To most golfers, it’s more than just a game. For many, it’s an excellent way to get their minds off their day-to-day works, whereas for others, it’s more like a lifestyle or a part of their routine that they can’t think their lives without.
Is there any health benefits of Golf?
Golf is an enjoyable, awesome socializing game that excellently keeps your brain and mind thinking and strategizing. And as a whole, this favorite outdoor activity can be a lifelong way to keep both your physical and mental health in check.
In this article, we’ll get to know about several incredible Golf health benefits along with some other benefits in our life that may find many in surprise.
Health Benefits of Golf
The benefits of golf encompass improvements in both physical and mental states across all the age groups.
Golf contributes a lot to a healthy lifestyle. Check out our Q/A regarding this topic with Porch here.
Here, we’ll put some light on the significant benefits that youths, adults, or seniors can avail by playing golf.
Physical Benefits of Golf
If you happen to be one of those who think how a slow-paced game like golf would physically improve your health, we have the following points to make that may add to your surprise.
Outdoor Exposures
This one is pretty obvious. You’re bound to outdoor exposures when playing the game that requires as large as 200 acres of open land. Constant exposures to green open fields help you relax your body and flex your bones and tendons as you keep wandering throughout the course.
Read: How to relax playing golf?
Besides, the exposure to the bright sunlight allows your body to soak in as much vitamin-D as your body needs for improving your skeletal health by adequately balancing the mineral levels.
Strong Bladders and Muscles
This one seems to go without noticing most of the time, but no one can rule out that visiting the friendly beer-cart girls around the course can give your bladder the run at times. Learning to hold it longer can strengthen your bladder’s capacity.
Also, for some women players, golfing provides an efficient way to strengthen their leg muscles. More specifically, it helps steady the quadriceps during the crouching maneuvers few people use who can’t hold it.
Weight Loss
If you’re wondering how golfing would help you reduce weight, let me start by saying, it takes a lot of walking to cover 40 to 200 acres of land.
Indeed, if you ditch the cart for foot, an average course will make you cover around 5-7 kilometers, at least. And if you start carrying your clubs on your own, it’ll pave you the way for even more calories to burn. To be more precise, a golfer can burn up to a thousand calories within a single game if it involves more walking, swinging, and carrying.
Better Heart Rates
Golfing can always lead you to pretty handsome bits of exercises for your heart. Like the walking, swinging, and carrying helps you burn calories, they also help increase your heart rates by keeping up the rhythm of its pumping, and therefore, improving the blood flow. Besides, it enables you to fight off harmful cholesterol levels efficiently to reduce the risks of heart diseases and maintain balanced blood pressure.
Better Vision
The game of golf requires natural zoom-ins and zoom-outs frequently by each round. The small white ball, be it merely a yard away or flying miles above the ground, you are to learn to track it with your eyes. It not only helps improve your vision but also improve hand-eye coordination.
Lower Injury Risks
The leisurely sport of golf leaves you with lower injury risks compared to other outdoor sports since it’s mostly a non-contact game. It instead is a game of strategy, accuracy, and coordination that involves several low-impact physical activities that engage your body muscles.
Read: How To Prevent Blisters On Foot & Hand From Golf Shoes?
Revitalizing Sleep
Since the game involves a steady amount of bodily exercises with all the walkings, swingings, and carryings, it’ll get your body significantly tired. So at the end of the day, when you crash in your bed, your tired body konks out more quickly for a profound good night’s sleep. And the deeper sleep you get, the more capable your body becomes of regenerating the cells to repair your tissues and muscles much faster.
Mental Benefits of Golf
Being in a natural setting and playing golf has lots of positive impacts on your cognitive, emotional, attentional, subjective, spiritual, and above all, mental well-being. Here’s how.
Reduction of Anxiety and Stress
Golf will help alleviate your stress. Playing the game is indeed a great way to be in the outdoors and interact with fellow golfers who share the same interests as yours. It undoubtedly helps you forget all the troubles. Walking through the greeneries, chit-chatting with friends will surely uplift your body and mind for a better release of endorphin, which is a natural mood-enhancing chemical within the brain that makes you happier and more relaxed.
Social Interactions for Mental Well Being
Whenever it comes to sociability through sport, there’s hardly a game that would beat golf. Golfers can discuss everything regarding friends, family, personal interests, business, golf clubs, bags, and so forth while teaming up in groups. These interactions provide every individual with the opportunities of meeting others, making new friends, and enhancing relationships to avoid all the negativities of loneliness and isolation.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the likes of positive interpersonal interactions, exchange of similar interests, and social participation are some of the most crucial protective aspects for developing the right mental balance.
Focusing the Mind
A recent study by Killingsworth and Gilbert has found that people tend to be less happy when their minds are continually wandering without focusing on anything particular. When you’re able to focus on a specific task, on the other hand, your engaged mind is less likely to drift around a bunch of negative and stressful thoughts.
And that’s what makes golf the perfect way to deal with such a rattling mind. The game requires a significant amount of focus and concentration. Throughout a single game, you are to keep an eye on the holes, the ball, the force necessary for a proper hit, and the right trajectory needed to score.
Benefits of Golf for Youths
The game of golf is equally great for kids and teenagers to get involved with. They can grow both physically and mentally by hitting the course, which is also an excellent place to meet new people and a place to develop new life skills. Golf can be beneficial to youths in the following ways.
Outdoor Experience
Kids in our societies these days are more inclined to constant immersion in technologies and gadgets than enjoying outdoor sports. Golf gives them the scope to be active and spend time on developing healthier habits. It helps them form a sense of a healthy lifestyle and the spirit of appreciating the beauty of nature.
Socializing
Kids and teens can discover newer ways of socializing just the way adults can. The entire golfing environment is an excellent course for social interactions that the youngsters can benefit from. The game can embed essential social skills in their mind in a fun and healthy way.
Self-improvement
The challenging sport of golf helps the youths analyze both their weaknesses and strengths at a young age that can surely benefit them in the long run. With the professional instructions, critiques, and all sorts of guidelines, not only can they develop their swinging skills but also self-improvement skills like patience, focus, discipline, and etiquette.
Golf Health Benefits for Adults
The unique game of golf benefits the adults the most with all the physical and mental goodness we’ve discussed above. While regularly playing the game enhances your physique and stature, it reduces the chances of anxiety, depression, stress, and panic attacks as well.
Health Benefits of Golf for Seniors
The physical and mental health benefits of golf that we have so far discussed imply not only for the youths or adults but also for older people in their sixties, seventies, and even eighties. Since the chances of outdoor activities and sports get limited for them as they grow older, the low-impact game of golf can serve as the best possible medium for them to indulge in outdoor enjoyment.
Moreover, many studies have shown that seniors benefit more than the average people in some cases.
For instance, the game helps them keep up their brain cell stimulations, which reduces the chances of failures and strokes by a substantial margin compared to those who do not play golf.
Besides, a recent Swedish study has shown that golfers live longer than those who don’t play the game by an average of six years.
Other Benefits of Playing Golf
Other than health benefits, here are a few more ways you can benefit from golf.
Benefits of Playing Golf for Business
You can benefit from playing golf professionally by building new business connections with the interactions with so many people of different spheres.
The game will provide you with ample opportunities to learn essential things about your colleagues or clients when you team up with them in the course. And it gives you great chances to demonstrate your wonderful behavior (or dubious?), and tactical words to turn the cards on your side.
You can read out the business acts of your client beforehand by studying their behaviors in the course. After all, quick-reacts, sulks, and temper tantrums after a missed shot say a lot of stuff without words.
And you can always analyze things about yourself as well. Observing your own acts during games can shed light on how your business tendencies really fair. You can test yourself whether you’re a risk-taker or not by taking a few risky shots. The level of attention you put in the game can well indicate how attentive you are in your own work planning.
But above all, the game of golf is undoubtedly a great medium to tie bonds with new business buddies by which you can enrich your professional thoughts and ideologies. More so, it opens up fantastic opportunities to increase the sales of your goods or services as well.
Benefits of Playing Golf Alone
Despite the questions “Can you play golf alone?” or “Should you play golf alone?” playing golf solo provides tons of advantages that every golfer would love to avail. You’ll find our detailed discussion about solo golfing here.
Benefits of Playing Golf for Self-Discipline
Golf helps you develop a sense of self-discipline more practically. It requires you to be courteous when interacting with others on the course. The likes of communicating with respect and exchanging handshakes after each game is among the shared responsibilities that build humility and respect in golfers.
The game makes you time-conscious too. When you’re scheduled for the tee at nine, you must be ready and present within eight fifty-five; a minute late, and you’re disqualified.
Golf is for gentlemen; golf is of honor. On the occurrences of transgressions, it involves volunteering confessions for the sake of the game, which imbibe the traits like fairness and integrity in players.
Regardless of how easy it may look, golf is one of the toughest games to master that needs consistent endurance, persistence, and practice. Whoever embraces these qualities for the game gifts themselves with similar attributes in different aspects of their life.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
1. Is Golf good for your health?
Ans: When you consider all the graceful benefits that golf provides you with both your physical and mental health, no doubt playing the game is good for health.
2. Is golf good for your brain?
Ans: Playing golf requires constant activeness of your brain, which helps increase your brain stimulations and keeps the cells healthy beyond decades.
3. Is golf good for stress?
Ans: Absolutely. Recent statistics show that stress levels in golfers (22.5%) are comparatively less than average people (25.8%).
4. Can golf keep you fit?
Ans: Without a fraction of doubt. The controlled swingings, walkings, and regular outdoor exposures will undoubtedly help you keep a good shape.
Read: How to get in shape for Golf?
5. Can you lose weight by playing golf?
Ans: Why not. Since the golf cart isn’t an essential part of golf, you can always stroll the distances between the holes, which can measure up to seven kilometers of walking. That should be enough to burn your calories, and if not, you can do the carryings yourself to lose a few more.
In Conclusion…
The assortments of health benefits that you achieve through golf take the game to a higher level than most other sports. When you envisage the array of life-changing physical and mental health benefits it provides, it becomes more evident that the sport is more than just putting a small hard ball into a tiny hole.
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