How Everything started
WHOOP… You may have heard of it. This is what got me started on a reflection about the importance of the heart rate in golf.
Actualy that’s not entirely correct. WHOOP sparked something that I remember from a long time ago. About achery, where the master of it actualy slows down there heart rate, and wait for the moment between 2 heart beat to release the arrow in the smoothest way possible.
Even tho I know this is probably impractical to to that in golf. I couldn’t help the feel that it might have something interesting to investigate hear.
So when I heard about this technology, through an interview that Rory Mcilroy have done on the Whoop podcast, I started thinking that it could be worth trying and see what it can help me doing.
Also the second reason I got into it is the fact that over the past year I have struggled a lot with boom and bust in my energy. Where I go on and on for weeks or even month, to then completely crash, and not being able to manage to do anything usefull.
If there is one part in my training I didn’t manage well until now, is my train VS recorvery time. Which has caused me some serious burnout in the past.
So those 2 things got me started on Whoop, and I decided to give it a try and see what happened.
First experience.
I receive my Whoop. Now what ?
I started just observing the data through out my day, and so on. And as I got familiar with the app, and the different data that were displaying. I started understanding myself better.
After that I decided to go on the practice range just to test, out of curiosity. I wanted to answer this simple question, What does my heart during a practice sessions.
And it blow my mind!
After a few shots my heart rate got through the rough. I was hitting ball with my heart rate between 140-160 bpm.
Then I start, willingly to reduce my heart rate, just to see how it feel to have an heart rate, lower than what I am used to on the practice range. I did that because in my mind they were no way, I had an heart rate that high on the golf course.
What I found is even more interseting. It was harder to hit shot with a lower heart rate! BOOM!!!!!
Hypothesis on Heart rate corherence
At this moment I connected the dots. Why is it that we are performing better on the practice range than on the golf course ? Why is there a differnce ?
My hypothesis is that we are training with a very high heart on the practice range, which is completely incorherent compare to physiological state that we experience at each shots during a golf course.
Also, when we have a very high heart rate, we have more oxygen, in our brain, which ultimatly increase our focus and awareness.
I think that we need to develop a coherence between the practice range and the golf course in term on physilogical and psychological state. Which is primarly dictate by heart rate at any given time.
Collecting data and validating hypothesis
But I had only on side of the board now. I needed to go on the golf course to test if actualy my heart rate is lower that on the practice range.
In order to identify what is my normal range. So I can build a clear strategy to train on the practice range and build a heart rate coherency between practice range and golf course.
This is what i did. Here is the first golf course I did since I have my Whoop:
I am not going to repeat my analysis of this golf course here.
You can go directly to my blog post about it. But in summary my heart rate is between 110-120 on average on the golf course.
As a consequence, this where I need to train.
Conclusion
Heart Rate Coherence. Realy interesting new concept. I am going to apply it from now on during my training, and keep analysing my heart rate.
We will see if that help. But I can’t see why it can’t. As golfer we are looking for maximum consistency. And the sligthest bit of change in our physilogical or psychological state can have drastic impact on our game.
So I am pretty confident that this is something important that I should not overlook.