[HN Gopher] Golfing Is Not Rowing
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Golfing Is Not Rowing
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 77 points
Date : 2025-12-24 21:44 UTC (5 days ago)
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| illusive4080 wrote:
| When I play golf, I just play to have fun. I'll take 2 shots here
| and there. I don't keep my score. I've met a few scratch golfers
| who will secretly tell you that they don't enjoy golf anymore. It
| is at that point it transforms from a hobby to an obsession, a
| line which I'm unwilling to cross.
| sklarsa wrote:
| In my experience as someone who started learning how to golf in
| their 30s, you need to be playing at least 4x a week to get
| good enough to start enjoying it in the first place. Unless you
| like shanking balls 5 yards, looking for lost balls in the
| woods, or picking your ball up near the green because the rest
| of your group has already finished the hole. Which to me, is no
| fun at all.
| maccard wrote:
| I also picked it up in my 30s - twice a week for a year with
| lessons along the way is enough to get you to sub 100, and
| it's perfectly fun to play at that level. Going lower than
| that does take more effort though.
| NickC25 wrote:
| Thing is though, the more you play, the more expectations you
| have (or don't have depending on your seriousness).
|
| I used to play frequently, and would be constantly unhappy
| with my round because I put effort into the game. Due to
| costs increasing, job being more demanding, and just having
| other things to do, I've golfed very little this year.
|
| I've played 2 full rounds this year, spent very little time
| on the range (much more on the putting green, as my
| residential building has a small turf green that I can just
| noodle around on at any time) and expected zero from each
| round.
|
| Ironically, those two rounds have been by and far the best
| rounds I've ever played in my life. For one of those rounds,
| I actually took a small-ish but still decently sized dose of
| magic mushrooms. 2 of my playing group were serious golfers
| and completely sober, and they were blown away by how relaxed
| i was when i was tripping. I was calm, relaxed, and enjoying
| my golf but still completely locked in and focused, and still
| tripping. I was like +6 through the front 9 from back tees,
| which in my book is fucking amazing as I generally shoot low
| 90s.
| jandrese wrote:
| The real goal for a bunch of golfers is to get to the point
| where they're not the slowest guy on the team and stop there.
| At that point you can network on the field without annoying
| the people you're trying to schmooze, but also not show them
| up. It's about who you are playing with, not the game itself.
| creaghpatr wrote:
| I loved this. Having recently transitioned from running
| ultramarathons to trying to break 100 on the course, I figured I
| already had the discipline to brute force effort my way by
| hitting balls 4-5 days per week. It wasn't until I worked with a
| coach and rebuilt my swing from scratch that I began to see any
| improvement and I actually got worse in the beginning for weeks.
|
| One thing the two sports have in common is that good decision-
| making has much more leverage than in short distance sports like
| swimming and shorter road races (and presumably rowing, I
| wouldn't know). Most of my score improvement in golf so far has
| been due to making better shot decisions on the course rather
| than improved shot execution. Feels like a life metaphor in there
| somewhere but im sensitive about becoming one of _those_ ppl who
| compare everything in life to golf.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| Decision making is really important for people that can play
| golf well. I've played with a buddy a couple times and every
| time it's eye opening to see how he is practically playing a
| different game than me. I'm just trying to get the ball in the
| hole, get par if I'm lucky. On the other hand, he knows, most
| of the time, that he can get par quite easily. Instead, the
| game becomes about positioning, club selection, and approach;
| if I'm being honest, though, those concepts aren't even part of
| my game. I'm just trying to finish, to _play_ the course, while
| he 's trying to _beat_ the course.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You can get in the weeds with complex decision making even
| when you suck. Say you hit your 3 wood 200 yards and you are
| 200 yards away from the hole. Course management would tell
| you that you hit your 9 iron well x% more often than three
| wood so maybe try and hit it twice laying up instead of the
| hero shot. Then there is the true reality unbound by theory
| like course management is, where if you thin the hell out of
| that 3 wood it is still going to skip forward at least 130
| yards making it a safer shot than the 9 iron with a risk free
| attempt at the green coupled in.
|
| Taking a moment to consider the green before you chip on is
| also a simple concept that would benefit golfers of all
| handicaps. Setting yourself up for easier putts or the chance
| to roll the ball in off the chip just takes awareness rather
| than skill and repetition.
|
| Golf is one of the more interesting sport just from a
| standpoint of how many considerations you are making and how
| lies aside from the teeshot are often so unique.
| creaghpatr wrote:
| >Then there is the true reality unbound by theory like
| course management is, where if you thin the hell out of
| that 3 wood it is still going to skip forward at least 130
| yards making it a safer shot than the 9 iron with a risk
| free attempt at the green coupled in.
|
| Yes, I improved when I accepted that the objectively
| correct decision based on a perfect shot execution was not
| necessarily the _right_ decision for _me_. Subtle but
| crucial distinction I didn 't have at the beginning and had
| to develop with experience.
| bruce511 wrote:
| If you go to a golf coach to "learn golf", they will
| teach you how to hit the ball. A crucial step, no doubt,
| but that's well short of "playing golf".
|
| Golf is first understanding _what_ to do, then executing
| it. It 's a risk/reward balance. Yes, execution will fail
| sometimes (ok, often), but at least _trying_ the right
| thing is better than successfully expecting the wrong
| thing.
|
| In so many ways, it's just like software development.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| Planning to play your 25th percentile shot, instead of trying
| to execute a 90th percentile shot saves like 10 strokes a round
| easy. Golf skill is narrowing the distribution, not improving
| the max.
| dogmayor wrote:
| Good decision-making is critical to golf. If you're interested
| in furthering your development, I highly recommend Decade[1].
| Great resource.
|
| [1] https://decade.golf
| huhkerrf wrote:
| > Some activities have smooth progress bars: rowing, knitting,
| cycling, climbing, bodybuilding, etc.
|
| I am being pedantic here, but bodybuilding/strength training
| definitely does not have a smooth progress bar. You need to be
| prepared for there to be weeks, or even months, where you are
| just not lifting what you were able to before.
| ekr____ wrote:
| This is actually true for many forms of physical training,
| including not just strength training but also endurance
| training (running, etc.) Plateaus and injuries aside, the basic
| principle of training is overload followed by recovery, and
| it's not uncommon during the overload phase to have high levels
| of fatigue and minimal improvement if not regression.
|
| This is something a lot of casual athletes don't notice because
| there is a very steep development curve for the untrained, so
| you just getting better very quickly. Once you have been
| training for years, gains come much slower.
| astura wrote:
| I mean.... None of those activities have smooth progress bars.
| It's not pedantic to point out the entire premise is flawed.
| huhkerrf wrote:
| I don't doubt that the other ones aren't smooth either. I
| just have no experience with them to say one way or the
| other.
| maccard wrote:
| Doubling down here on the analogy - I used to row, and the
| progress is anything but smooth. There are absolute massive
| leaps that come from a years worth of training wit very little
| to show for it in the middle.
|
| I do like his point about taking all the mulligans though!
| bob1029 wrote:
| Rowing (and all other forms of exercise) are definitely non-
| linear in progression. Most of the time the progression is sub-
| linear, but rarely you get the other thing too.
|
| From 2013~2023 I would struggle to row 10km in any duration. My
| typical daily routine would be 2~3km. From 2023+ I can row 10km
| every single morning 365 days a year without any issues.
|
| Some kind of step-wise change occurred about 2 years ago. It
| wasn't a gradual or linear event. I vividly recall a day where
| I just kept going and going without paying attention. I finally
| look down and there was 14km indicated on the display. At this
| point I figure I can do 4km less than that every day since it
| wasn't too bad. 80% of it seems to be psychological. The human
| body is incredibly adaptive, even over short time frames.
|
| Confidence is probably the most important thing in making
| progress with things like weight lifting. _Definitely_ in
| Olympic lifting. I 've seen people go from a 135lb to a 225lb
| clean & jerk in one day with a good coach.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| > strength training definitely does not have a smooth progress
| bar
|
| Not at intermediate or advanced levels, but for beginners on a
| well designed program like "starting strength" it typically
| does.
| ekr____ wrote:
| Right. Basically, beginners in any sport are naive to
| effectively all training stimuli, and so they will respond to
| a wide variety of inputs.
|
| Once you get adapted it gets harder and harder to find new
| stimuli that will trigger new adaptation without breaking you
| down too much. If you're interested in running, Steve Magness
| and Jonathan Marcus talk about this quite a bit in the On
| Coaching podcast
| (https://www.scienceofrunning.com/podcast-2?v=47e5dceea252).
| sailingparrot wrote:
| The author is talking about progress within one game/set/race
| not over the long term. In lifting during your first rep you
| can notice that your stance was slightly too wide and adjust it
| for the other 4 reps. Just like in rowing if your first paddle
| is a bit out of sync you can fix it.
|
| The point is those are activities with highly repetitive
| efforts and you can adjust after each one with feedback.
|
| Golfing is not like this, if you miss your first swing, you
| can't micro adjust for the second one, because it's going to
| take place under completely different conditions where the
| feedback you just got does not apply usually.
| d-us-vb wrote:
| That is not my read on the post, and your point doesn't
| really make sense. The objective of all these activities is
| measurable improvement. The practical discipline in each
| practice session for each activity is the bare minimum to
| improve and every activity has it. The point of the post is
| that some activities tend to see consistent, linear
| improvement over the long term where others tend to see
| droughts/plateaus.
|
| Running is a great example because a dedicated runner, even a
| hobbyist, can expect to see 3-5% improvement in
| speed/endurance or whatever every season. But no runner
| expects to see improvement during a single run. But the same
| isn't true for activities like golf or language acquisition
| (my own example).
| ekr____ wrote:
| Running improvement isn't actually like this, except for
| beginners.
|
| First, you actually do quite a bit of periodization at the
| season level, so you might have a long base block, followed
| by a more stamina/quality oriented block, then race
| specific sharpening, followed by taper and an A race, and
| then rest. Improvement is distinctly non-linear across
| these phases, and you'll actually start each season fairly
| far behind where you were at your peak.
|
| There are also plateau effects, where you've basically
| adapted as much as you can to an existing stimulus and you
| need to find new ways of triggering adaptation.
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| > A golf game is 65-75 swings over ~5 hours
|
| Aaaah! If only it took me that many swings I'd die a very happy
| person.
|
| (5 hours is waaaay toooo long to torture oneself).
| dcrazy wrote:
| Don't forget the 40-50 putts. :)
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| Play with friends that are willing to grant generous gimmes.
| ptzolov wrote:
| Golf is like rowing, like knitting, like learning a new language.
| If you start without instruction, you'll build bad habits that
| stay with you forever. You can row as hard as you want, but
| without proper technique, you'll never get faster. Golf is the
| same. Effort doesn't equal improvement unless it's guided. If you
| start with fundamentals and practice them intentionally, you will
| get good. But if you repeat the same shitty swing for 10 years
| with no feedback, you'll end up exactly where you started.
| miyoji wrote:
| > If you start without instruction, you'll build bad habits
| that stay with you forever.
|
| > Effort doesn't equal improvement unless it's guided.
|
| This obviously has to be false. Progress is made, people learn
| better ways to play golf and do all the other things. At the
| frontier, people simply MUST be doing self-guided
| experimentation and learning from objective results, and since
| this has always been true, there was once someone who could not
| play golf at all (because no one could) who figured out how to
| hit a ball with a club correctly on their own, without learning
| from anyone else, because that person was the first person who
| did it. Thus, self-guidance must be possible and self-
| improvement must also be.
|
| > But if you repeat the same shitty swing for 10 years with no
| feedback, you'll end up exactly where you started.
|
| You always have feedback. If your ball doesn't go where you
| intended, your swing was bad in some way. If you keep doing the
| same thing without making adjustments based on measured
| outcomes, yeah, you won't improve. But you can try different
| things and figure out what works and what doesn't without ANY
| instruction or outside guidance.
| Cpoll wrote:
| I agree in principal, but: The people at the frontier aren't
| alone at the top of a mountain, they still have each other
| for guidance. The master that transcended limits while in
| isolation is a literary trope.
| miyoji wrote:
| This doesn't contradict my point at all, I agree entirely
| that people work with each other and it's a great way to
| learn. And obviously people aren't going to achieve what
| took tens of thousands of person-hours at the highest level
| in one lifetime on their own. One does need to stand on the
| shoulders of giants and all that.
|
| But the OP was making a much stronger claim, that it is, in
| principle, impossible to learn anything on one's own, and
| that HAS to be wrong, for the reasons I listed.
| someone7x wrote:
| For what it's worth that tracks with me experience in video
| games.
|
| When I sat with 30 other testers for 6 days per week I
| achieved mastery I did not believe possible. Eventually I
| could cakewalk even the most difficult challenges in those
| games and I was generally recognized as a highly talented
| tester.
|
| Meanwhile I've sunk more cumulative hours alone into Elden
| Ring and I have accepted I will never reach that same level
| of mastery.
|
| It's a humbling realization how much of my prior greatness
| was actually just my environment at the time.
| arkh wrote:
| > people simply MUST be doing self-guided experimentation
|
| And self guided exploration is a skill in itself which you
| have to learn. You can experiment for years and get nothing
| of it because you don't even measure anything. You can find a
| local maximum and, not knowing the concept, never try
| something radically different.
| kyleblarson wrote:
| There are basically zero players on the PGA tour right now
| who were self taught. For the next generation of pros, if you
| are not a plus index player by the time you are around 13 you
| have no chance whatsoever.
| rokob wrote:
| I think with rowing in particular due to certain counter
| intuitive parts of the stroke you absolutely can get nothing
| out of years of self exploration.
| ifbutwillagan wrote:
| I appreciate the goal of this article... But everything has
| plateaus. Progress is never linear.
| winslett wrote:
| For golf, you don't try harder, you relax more. At the highest
| level of sports, even rowing, I suspect it's similar. Only in
| golf do we compare the outcome of a ball flight -- we think we
| row similar to professionals, but there a ton of difference, you
| just can't see it in the result of ball flight.
|
| My go-to golf philosophy book is "Cheng Hsin: The Principles of
| Effortless Power":
|
| > To relax, you must surrender your mind-even the notion that you
| have a mind. You will find that relaxing your mind is the same
| thing as relaxing your body. There should be no separation
| between your mind's activity and your feeling-awareness of bodily
| sensations and impulses. Feel yourself letting go so that your
| body isn't "held" so much--this requires doing the same thing
| with your mind. When you relax your tissues, nervous system,
| organs, the muscles around your organs, every-thing, then the
| energy will flow. It is this very relaxation that allows for the
| energy, or feeling-attention inherent in your body-being, to
| circulate, develop, and be utilized.
|
| Don't know how this affects daily writing ;)
| nradov wrote:
| Have you done any rowing? There is certainly some technique
| involved and you can't be all tensed up. But at the highest
| levels everyone has excellent technique. As an endurance sport,
| performance largely comes down to VO2 Max and pain tolerance,
| plus a bit from height.
| jebarker wrote:
| Analogies all the way down.
| herbertl wrote:
| While this is a super interesting post, and worth contemplating,
| I do not think it is a useful story for the majority of aspiring
| writers, who often are very good at thinking themselves into a
| creative block. (Aspiring writer being someone who wants to
| write, but isn't writing yet)
|
| > Programs like NaNoWriMo mislead aspiring writers. "Write every
| day" is great advice, but the first 90% of writing a book is
| often not writing -- it's thinking/planning/researching. There
| are other golf clubs in that bag. Many writers only start
| "writing" once their ball is very nearly in the hole.
|
| To use the author's analogy, NaNoWriMo is useful for encouraging
| the aspiring writer to actually show up tothe golf course or the
| rowboat, because most people who want to write have talked
| themselves out of it.
|
| (I would be curious to learn more about the "many writers"
| claim.)
|
| It's also worth considering how writing a book/post/whatever
| contributes to an overarching body of work. Two quotes come to
| mind:
|
| "Every novelist spends their life writing the same story over and
| over." Danielle Chelosky
| https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/writer-and-music-j...
|
| "My subject matter doesn't vary so much from book to book. Just
| the surface does. The settings, etc. I tend to write the same
| book over and over, or at least, I take the same subject I took
| last time out and refine it, or do a slightly different take on
| it," Kazuo Ishiguro says to The Guardian.
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2015/jan/16/kazuo-ish...
|
| I think it's more useful to see writing literally as part of the
| thinking/planning/researching process, not as separate from it
| and thus soil for a creative block.
| d-us-vb wrote:
| Completely agree. NaNoWriMo solves a problem that the author
| doesn't even mention. And I like your point that writing is
| part of the thinking process. Indeed, Richard Feynman claimed
| that his notes were his thoughts. He saw no distinction between
| them, and that useful fiction was important to him making
| progress.
| wombat-man wrote:
| I found this post to be very encouraging. I'm kicking around some
| novel ideas and mostly I am just building some lore documents.
| Glad I'm not the only one.
| thih9 wrote:
| > Golf cannot be played in tidy 1-yard increments.
|
| Sure, but it requires tidy increments of effort and practice. At
| least according to advice from a reddit thread about golf[1].
|
| > To make a golden necklace, you must start with gold.
|
| But maybe practice with silver or copper necklaces first, or
| you'll waste time and money for no good reason.
|
| [1]:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/golf/comments/sgppbe/whats_the_best...
| e.g.: "Get a lesson to identify flaws and get drills to work on
| said flaws. Go to the range and practice those drills to get them
| down. Rinse. Repeat."
| dcrazy wrote:
| The golf swing is extremely non-intuitive for several reasons,
| not the least of which is the physics of trying to swing a hunk
| of metal at the end of a 3-foot rod around your body at 100mph.
| Fixing one thing will often send something else out of whack.
| Improving the golf swing requires system-level analysis, trying
| new things to see what else is affected, and then fixing the
| regressions.
| mdwhatcott wrote:
| > There are real tigers in those woods.
|
| Nice little nod (on a post about Golf) to Tiger Woods.
| H1Supreme wrote:
| > Golf is not so smooth. Yes, each round is a state-dependent
| game of error-correction (i.e. Zeno's Paradox). But golf swings
| are coarse actions -- few swings per game, with no recourse for
| fine adjustment between swings.
|
| This is a bit of a contradictory statement. The "error-
| correction"'s are typically fine adjustments between swings.
| Small adjustments to setup, backswing, tempo, etc. are exactly
| the sort of thing a golfer adjusts during a typical round.
| chubot wrote:
| I like this framing!
|
| One analogy I'd make is alternating periods of
| - "grinding through tests", making them green, and -
| deep design work (ideas often come in the shower, or on a
| bicycle)
|
| If you just grind through tests, then your program will not have
| a design that lasts for 3, 5, or 10 years . It may fall apart
| through a zillion special cases, or paper cuts
|
| On the other hand, you can't just dream up a great design and
| implement it. You need to grind through the tests to know what
| the constraints are, and what your goal is! (it often changes)
|
| ---
|
| So one way I'd picture programming is "alternating golfing and
| rowing" ... golfing is like looking 100 yards away, and trying
| your best to predict how to hit that spot. If you can hit it
| accurately, then you can save yourself a lot of rowing !!
|
| Rowing is doing all the work to actually get there, and to do it
| well
| Vaslo wrote:
| "A typical golf game is 65-75 swings per game"
|
| I wish...
| testbjjl wrote:
| > A golf game is 65-75 swings over ~5 hours.
|
| For Tiger Woods
| whycombagator wrote:
| This number likely isn't counting putts. Which for someone
| taking that many swings/shots will be 35-50 putts on top
| bitwize wrote:
| Bodybuilding does not have a linear progress bar. Sometimes you
| train and train and train and see little or no progress, and you
| need your coach to come make adjustments to your diet, routine,
| or supplements (incl. anabolic "supplements") in order to break
| the logjam.
|
| Source: Not a bodybuilder but know enough bodybuilders to have
| heard this story many times.
| thehappypm wrote:
| "A golf game is 65-75 swings over ~5 hours."
|
| What about the back nine though?
| rkomorn wrote:
| Beautiful comment.
| rokob wrote:
| This guy golfs.
| jmclnx wrote:
| They never golfed with me, double the swings and then triple
| the time I take to find my ball. I have the hardest time find
| things, not just in golf :)
|
| So I guess I would get a decent workout by all the walking I
| do. FWIW, I have not played golf for over 30 years due to
| having a hard time finding the ball.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Just some nitpick:
|
| Bodybuilding, and many other sports, follows logarithmic growth.
| Lots of progress in the early years, until you reach peak and
| start plateauing.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| A few years ago, I went skiing and rode a chairlift with a novice
| skier and some of her friends.
|
| She kept complaining that, as soon as she got into a rhythm, the
| ground would change and she couldn't maintain her rhythm.
|
| She didn't "get" one of the fundamental points of skiing; one
| that is so basic that it's rarely explained. _Part of the fun of
| skiing is that the ground changes and varies and is not
| repetitive. A ski trail is not an exercise machine._
|
| The archetype of the article is the fallacy that, when someone
| learns something new, they think the same kind of patterns will
| emerge that formed some other activity. Golfing is a low-impact
| sport, rowing isn't. Skiing isn't repetitive and mindless like an
| exercise machine.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I wouldn't call golf low impact. If you walk 18 it's 5 or 6
| miles with 25lbs on your back. Many pros tend to blow up their
| back and require surgery in their early 30s. Even amateurs can
| suffer from back or hand issues. It may not be intense cardio
| like rowing but the body is certainly being used towards its
| limits along some vectors and being put at risk for injury.
| Swinging a weighted metal rod at 100+ mph sometimes with all
| that force going right back from the ground you chunked into
| your wrists and spine.
| JonoBB wrote:
| It's lower impact than most other sports (excluding sports
| like darts or bowls, of course).
|
| There's a reason that (i) professional golfers have a longer
| career than most other professional sports and (ii) many
| sports people transition to golf later in their career and
| (iii) there is a high preponderance of older players in golf.
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