a round… and I know I feel like it was more than 80 calories per hour, especially in the hot Carolina sun.

There are some websites that say that it can be as much as 487 per hour. Of course this same website claims 310 to ride, but the differential is 177 (or 57% instead of 36%) and closer to what I imagined it would be.

So let’s assume the calories/hr for walking is 390 and riding is 250. That keeps the differential at 140 (56%)… what does that do to my totals? It pushes it to nearly 80,000 calories.

The other thing I thought was interesting was the 177 calories per hour when hitting golf balls. I thought the number would be closer to the riding calorie rate. Even though you are not doing the amount of walking, you are taking at least 3-4 times more swings with a golf club in an hour long range session than you are on the course. Walking (around the green, from cart to ball, etc) takes more energy, but I don’t think it is that much more than riding a golf cart and hitting range balls. Again, in the summer, that sun makes it feel like a lot of work on the range.

Still, at least we now have an idea on the amounts of calories one can burn during the golf season. Unfortunately there is the ugly side of golf and calories.

Consumption
Beer. Hot Dogs. Chips. Tiger may have a banana, but there are some people that associate golf with drinking. Not me, but there are plenty of them. Here is a list of common items you would see at a golf course being consumed in a typical round and their caloric content

Product             Calories
Lite Beer (can)        10
Regular Beer (can)    150
Soda/Pop/Cola (can)   155
Powerade (bottle)     120
Hot Dog with bun      200
Hamburger with bun    325
Banana                 90
Crackers              280

Want to down six bottles of Bud? That will be 900 calories… and we know that you won’t be carrying that Bud around, so don’t tell me you’re going to work it off by walking. So you’ve already put all but 90 of those calories back into your system. I’ll concede that those types of golfers aren’t concerned with how many calories they are burning.

If I look at my typical consumption during a round, it would be, at most, a package of crackers and a Powerade. That would be around 400 calories. I would say that I do that every other round, so make it 200. I usually have a water bottle that I keep full. If I walk, I’m netting around 1150 calories burned during my round. I feel pretty good about that and it feels like a fair number.

Thoughts
Many golfers (myself included) don’t like to introduce a lot of sugar during a round of golf. I’m not interested in getting a sugar rush when standing over a five-foot downhill slider.

I’m probably not going to change any of my habits when it comes to golfing. I enjoy walking when I can, but riding doesn’t bother me. As we have passed more than a month or so into the new year and also broken many of our new-year resolutions, this is not only a good way to look forward to the golf season and maybe look at how golf can help better ourselves… at least on the physical side. The mental side is still torture.