Is Women's Golf Finally Rethinking How Female Athletes Are Assessed?

Golf can tell you almost everything about a swing. Clubhead speed, launch angle, body rotation, the position of the hands at impact. There is enough information to keep coaches and their launch monitors occupied for a considerable amount of time.

What those numbers cannot necessarily tell you is why something has changed.

A golfer starts losing speed. Her back becomes troublesome. A movement that once worked perfectly well is suddenly identified as a technical fault.

The instinct is to correct the swing.

But what if she is struggling with fatigue, poor recovery or iron deficiency? What if the supposed fault is actually a perfectly reasonable movement for her anatomy?

And what if golf has spent decades measuring women against an idea of the ideal swing that was never designed around them in the first place?

These are the questions being explored by the Ladies European Tour (LET), where a growing emphasis on female athlete health is challenging long-established assumptions about biomechanics, injury prevention and sporting performance.

At the centre of that work is Dr Danny Glover, Chief Medical Officer of the Ladies European Tour and Director of the LET Performance Institute.

I spoke with Dr Glover about the limitations of male-derived sports science, the overlooked role of breast support, the importance of menstrual and iron health, and whether golf’s extraordinary collection of performance data could eventually help identify health problems before they develop into something more serious.

His answers reveal how much there is still to understand about the woman behind the swing.

Is Golf Trying to Fix Movements That Aren’t Actually Wrong?

For years, the search for the ideal golf swing has helped shape coaching methods and performance assessments. But if the original reference models were developed predominantly around men, there is an obvious question about how accurately they reflect female anatomy.

Is a woman’s golf swing being judged against the wrong definition of “normal”?

In many ways, yes. Most of the biomechanical models, coaching cues and “ideal” positions in golf were built from male players. Women differ in pelvic width, hip structure, joint laxity, the distribution of muscle mass and, of course, breast tissue.

If you take a male template and measure a woman against it, normal female movement can start to look like a fault. I’m not saying there’s no such thing as poor technique in women. I’m saying we need female reference data before deciding what’s an error and what’s simply how a female body organises the swing.

How much of lower-back, neck and wrist pain is swing mechanics versus strength, recovery, workload or health?

Mechanics matter, but a change in mechanics often matters more. A player who has swung a certain way for years has usually adapted to it, so I’m far more interested when something shifts. That might be a swing change, new equipment, a compensation for a niggle elsewhere, or a sudden jump in practice volume.

As in any sport, injuries in golf are multi-factorial, and it’s rarely one single factor. When I see a back, neck or wrist problem, I’m looking at how much the player has been hitting, travel, sleep, strength and conditioning, recovery and her general health, as much as at the swing itself.

The key thing we can influence is tissue tolerance. If a player builds her capacity through well-structured training and proper recovery, her body can cope with the load the swing puts through it. Injury tends to happen when the load outstrips that capacity. So the swing is often where the injury shows up, but not always where it starts.

Could we have spent years coaching women out of movements that suit their anatomy?

I think it’s very likely in some cases. Hip and pelvic rotation patterns, how a player creates width, and how she uses ground force can all legitimately differ in women.

If a coach works to “fix” a movement that was actually a sensible adaptation, the player can lose speed or shift load somewhere less able to cope with it, often the lumbar spine or the lead wrist. The honest answer is that we don’t yet have enough female data to say exactly where that line is. That’s precisely the gap we’re trying to close.

From Menstrual Health to Sports Bras: What Has Golf Overlooked?

The conversation about female athlete health has become more prominent across sport, but greater attention has also brought its share of sweeping advice.

From menstrual cycle-based training schedules to assumptions about what constitutes appropriate sporting support, Glover argues that individual experience and reliable evidence must come before convenient rules.

How much can menstrual health affect training, recovery, injury and performance, and what should golfers track?

For some women, very little. For others, a great deal, and that variation between individuals is the most important point.

There is currently no good evidence to support a blanket approach where every player trains, recovers or competes differently according to the phase of her cycle. The best research so far, including large reviews pooling dozens of studies, suggests any average effect of cycle phase on performance is small and inconsistent.

The differences between individual women are far bigger than the differences between phases. Telling a whole squad to back off in one phase or push hard in another isn’t supported by the science, and it risks making women feel their bodies are a limitation.

What does matter is how the cycle affects that player. Symptoms such as pain, heavy bleeding, fatigue, poor sleep, gut upset and mood changes can clearly affect training quality and recovery. Heavy bleeding is also a major driver of iron loss.

So rather than a phase-based plan for everyone, I’d encourage players to track:

• cycle length and regularity
• bleeding heaviness
• symptoms and how severe they are
• sleep and energy
• how training and competition felt

Over a few months, patterns appear, and then you can individualise. A missing or irregular period is not a performance badge. It’s a medical signal and should be investigated.

What has the LET research taught you about breast support?

Mainly that it’s been completely overlooked. Through the LET Performance Institute we’ve worked with the Research Group in Breast Health at the University of Portsmouth, Professor Joanna Wakefield-Scurr and Lewis Clarke from the PGA.

Fewer than one in five players had ever received formal guidance on breast support for sport. Many didn’t wear a sports bra at all because they didn’t see golf as demanding enough. Yet nearly half said breast-related discomfort or distraction had affected them during a round. Players who were screened felt the breast and bra influenced their technique and performance, particularly at set-up and in the backswing.

Golf looks gentle, but the swing involves fast rotation, acceleration and deceleration through the torso. The breast has very little supporting structure, so without adequate support it moves substantially in all directions.

I’d be careful not to claim we’ve proven a performance gain yet. That’s the next phase: looking at how breast movement and support influence spinal loading, torso movement and swing mechanics. But on comfort and confidence, the message from players has been very clear.

How does a golfer know her sports bra is genuinely suitable for golf, not just comfortable?

Comfortable standing still is not the test. The test is how it performs through a full-speed swing, repeatedly, over four or five hours. Practical checks:

• Does the band sit level and firm without riding up when you rotate?
• Do the cups fully contain the breast without spilling or gaping?
• Do the straps stay put without digging in?
• Is there any movement, rubbing or discomfort at the top of the backswing or through the finish?
• Does it stay comfortable in heat, when wet and late in the round?

Make a few full swings in it before buying, and ideally get professionally fitted. Size and shape change with weight, training, the cycle, pregnancy and age, so it’s worth re-checking regularly.

Losing Distance? The Answer Might Not Be in the Swing

A change in clubhead speed can be measured immediately. Establishing why it happened is another matter.

Glover believes there is considerable scope for closer cooperation between the professionals who monitor athletic performance and those responsible for medical care, particularly when physical symptoms or changes in training capacity accompany a loss of form.

When an athlete loses speed or gets injured, how often is it treated as biomechanical when it’s physiological?

More often than it should be. As I said earlier, injury and changes in performance are usually multi-factorial. A drop in clubhead speed could be biomechanical, but it could equally be related to a number of other things:

• fatigue, or accumulated training and travel load
• poor sleep or inadequate recovery
• low energy availability or under-fuelling
• iron deficiency
• illness or a recent infection
• thyroid or other hormonal changes
• an emerging injury or a compensation for pain elsewhere
• loss of strength or conditioning
• stress or mental fatigue
• equipment changes

The natural reaction is to look at the swing or the equipment first, because that’s what’s most visible. But sometimes the best swing intervention is a blood test.

Personally, I’d like to see the medical and performance teams working much more closely together. In golf, that doesn’t happen as naturally as you might think. Through the LET Performance Institute, we’ve made real progress in bringing the medical and performance sides together as a genuine multidisciplinary team. Doctors, physios, S&C and sports science staff now share information and look at the player as a whole.

The missing piece is the coach. Coaches are usually employed privately by the player, so we’ve had little to no exposure to them, and they’re often the person who sees the swing change first. Bringing coaches into that conversation is the next step. That way, an unexplained drop in performance becomes a question everyone asks together: has something changed in this athlete’s health, not just in her swing?

Could swing data eventually detect health problems before the athlete notices?

That would absolutely be the goal. Golf is an incredibly data-rich sport, across both performance and health. Players have launch monitor and swing data, strokes-gained statistics, wearables, sleep tracking, training load and medical information.

The problem is that much of this data is siloed. It sits with different people, on different platforms, and rarely talks to each other. We can already use individual metrics well. Heart rate variability, for example, gives us a useful window into recovery. But we don’t yet have the algorithms and technology to bring it all together and show how a change in health shows up in the swing, or the other way round.

That’s exactly what ORB for Sport is working on through its Athlete Health Passport, which players are already using. It brings a player’s health and performance information together in one place that she owns and controls. The aim is to spot meaningful changes against her own baseline earlier, so the medical and performance team can have the right conversation before a small problem becomes an injury or a lost season.

Whatever we build, the athlete’s consent and ownership of her data have to be at its core. The goal is earlier conversations, not surveillance.

What do we know about iron deficiency in female golfers, and should women who menstruate be checked routinely?

Honestly, golf-specific data is limited, which is itself part of the problem. Across sport, iron deficiency is reported in around 15–35% of female athletes, compared with 3–11% of male athletes.

Golfers aren’t immune. Long days, travel, variable diet and heavy periods all add risk. You can also be iron-deficient without being anaemic, so a normal haemoglobin doesn’t rule it out.

My view is that any woman training and competing seriously who menstruates should have ferritin checked as part of routine screening. Some sports science guidance suggests screening women twice a year or quarterly, depending on their history. What I’d caution against is self-prescribing iron without testing, because too much is also harmful.

What Would Sports Medicine Look Like If Women Came First?

The questions emerging from the LET’s work are not limited to professional golfers.

They concern how women’s bodies are studied, what medical information is collected, which experiences are considered important and whether sporting environments are equipped to respond appropriately at different stages of an athlete’s life.

What would female-specific sports medicine look like if designed from scratch around women?

It would start with the female athlete as the default, not the adjustment. That means:

• menstrual, pelvic, breast and bone health as part of routine screening, not niche add-ons
• reference data, kit and equipment built on female bodies
• care across every life stage: adolescence, pregnancy, return to play after childbirth, and perimenopause
• staff who are comfortable having these conversations
• research designed around women from the outset

That’s the thinking behind the SWING study, the Survey of Women in Golf, led by Professor Margo Mountjoy. It looks specifically at pelvic, endocrine and reproductive health. Golf is the first sport, and the design is intended to be repeated across others. Women’s golf has an opportunity to lead here rather than follow.

The implications of Glover’s answers extend beyond a different coaching philosophy. They raise questions about the relationship between health and sporting performance, the quality of female-specific research and the assumptions that influence decisions about individual athletes.

There are important limits to what can currently be concluded. The breast-support work has not established a measurable performance benefit, iron-deficiency evidence specifically involving golfers remains limited, and using connected health and swing data to identify emerging medical problems is still a developing ambition.

Nor does understanding female physiology mean replacing one universal template with another. As Glover’s comments on menstrual health make particularly clear, women are not a single physiological category with identical needs.

For coaches, the practical challenge is recognising when technique requires attention and when a change in performance warrants a broader conversation about health, workload or recovery.

For researchers, it is building the evidence needed to distinguish those possibilities.

And for female golfers, it may eventually mean having their movements assessed against a more appropriate understanding of their own bodies.

Golf already knows how to scrutinise a swing.

The more interesting question is whether it has been looking closely enough at the person making it.