The Push Cart Is the Best Gear Upgrade You Have Not Made Yet
The next driver in your bag will not make you fitter. It will not lower your heart rate over a four hour round. It will not give your back a better Monday morning. A decent push cart can do all three, and most golfers in their 50s and beyond have never seriously considered one.
This is not a pitch for any particular brand. It is a case for a piece of equipment that gets dismissed as something for old timers or never gets thought about at all, despite a peer reviewed study sitting in the European Journal of Sport Science that quietly demolishes a lot of the assumptions golfers carry about walking, riding, and what your body is actually doing during a round.
Let's start with what the science says, then talk about how to act on it.
What the research actually shows about walking versus riding
In late 2025, a team of researchers led by Liverpool John Moores University and supported by the R&A, the DP World Tour, and the Ladies European Tour ran a controlled experiment on 16 competitive golfers in Portugal. Each player completed two rounds on the same championship course, one walking with a caddie and one riding a cart driven by a caddie. Same food. Same weather. Same tee times. The kind of tightly controlled setup that real research demands and most internet golf advice does not bother with.
Walking burned about 880 calories per round. Riding burned about 456. The walkers took 17,000 steps. The riders took 6,000. Walkers had higher heart rates, higher core body temperatures, and drank more water. Their leg muscles were also more fatigued at the end, measured by a standard vertical jump test.
Here is the part the researchers expected to find and did not. Club head speed, ball speed, and carry distance did not differ between walking and riding. The walkers swung just as hard and hit the ball just as far at the 18th tee as they did at the 1st. There was one exception to this finding and it occured on the 12th tee, which sits atop the highest point on the golf course. After the steep climb, walkers carried the ball about 11 yards shorter than their riding counterparts. Hills, good for the heart, bad for distance. Everything else was a wash.
The takeaway from a single round is that walking is real exercise, and the actual ball striking does not seem to suffer from the added exercise.
A caveat worth knowing before we go any further. Every participant in the study was 21 years old, male, highly skilled, and walked with a caddie carrying their bag. If you are 60 and lugging your own clubs up the same hill, the energy disparity between walking and riding is going to be larger than what the paper reports. Which is exactly why the push cart conversation matters.
Why a push cart changes the math for a 50+ golfer
Carrying a bag for 18 holes is not free exercise. A typical staff bag with 14 clubs and a few sleeves of balls weighs 30 to 40 pound (14 to 18 kilograms) once it is fully loaded. Slinging that on one shoulder for five hours adds load to your spine, your hips, your knees and your ankles. Over a season, it accumulates. Over a decade, it shows.
A push cart takes the bag off your back and puts it on three wheels. You still get the walking benefits. You still burn most of the calories. You still get the cardiovascular work. What you lose is the joint compression, the asymmetric load on one shoulder, and the slow accumulation of fatigue that does not show up until somewhere around the 13th hole.
A separate 2022 study from the same Liverpool research group, published in the European Journal of Sport Science, looked at carrying a bag versus using a manual trolley versus using an electric trolley (I’m using “trolley” here because that’s how it was phrased in the study). The energy cost was roughly the same across all three modes. So the walking is what is doing the work for your health. The cart just spares your joints.
In other words, the push cart gives you almost all of the upside of walking with almost none of the downside of carrying.
The three flavours of push cart and the golfer each one suits
The push cart market sorts into three broad categories. Each has a real case for the right player.
Manual push carts
The classic three wheel design. You push, it rolls. Modern manual carts are lighter than the wobbly versions your father pushed, fold down to about the size of a small suitcase, and come with a parking brake, an umbrella mount, a beverage holder, and somewhere to clip a scorecard.
A good manual cart suits you if your course is flat, your bag is reasonable, and you have no real issues with your back or hips. It is the cheapest entry point and will last for years if you treat it with even moderate respect.
The honest catch is that on a hilly course, pushing a loaded cart uphill in mid summer is its own form of cardio. Some people enjoy that. Others discover, somewhere around the 14th, that they should have jumped into a cart at the turn (nothing wrong with that).
Kick assist push carts
This is the in between option. A small motor in one of the rear wheels helps you over the worst of the uphill push. You still walk. You still steer. The cart just stops trying to roll backwards down the hill while you reach for your water bottle.
Kick assist makes sense if you play undulating courses, if your bag runs heavy, or if you want a long term option that respects the fact that you may not feel as fresh at 65 as you did at 55. Pricing sits in the middle of the market.
Electric push carts
A small electric motor drives the cart at walking pace. You guide it with a handle, a remote, or in higher end models, a follow function that has the cart trailing you like a well trained golden retriever. Battery life on a modern lithium pack covers 27 to 36 holes comfortably.
Electric is the right call if you have any nagging back, knee, or hip issue, if you play hilly terrain regularly, or if you simply want the experience of walking 18 holes without spending the last few of them wishing you’d stayed at home. Treat it like a multi year purchase, because at this price point it should still be on the course in a decade.
When riding a cart is still the right call
Pretending that riding is always the wrong choice would be dishonest, so let's be straight about it.
Riding is the right call when the temperature is over 90 degrees fahrenheit (32 degress celsius) and the humidity is brutal. Heat illness in older golfers is a real thing, and pride is a poor reason to end up in the emergency room.
Riding is the right call on courses where the holes are spread out across long stretches of road or terrain that was clearly designed for carts. Some American resort courses fall into this category. Walking them is technically possible but rarely enjoyable.
Riding is the right call when you have a medical condition, a recent surgery, or any acute issue that walking would aggravate. The whole point of choosing your mode of transport is to keep playing for the next thirty years, not to prove a point in any given round.
Riding is also fine when you are playing with friends who ride, the round is social, and the alternative is not playing at all. Walking purism has its limits.
What the science does suggest, though, is that for most rounds, on most courses, in most weather, walking with a push cart is the choice that pays the biggest dividends in health, mental engagement, and longevity in the game.
What the study did not measure, but matters anyway
The Liverpool team measured calories, heart rate, body temperature, jump performance, and had the golfers complete a workload questionnaire. They did not measure the things that golfers in their 50s and beyond probably care most about.
They did not measure sleep quality after a walking round. Adjacent research on physical activity and sleep suggests walked rounds correlate with better sleep that night, which is reason enought to walk in its own right.
They did not measure mood. There is a separate body of literature on outdoor physical activity and mental health that suggests walking for a few hours in a natural environment produces measurable mood benefits beyond what the same workload indoors would deliver.
They did not measure pace of play. The Liverpool study found riding saved about one minute over a five hour round, which is not a meaningful difference. Anyone who has walked behind a slow group of cart riders has lived this finding.
They did not measure conversation. Walking 18 holes with a friend is one of the few remaining situations in modern life where two adults spend four hours together without staring at screens. The cart, with two people facing forward and the engine humming, produces a different and lesser version of the same outing.
The health case in numbers that matter
The World Health Organization recommends 150 to 300 minutes of moderate intensity activity per week for adults. According to the Liverpool data and the American College of Sports Medicine guidelines, walking 18 holes qualifies as moderate intensity activity for roughly four to five hours.
One walked round per week, on its own, roughly meets the WHO minimum recommendation. Two walked rounds per week clears the upper end of the target.
That is not a bad return on a piece of equipment that fits in your trunk, weighs less than your bag, and asks for almost nothing in return but an occasional cleaning.
How to think about the upgrade
If you are still riding by default and you do not have a medical reason to do so, the question worth asking is whether riding is actually serving you or whether it is the path of least resistance.
If carrying your bag has started to feel like work in a way it did not a decade ago, the push cart is the answer that keeps you walking without paying a physical price.
If you have already made peace with walking but you are managing a hilly course or a heavy bag, the kick assist or electric option is not a luxury. It is the tool that keeps you on the course for another ten or fifteen years.
The right frame is not "which cart is cheapest." It is "which option gets me walking 18 holes regularly, comfortably, and for the longest stretch of years."
By that measure, the push cart is the best piece of equipment most golfers never seriously considered. The driver gets the marketing budget. The cart does the actual work.
The bottom line
A 2026 study in the European Journal of Sport Science found that walking 18 holes burns roughly twice the calories of riding, raises your heart rate to moderate intensity exercise levels, and does not hurt your ball striking over a single round. The downsides of walking are concentrated in the legs, back, and shoulders if you carry your own bag.
A push cart removes most of those downsides while preserving all the upsides. On a flat course with a light bag, a manual cart is enough. On hilly terrain or with a heavier bag, a kick assist or electric model pays for itself in body parts not aggravated. Riding still has its place in extreme heat, on cart only courses, or when a medical reason calls for it.
The rest of the time, the cart you push is the one that does more for your game and your body than any new driver ever will.
Thanks for reading. See you on the back nine!
- Dave
References
O'Donnell A, Murray A, Jones A, et al. Riding a Golf Cart Versus Walking: A Study on the Physiological and Performance Differences in Tournament Golf. European Journal of Sport Science. 2026;26:e70099. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsc.70099
Kasper AM, O'Donnell A, Langan-Evans C, et al. Assessment of Activity Energy Expenditure During Competitive Golf: The Effects of Bag Carrying, Electric or Manual Trolleys. European Journal of Sport Science. 2023;23(3):330-337. https://doi.org/10.1080/17461391.2022.2036817
Bull FC, Al-Ansari SS, Biddle S, et al. World Health Organization 2020 Guidelines on Physical Activity and Sedentary Behaviour. British Journal of Sports Medicine. 2020;54(24):1451-1462. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2020-102955