Health Benefits of Tennis: Why Play Tennis?

In the era of new racquet sports like pickleball and padel, good old tennis still draws thousands of fans to the tennis courts.

According to world-renowned scientists from a variety of disciplines, there is no doubt that tennis is one of the best sports for you to play.

Here are some important reasons why you should play tennis:

 Physical Reasons to Play Tennis

 Tennis helps your:

 Aerobic fitness by burning fat and improving your cardiovascular fitness and maintaining higher energy levels.

 Anaerobic fitness by offering short, intense bursts of activity during a point followed by rest which helps muscles use oxygen efficiently.

 Ability to accelerate by practice in sprinting, jumping and lunging to move quickly.

 Powerful first step by requiring anticipation, quick reaction time and explosion into action.

 Speed through a series of side-to-side and up and back sprints to chase the ball.

 Leg strength through hundreds of starts and stops which build stronger leg muscles.

 General body coordination since you have to move into position and then adjust your upper body to hit the ball successfully.

 Gross motor control through court movement and ball-striking skills which require control of your large muscle groups.

 Fine motor control by the use of touch shots like angled volleys, drop shots and lobs.

 Agility by forcing you to change direction as many as 5 times in 10 seconds during a typical tennis point.

 Dynamic balance through hundreds of starts, stops, changes of direction and hitting on the run.

 Cross-training by offering a physically demanding sport that’s fun to play for athletes who are expert in other sports.

 Bone strength and density by strengthening bones of young players and helping prevent osteoporosis in older ones.

 Immune system through its conditioning effects, which promote overall health, fitness and resistance to disease.

 Nutritional habits by eating appropriately before competition to enhance energy production and after competition to practice proper recovery methods.

 Eye-hand coordination because you constantly judge the timing between the on-coming ball and the proper contact point.

 Flexibility due to the constant stretching and maneuvering to return the ball toward your opponent.

 Psychological Reasons to Play Tennis

 Tennis helps you:
 

 Develop a work ethic because improvement through lessons or practice reinforces the value of hard work.

 Develop discipline since you learn to work on your skills in practice and control the pace of play in competition.

 Manage mistakes by learning to play within your abilities and realizing that managing and minimizing mistakes in tennis or life is critical.

 Learn to compete one-on-one because the ability to compete and fight trains you in the ups and downs of a competitive world.

 Accept responsibility because only you can prepare to compete by practicing skills, checking your equipment and during match play by making line calls.

 Manage adversity by learning to adjust to the elements (e.g. wind, sun) and still be able to compete tenaciously.

 Accommodate stress effectively because the physical, mental and emotional stress of tennis will force you to increase your capacity for dealing with stress.

 Learn how to recover by adapting to the stress of a point and the recovery period between points which is similar to the stress and recovery cycles in life.

 Plan and implement strategies since you naturally learn how to anticipate an opponent’s moves and plan your countermoves.

 Learn to solve problems since tennis is a sport based on angles, geometry and physics.