Image courtesy of FootJoy

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By Guy Yocom
Late the night preceding the 1919 U.S. Open playoff between Walter Hagen and Mike Brady, the Haig was partying up a storm, oblivious to the rigours that lay ahead. “Walter, shouldn’t you be turning in?” a friend pleaded. “Mike’s been in bed for hours.” Replied Hagen, “Mike may be in bed, but he ain’t sleeping.”

Our sympathies to Brady, who lost to Hagen by a shot the following day. But it’s doubtful the challenges of sleep in 1919 match what tour pros confront today. The modern player faces time-zone changes, irregular tee times, myriad hotel rooms, crying children, unfamiliar beds, halls filled with the sounds of slamming doors, elevator bells and yahoos returning from late-night forays. And those are small compared to the anxiety of swing changes, bad bounces, unpleasant pairings and how the family you left at home is doing.

Yet, tour players somehow appear perpetually fresh and well-rested. Maybe it’s just their youth, but their strides seem as bouncy at the conclusion of a five-hour round than at the beginning. So is sleep really that important? And how much are tour players sleeping really?

“We hear a lot about diet and exercise, but very little about sleep,” says Nick Littlehales, former chairman of the U.K. Sleep Council and a sleep coach who advises many professional sports teams in Europe. “It’s always surprised me, because all of us know from experience that sleep is not only vital, but perhaps the most important aspect of our well-being of all.”

Indeed, tour pros provide little in the way of details about that aspect of their lives. They regularly post on social-media photos of their workouts, meals and other parts of their training and recovery, but little about sleep. It’s understandable why Rickie Fowler is more apt to post photos of himself in the gym than slumbering in eye mask and pajamas. Still, it’s surprising players don’t address it more.

Jetta Productions

The springboard for curiosity about the subject is, of course, Tiger Woods. His recent disclosure of a sleep disorder in the midst his DUI arrest in May may have been a surprise to those who don’t know him, but was actually well known for years. At least a decade ago, Woods was telling people that he rarely slept more than three hours a night, which, glint-eyed and alert as he always looked, even for his regular dawn-patrol practice rounds, seemed to evidence that he was superhuman. Today, his invincibility gone but the insomnia still there, it just seems unhealthy. Rory McIlroy talked in January of a text he’d received from Tiger at the unholy hour of 4 a.m. “Up lifting. What are you doing?” it said.

But other strange sleep patterns among golfers have emerged through history. Doug Sanders, whose lifestyle and nightlife habits in his prime would make the aforementioned Hagen blanch, told me he deliberately never slept more than four hours a night. “It was a choice,” he said. “I didn’t want to sleep a third of my life away. Going to sleep was like ruining a bad dream.”

Laura Baugh, one of the LPGA glamour girls of the 1970s who, though winless, made a good living at the game, told me she slept only two hours, sacking out at 4 a.m. then rising at 6 a.m. to iron and listen to the radio.

Even the great Bobby Jones had trouble sleeping, able to doze off only after ingesting a meal and a couple of stiff highballs.

Short-hour sleep tales are the most compelling. But long-duration sleepers raised an eyebrow, too. Jack Nicklaus was famous for sleeping into mid-morning in a one-room motel with his young children raising cain all around him. Michelle Wie claims to have slept 16 hours continuously once, and says she doesn’t feel good unless she slumbers for at least 10.

And then there are the sleep opportunists. Boo Weekley is like that, often falling asleep under a tree during hunting trips. So is Gary Player, who is known for falling asleep at the moment his plane takes off, the roar of the turbine engines a soothing balm.

But to the point: How much are current players today sleeping? Given the alternating starting times of the first two rounds of a PGA Tour event, not to mention the sometimes early times for Wednesday pro-ams, the irregular waking hours have to put a crimp in the total amount of shut-eye players get.

We put the question to a number of PGA Tour pros seeking not only average numbers but insight on how they got there. Most sleep experts judge a healthy night’s sleep as one between seven and nine hours, though it depends on the individual. A fat segment of tour players we talked to are smack in that zone.

Snedeker, Wie and Casey all have their own unique sleep stories

“I’ve always slept eight hours,” Paul Casey says. “But it took some effort to establish that. When I first came on tour I used to tape over everything in the hotel room that emitted light, including the little red light on the smoke alarms. I taped the curtains together, put a towel at the base of the door, even covered the clock next to the bed. It was so dark, I once walked into the closet instead of the bathroom.”

Brandt Snedeker sleeps eight hours, too, but recalls that on the eve of his first Masters in 2008 he slept only three hours, his mind racing certain tee shots he’d face the following day. “After it dawned on me that one tee shot wasn’t going to decide the whole tournament, I started sleeping better,” he says. “In fact, I started sleeping so deeply that I had a recurring dream of holing an 8-iron from 159 yards on the 18th hole. It’s very vivid. But I haven’t lived the dream yet.”

Jim Furyk is an eight-hour guy, though he seems wistful when he talks about his teen and college years, when he would snooze for 11 hours. “After I got married and had kids, I started sleeping like a baby—I was up at 4 a.m. just like they were. But it’s settled down.”

Tony Finau sleeps eight hours as well, but surprisingly, does better on the road than at home. He and his wife, Alayna, have three young children. “We’ve been trying to at least improve the quality of our sleep by conducting a full-on bed search,” Tony says. “We’ve tried gel beds, a water bed and even the reclining models advertised on TV infomercials. We haven’t found the perfect one yet.”

Also in the eight-hour camp are Zach Johnson (“My physio guy can’t sleep and is jealous”), Bryce Molder (“I do it with kids, too”), Justin Leonard (“A better diet has helped”), Stewart Cink (“Sometimes only seven because I’m a clock-glancer, thanks to almost missing an early tee time early in my career”) and Matt Kuchar (“I can go 10 easy, but it’s usually eight, especially when I’m contending”) and Billy Horschel (“I didn’t sleep the night after I criticized the greens at Chambers Bay”).

“What matters most is the sum of the sleep you’re getting, not the duration,” he says. “If a person can sleep for 1½ hours five times a day or, even better, 2½ hours three times a day, research has shown that they get pretty well rested. It’s not ideal, but it’s realistic. What I call the ‘poly-phasic’ approach will guarantee a pretty high level of alertness and awareness when you’re awake.”

His advice to tour pros, or anyone who finds shut-eye in short supply, is to get it where you can. “If you can grab an 1½ hours on a plane flight, fine. An afternoon nap—the old ‘siesta’—terrific. We’ve got to find creative ways to shut down our brains down into that paralyzed state we call sleep.”

This shouldn’t be a hard concept for tour pros to grasp. After all, their livelihoods are spent consumed by an activity where they’re adding up numbers and posting a score. It’s just that in the game of sleep, you want to go high rather than low.

The post The trickiest challenge for a tour pro? A good night’s sleep appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

Groove a more powerful hip action in your downswing with this drill
By Mark Gregson-Walters
With Robbie Greenfield

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ore than just about any other layout on the European Tour, the Earth course here at Jumeirah Golf Estates has proven to be a stage for the best ball strikers in the game. Guys that can hit the ball long and high have a tremendous advantage on a layout that can stretch to over 7,700 yards and features greens that are so firm and undulating, they repel mis-struck approach shots to some tricky spots.

On some tour stops a hot putter can get the job done, but you need more than that on Earth, as evidenced so clearly during Henrik Stenson’s record-breaking 2013 performance in which he only missed a couple of greens the entire week.

Solid ball striking is critical to success in the DP World Tour Championship, and it’s also what most amateurs strive the hardest to improve. The drill illustrated here will give you instant feedback, and should lead to some good results, too. It’s a sensory exercise that positions your body in such a way that allows you to feel the correct hip action on your downswing for better ball flight and distance control. Most golfers are familiar with the idea that the lower body ‘leads’ on the downswing, but in an effort to clear or ‘fire’ their hips, a lot of amateurs get the sequence of movement badly wrong.

The reality is, the hips must work downward first, allowing weight to transfer from your trail heel to the toes, before rotating through impact. By turning your back foot outward at address, the position of your bones forces the muscles in your trail leg and hip to move correctly to strike the ball. Follow the steps below on the range, and watch the quality  of your ball striking improve.

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The beauty of this drill is in its simplicity. All you’re doing at set-up (and you can practice this with anything from wedge shots to a 6-iron) is turning your trail foot out to a 45 degree angle, ensuring that your knee joint stays in line with your toes. By moving into this position, it forces your bones to move in the correct way for good hip action during the golf swing

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Stability is a vital ingredient in any good golf swing. When you analyse the best swings on tour, something they all share in common is the way they use the ground to generate force. From this position at the top, amateurs can give up energy and get out of sync by trying to immediately rotate their hips towards the target. What you should aim to do from here though, is feel your hips work back down, and your weight shift from your trail heel to the ball of your foot.

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So long as you have kept your trail knee pointing over your toes during this drill, feeling your weight shift from heel to toe on the downswing will really give you the feel for how your hips move back into position ready to rotate and convert this ground force into a powerful connection with the ball. If you slide laterally with your hips from this position, it’s impossible to feel your weight moving onto your toe and you’ll know you haven’t performed the exercise correctly.

Mark Gregson-Walters is the European Tour Performance Institute Director of Instruction

Photos by Farooq Salik

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