SwingOIL – high-tech liquid refreshment to help your golf game

I think I first heard the term “swing oil” back when I first took up golf, playing with a more experienced golfer-friend who was referring to a mid-round brewski. He claimed that it not only quenched his thirst, but it relaxed him and allowed him to swing freer, and play better. I never noticed any improvement in his back nine after a cold quaff of the brew that made Milwaukee famous, or whatever, but he swore by it.

These days, when the golf magazines and most health and fitness gurus are emphasizing healthy eating (no more hotdogs at the turn…) and drinking on the course, there are much better options available in the drinks category. One of them is swingOIL.

SwingOIL is a sports drink that is formulated especially with golfers in mind. It comes in three flavors – Orange, Lemon-Lime, and Strawberry-Banana.

The sports drink trend started back in the mid-1960s with Gatorade, a simple hydration and carbohydrate and electrolyte replacement drink. The drinks that are available nowadays have evolved from that early beginning, and incorporate ingredients that are advertised to help your golf game in a number of ways. SwingOIL includes a generous list of these New Age ingredients: glucosamine, chondroitin, and turmeric for your joints, ginseng to help your focus, rhodiola rosea extract to help you manage stress, taurine to keep you energized during your round, and citrulline maleate to help you recover afterwards.

Absolutely confirming the claims of the manufacturer would require a large group of test subjects, blind testing with placebos, and a legion of lab-coated boffins to run the tests and gather data. Lacking those resources, what I did was take a few packets of swingOIL (in the yummy orange flavor) along with me on a three-day golf outing to give it a try. The orange-flavored variety of the drink has a nice citrus flavor that I really enjoy, sweeter than actual orange juice, but not sickly sweet like an orange soda.

As much as I look forward to the opportunity to take time off from my desk job to go to a resort and play golf three days in a row, I know that doing so will take its toll on me – precisely because I spend much more time sitting at a desk at the aforementioned desk job than I do playing golf. My informal experiment may not carry much weight in the world of science, but I came away from the experience with a good impression of swingOIL and its benefits.

I held off using swingOIL until the third day. I was playing a pretty tough private course during this outing, and though carts were in use all three days, the difficulty of the course and the amount of time it had been since I last played meant that I was in for some aches and pains after the end of the visit. I downed a packet of the juice just before I went to the course, and I took another along for a mid-round quaff.

I wasn’t consciously evaluating how well I played during the round with swingOil, compared to the first two days, but on later reflection I had to conclude that I felt better than I might have expected to, given that three straight days of golf is not usual for me. I knocked a few shots off my score on the third day (including playing four pretty tough par-3s in even par) – a result which might be attributed to an increasing familiarity with the course, but I can honestly say that I felt more focused on my game, which is one of the claims the makers of swingOIL advertise.

I also noticed that I didn’t feel sore, or not very much, the next day, after my three-day outing, and I can’t help but think that the swingOIL made a contribution to that result. Over the next couple of weeks I used swingOIL a few more times, on trips to the range, and always felt that it had helped keep my swing smooth, and my next-day aches and pains at bay.

As the ads always say, “Your Results May Vary”, and I don’t expect anyone to take my word for gospel on what swingOIL will do for you – but I will say that it sure can’t hurt to try it. The drink goes down smoothly, especially chilled, at the end of a hot day on the course, and it is chock-full of good stuff – and no bad stuff – that has got to be better for you and your golf game than a cold brewski at the turn.