Even with a sweetly struck drive, it’s obvious that an old, cut up golf ball won’t perform optimally in the air, or roll true on the smooth, freshly cut putting surface of each green. In the same vein, a tired, stressed, and demotivated golfer won’t perform at their best either!

Having read the title, you may be wondering, what does ‘daily wellness’ have to do with golf? In fact, what does ‘daily wellness’ even mean?! In this blog we will focus on the importance of understanding and logging specific items each day and how, ultimately, this can improve your golf.

As an example, a fatigued golfer could analyse their average sleep duration over the previous week alongside energy levels and motivation to understand whether they’re getting enough shut eye! If the duration isn’t an issue, but the sleep quality is low then we may need to consider the non-golf stress levels or other reasons this might have changed.

Monitoring each of these components allows you (and your coaches) to put interventions in place that can improve your energy levels and motivation to practice, play and train. Knowing if the non-golf stress levels are high may not give us the full picture, however, it’s a great starting place to a discussion and realizing that changes are likely required in order to optimize you again.

To help with these discussions, the AMI Sports: Golf app allows you to not only log these different measures, but use the Personal Monitoring area and see your ‘Sleep Data’ averages over the past 7, 30 and 90 days providing insights into whether sleep has been an issue over a recent or more sustained period.

Further down in the Personal Monitoring area you can also check out the comparisons between ‘Motivation to Practice/Play/Train & Energy Levels’ and ‘Non-Golf Related Stress & Perceived Recovery’ on the line graphs. These provide important comparisons where answers can be found and discussed further. It makes sense that with lower energy levels, you’re less likely to want to train or play golf. However, if your Strength & Conditioning coach or personal trainer doesn’t know about this, they may continue with the plan to work you hard in the gym and wonder why your performance has dropped!

Finally, built using the latest research^1,2, you will notice the different measures consider the perception of both your physical and mental well-being/recovery.  Why is this important? Well, as an example, it allows you to see that when stress levels increase it can mean that the golfer’s perception of recovery reduces and vice versa giving you further insight into the root causes. Therefore, building some stress relieving activities (such as yoga, socialising with family and friends, relaxation etc.) into your week can ultimately help you recover better in time for your next round of golf.

Each of the measures you log on your ‘Daily Wellness Survey’ provide valuable insights to both you and any coaches who are supporting you to optimize your golf. Ensure you log them every day to get the most value from your data and engage in supporting discussions with those who have access to your reports.

Your team on AMI Sports: Golf

Remember to visit the ‘Team Members’ section in your profile and add relevant coaches into ‘My Team’ using their email address. At the start of each week they will automatically receive your weekly AMI Sports: Golf monitoring report.

References

1. Gabbett, T. J., Nassis, G. P., Oetter, E., Pretorius, J., Johnston, N., Medina, D., … & Ryan, A. (2017). The athlete monitoring cycle: a practical guide to interpreting and applying training monitoring data. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 51(20), 1451-1452.
2. Saw, A. E., Main, L. C., & Gastin, P. B. (2016). Monitoring the athlete training response: subjective self-reported measures trump commonly used objective measures: a systematic review. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 50(5), 281-291.