As you watched Jannik Sinner and Aryna Sabalenka serve and return balls past their opponents a couple of weeks ago, you might have thought: “I should start playing tennis.”
Maybe you should. After all, the U.S. Open agrees more people should be playing, calling it “the world’s healthiest sport.”.
“On average, tennis players live 9.7 years longer than sedentary individuals, and ranks highest among all sports in the study for increased longevity, including jogging, swimming and cycling,” the Open wrote.
That statistic comes from the Copenhagen City Heart Study of 2018.
The Open also highlighted the community aspects of the sport, saying it “increases social and emotional wellbeing, and tennis players generally exhibit higher self-esteem than their athlete and non-athlete peers.”
The U.S. Tennis Association. of which the Open is a part, has unveiled a new goal, “35 by ‘35,” which aims to have 35 million American tennis players by 2035.
The goal of “35 by ‘35″ is to create and scale programming to create new tennis players for life, expand the availability of coaching at all levels, maximize court availability, and support and elevate the next generation of stars. One of the plan’s larger goals is to increase participation among Black and Hispanic youth.
Is tennis the healthiest sport?
The Copenhagen study found tennis players lived nearly 10 years longer than their sedentary peers, which was the biggest life extension tied to a single sport.
Tennis beat soccer (4.7 years), cycling (3.7 years), swimming (3.4 years) and jogging (3.2 years) in terms of longevity.
The British Journal of Sports Medicine found a 56% reduced rate of dying of a heart disease compared to nonplayers and a 47% lower risk of dying prematurely of any reason.
“I would get on the bandwagon and say it’s the healthiest sport we’ve got,” Dr. Gautam Pratap Yagnik, an orthopedic surgeon, told Today. “The fact that 4-year-olds are playing it and 80-year-olds are playing it, there are not a lot of sports where you can do that. So that’s a huge benefit.”
What are the health benefits of tennis?
Tennis benefits the entire body, from cardiovascular to bone to mental health.
“It challenges the body in a lot of different ways,” Yagnik told Today. “It’s pretty much a whole-body workout.”
As players run around the court and angle their bodies in different ways to slam the ball across the court, their core, shoulder, legs and arms all get a workout.
Tennis is similar to a high intensity interval workout, where there are times the heart is able to slow before quickly picking up again. Workouts like this strengthen the heart and build endurance.
A boost in mental health can be associated with tennis as well, because the sport encourages meeting up with another person or a group on a consistent basis.
It also has the typical common health boosts that come from sunlight, endorphins and fresh air.
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