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How Does Sleep Impact Your Scores?

A new study looked to see if the quality of your sleep/recovery impact how you perform on the golf course?

The study authors were Gregory J. Grosicki, William von Hippel, Finnbarr Fielding, Jeongeun Kim, Christopher Chapman, and Kristen E. Holmes.

This study was done on professional golfers, but the lessons apply to the rest of us.

The study

The researchers connected wearable data (sleep plus cardiac metrics like resting heart rate and HRV) to actual competitive results. Not practice, not “how you felt,” but real tournament performance.

They had a big sample: 389 male professional golfers, 521 competitive events, and 35,140 nights of sleep and biometric monitoring.

The stats

Here are the averages across the group in key metrics:

Sleep duration (7.21 hours per night): How many hours they slept

Sleep consistency (69.1%): How steady your sleep schedule is. Higher means you go to bed and wake up at similar times most days.

Recovery score (59.1%): A “how ready is your body today?” number based on sleep and other body signals. 59% means somewhat recovered, but not fully recharged.

Resting heart rate (55.9 bpm): How fast your heart beats when you’re truly resting (usually during sleep). Lower often suggests you’re calmer and more recovered; higher can signal stress or fatigue.

HRV (64.2 ms): A measure of how much variation there is between heartbeats, which reflects stress and recovery. Higher is usually a sign your body is handling things well, but your personal baseline matters most.

Then they wanted to know, when golfers have better sleep and better recovery, do they tend to play better?

Their answer was yes. Sleep and measures of heart “function” were associated with performance for tour pros, and this showed up both between golfers and within the same golfer over time.

When you look at the same golfer over time, a 10-point improvement in sleep consistency was linked to about 0.19 fewer strokes per round, and a 10-point improvement in recovery was linked to about 0.24 fewer strokes per round. HRV helped a little. A 1 ms increase in HRV was linked to about 0.02 fewer strokes.

You need to remember that pro golfers are working hard to shave fractions of a stroke from their scores. While two or three tenths of a stroke may not seem like much, at the PGA Tour level that is going to make you a nice extra chunk of cash.

My thoughts

“I’m tired today.”
“I didn’t sleep great.”
“I’ll be fine once I warm up.”

This study suggests there is more going on. If sleep consistency and recovery can correlate with performance for pros who already have everything dialed in, it is hard to argue it does not matter for amateurs who juggle work, kids, stress, travel, late meals, early tee times, etc...

What does this mean for you?

Chase consistency more than the perfect night. Try to keep your sleep and wake times within about an hour, especially leading up to rounds that matter.

Use recovery as a planning tool. If you track anything (WHOOP, Oura, Garmin, even just resting heart rate), use it to give you guidance. On low recovery days, you may want to avoid a marathon range session for example.

Limitations

This is observational research, not a controlled experiment, and the data is from male professionals. The study was funded by WHOOP, and the authors are WHOOP employees with stock options, and the data is not publicly available. None of that invalidates the findings, but it is context you should know.

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