How far you walk during around a golf depends upon many factors. The most important one, or at least the starting point for any calculation, is the actual length of a round. If you are being pernickety, it also depends on what you count as being a round. To quote from the R&A rule book:
“Meaning of Round: A “round” is 18 or fewer holes played in the order set by the Committee. When a round ends in a tie and play will go on until there is a winner. Tied Match Extended One Hole at a Time: This is the continuation of the same round, not a new round. Play-off in Stroke Play: This is a new round.”
But for the purposes of this analysis, let's presume that round is of 18 holes, played as strokeplay. The scorecard length of a course to a certain extent dictates how far the golfer will walk, but so does the layout, as some courses have short walks from a green to tee – typically older courses are like this – however others have longer walks, especially modern ones built in the expectation that many golfers will use buggies.
So it's not just the walking involved in playing a hole, but also the walking between holes. A hole’s distance on the card is defined from the tee plate to the centre of a green, measured down the centre of the fairway. But we don't all necessarily play straight down the middle of the fairway to the centre of the green each time. We can zig zag down the fairways, and on the green there's often quite a bit of pacing around to check your line and so on.
It also depends who you're playing with as if you're playing on your own you're probably going to walk less far than you would if you are playing with somebody else because then you're potentially, getting out of their way, helping them look for their lost balls, marking your ball on the green, et cetera.
But at least two studies have been carried out into how far golfers walk during a round. In 2018, Golf Monthly attended the European Institute of Golf Course Architects conference, which included a round on the highly regarded Royal County Down Championship links, a regular Top-10 performer in our Top 100 course rankings.
The R&A’s Director of Research and Testing, Dr Steve Otto, conducted an experiment at this to see how far golfers walked during a round over this links. Tracking devices which were handed out to each player.
The playing length of the course was around 6,800 yards, or 3.9 miles. But this layout includes a reasonable degree of walking between certain holes. The results from Royal County Down were that the shortest distance walked was 5.7 miles; the longest, 7.8 miles. The later figure is twice the scorecard length; the former is 47% more. The average distance walked was 6.6 miles, or 69% greater than the scorecard yardage alone.
But this was just at one layout. Another, more extensive, study had been carried out in 2012-2013 by a golf magazine in Australia, Inside Golf. It had encouraged readers to use “GPS measuring devices or smartphone apps” to record the actual distance they walked in a round of golf and send the results in. More than 1,000 rounds, on a variety of courses by different ages and standards of player of both sexes, were entered into the survey, and the average extra distance walked was 77% more.
How many steps is a round of golf?
An average length golf course, as measured on a scorecard, is 6,000 yards or more, and one survey has found that golfers walk an extra 77% on average more the scorecard length. So on an average 6,000-yard course, golfers would walk about 10,600 yards (just over 6 miles), which equates to about 12,800 steps.
