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ENGLEWOOD, Colo. -- Is golf really a sport or just a hobby?
Is it a good walk spoiled, or should we forget the walk and ask Santa for a golf cart this Christmas?
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Would a PowerBar help more than an apple after nine holes, or should we forget 'em both and just wolf down another candy bar and Coke?
And do you really have to have Tiger Woods' biceps to be any good?
A sports scientist pondering these and other 19th-hole kind of questions crunched a bunch of numbers and came up with answers, a few of which put a new twist on some age-old assumptions.
Among the top findings: Given the number of calories burned, it's certainly OK to call golf a sport.
"One of the more interesting things I found was that the actual act of swinging a golf club takes significant energy," said Neil Wolkodoff, director of the Rose Center for Health and Sports Sciences in Denver.
Maybe more energy than many people might think for a motion that takes a grand total of about 3 seconds.
Wolkodoff found eight male volunteers, ages 26 to 61 with handicaps between 2 and 17, strapped them into some state-of-the-art equipment and took them out for a few rounds of golf on the hilly front nine of Inverness Golf Club in suburban Denver.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I was one of the subjects, and I blame the somewhat bulky equipment for every bad shot I hit during the experiment.)
Wolkodoff discovered the subjects burned more calories when they walked and carried their clubs (721) than when they rode in a cart (411). When they walked, they traversed about 2.5 miles, compared to 0.5 miles when they rode, but the 500 percent increase in mileage corresponded to only a 75 percent increase in calories burned.
The conclusion was that the act of swinging the golf club could actually be considered good exercise -- a theory many on the "not a sport" side of the golf debate have long questioned.
"As far as physical exertion, it's not the same as boxing, but it's definitely more than people thought," Wolkodoff said.
