Golfers fall into the trap of their wearable technology

Posted by

Tomas Greco

May 3, 2026

On May 3, 2026

There probably shouldn’t be any competition for sleep, but a wearable device at least offers an alternative.

Maybe you know the deal: Wake up, get out of bed, and, at least in my family, check for evidence that you did a better job than the other people at the breakfast table all night long.

Granted, this is childish and meaningless. The question is whether it is also counterproductive?

One of the trickiest things about the valuable information we get from our fitness monitors is how we should feel about the feedback in the moment. The topic seemed relevant last week, when I talked to my son on the morning of a college golf tournament, and he lamented that his Whoop “recovery” score was worryingly low. After this he gave his best performance of the week.

Conversely, I have had mornings when I have rolled out of bed after eight hours of solid work with all the data to prove it and still have two left in the bunker on the first hole.

such as wearable devices oops, Ora Rings, or Apple Watches can certainly provide directional guidance on healthy decisions. If my Whoop reports that I’m not getting enough sleep, I prioritize going to bed earlier. When my workout doesn’t get my heart rate up to a high enough level, I try to increase the intensity for the next time (Golf Digest’s Drew Powell and I too) Recently an experiment was conducted to investigate How our performance changed based on increased heart rate, and the findings were…complex).

The trap we fall into is when we make those readings the final arbiter of our performance ability. Jeremy Jamieson, a psychology professor at the University of Rochester, who has Contributed to my “Mind Games” series, Heart rate variability (HRV) sounds like it’s an insightful metric, but it can be a misleading measure of our resilience. A general point from Jamison is that our interpretation of stress is more influential than stress itself, and this extends to low HRV.

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“You may be thinking you have less resilience today because you’ve noticed that whatever happened to your internal body had a greater impact on it,” says Jamison.

Performance coach and author Steve Magness made a similar observation About runner Don Bowden, who broke the American mile record on a day when he couldn’t sleep properly and was taking an economics final. This was in the era before wearable devices, but if they had been around, Bowden would likely have been encouraged not to run it or expect a bad outcome.

This part extends beyond perception. Stanford psychology professor Dr. Alia Crum has researched the “nocebo effect” of negative beliefs promoting negative outcomes. Golf example: You walk up to a hole where you rarely play well, run through a checklist of all the bad shots you’ve hit there before, which creates a physiological response that leads to another bad shot.

But the opposite is also true. For example, when Crum studied people’s beliefs about stress, he noted that those who believed stress could help responded better than those who believed it was harmful.

“We have found across multiple studies that a greater stress mindset is associated with better health outcomes and higher performance,” Crum said recently.

So, back to golf, the answer is to treat your wearable device as a tool, but one that can easily be dismissed. As performance coach Jason Goldsmith said, every low reading on your screen is also an opportunity to prove it wrong.

“You have to have a little bit of that chip on your shoulder,” Goldsmith says. “You have to say, ‘I appreciate this device. It’s very helpful, but I’m not going to let it affect the rest of my day. I’ll show up and do what I need to do anyway.'”

This article first appeared in Low Net, a weekly newspaper written by an average golfer for an average golfer. To get low net, Sign up for Golf Digest+.

Do you have a topic you’d like me to explore? send me an email here samuel.weinman@wbd.com With your feedback.