Health benefits of tennis

Introduction

There is a common misunderstanding of tennis as a "too difficult“ sport; every long distance runner, swimmer or cyclist think that they can look down on you, when sports and recreation is involved. Well, no more, because recent studies and also change in the exercise duration and intensity are changed recently, so tennis is now high up in the list of sports that are significantly healthy and hard to participants.

Here we will state some newly found scientific facts about tennis that will prove wrong all those skeptics from other sports and show that tennis, as a potential life long recreation, has many healthy benefits, same or more than other kind of sport and recreation.

Fact vs. Myths

And if those scientific facts does not convince you to continue or start to play tennis, other benefits of tennis may be that it is safe, non impact sport with minimum risks of serious injuries, it is accessible, with number of tennis court growing each day, that it has been shown that tennis improves bone density especially lumbar spine and hip areas.

Tennis is also a great way to meet a new and interesting people, and play with people of various ages and genders, you can play tennis until relatively very old age when recreation is concerned, and tennis is excellent reliever of stress, and strategy and tactics involved in game playing boosts your brain activity.

There is a myth that you cannot lose weight by playing tennis; this is not quite the truth. In single player tennis match men burn 600 calories and women 420, which is equivalent of weight lifting in the same period of time. Also studies show that tennis players have much lower risk of obesity than a team player in other sports.

Other wide spread myth about tennis is that it won’t get you fit enough; that is also not true. Studies and sport scientist discovered that 30 minutes per day of moderate exercises can get you quite fit. Also main advantages of tennis over other sports like swimming, cycling or jogging is that people at any age can start playing it, and continue to do so for the rest of their lives.

Main myth related to tennis is that it does not work you as hard as other sports. In that case, here are some facts; oxygen consumption is a good way to measure sport’s effectiveness in improving overall health and cardiovascular system; higher the oxygen consumption is, more heath benefits the activities have.

So the fact is that in a single player tennis match oxygen consumption is between 50 and 80% of maximum value of oxygen the individual can utilize during intense exercise, and that is quite a lot.