The Loop

A new strategy to lower your score: More coffee!

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Shutterstock / Valentyn Volkov

August 31, 2015

For the coffee-addicted among you, we come with excellent news. A recent study of college-aged golfers suggested a moderate dose of caffeine could shave two strokes off your score.

Auburn University researchers, who we stress were not in any way funded by Starbucks, studied 12 male golfers playing 36 holes over two days. Half were given a 155 milligram supplement of caffeine (about the equivalent of a cup of coffee) and half were given a placebo. According to the study, players who took caffeine scored two strokes lower, drove the ball further, and hit more greens in regulation.

In other words, lattes on us!

That coffee in any way could help your golf flies in the face of a long-held belief that coffee makes you jittery, and thus impacts your short game. There was no evidence of this in the Auburn study, which adds credence to overall findings about the positive impact of coffee on exercise. In one study from the British Journal of Sports Science, subjects who consumed coffee before running 1,500 meters on a treadmill completed their run 4.2. seconds faster than those who didn't.

Of course, many of these studies emphasize moderate coffee intake. Otherwise you might end up like this:

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Cy Cyr