Colder weather means more layers on the golf course. But will your swing speed suffer from it? 🤔

Colder weather means more layers on the golf course. But will your swing speed suffer from it? 🤔

For golfers across much of the country, colder weather is starting to arrive and players are layering up with extra clothes. But do these extra layers affect swing speed and distance? This is Golf Digest Mythbusters, where we explore answers to some of golf’s most common questions through a series of tests with real golfers. Here’s what we found. Two of our staffers hit a series of shots wearing different amounts of clothing. We each hit 32 drives, eight each with a normal short sleeve shirt, then adding a base layer and then a base layer plus a pullover and then finally a jacket on top of all of that to control for our energy levels changing throughout the test. We rotated between the outfits after every two shots. With each shot, we measured club head speed, ball speed, carry distance, and smash factor. The results were really surprising. Conventional wisdom figures that the more layers of clothing you have on, the slower you’re going to swing and the shorter you’re going to hit it. But our data shows a more complex outcome. In fact, both of us had the slowest swing speed and ball speed while wearing no extra layers. In other words, we got faster once the base layer was added. Adding a second extra layer didn’t really affect swing speed or distance much. But when we put on a jacket as the third layer, that’s where we really started to see our speed and carry numbers decrease. Our data shows that some additional clothing, whether it be a long sleeve base layer or a light pullover, may actually increase speed. But once you get too many layers on, speed and distance decrease. So if you’re noticing decreased distance and cooler temperatures, it very likely is not because the extra layers of clothing are making you swing slower. It could be that your body is stiff, the ball is colder, and the air is denser. So, if you’re cold on the course this fall, don’t worry that adding that one or two extra layers is going to hurt distance. Our test shows it may actually help.