Playing America’s most popular racquet sport is an incredible decision for your health. Tennis requires a full-body workout that engages your core alongside different muscle groups and organ systems in the body.
Playing tennis is guaranteed to get your heart pumping, your hamstrings firing on all cylinders and your quads engaged. The best part about playing tennis is that you can spend time outdoors with a friend, which also has its benefits for your mental health.
Read on to find out about the various health benefits of playing tennis or visit RacquetSportsCenter.com for further information on how to start playing tennis.
What Are the Benefits of Playing Tennis?
Supports Your Cardiovascular Health
Performing aerobic activities of any kind helps to strengthen your heart. Tennis involves you running across the court, chasing runaway balls, and swinging your arms consistently. All of these activities cause your heart rate to increase, improving your cardiovascular health by proxy.
As your heart rate begins to rise, your breathing will become faster and deeper which increases the overall blood flow and oxygen within the body. All of these factors contribute to creating a healthier and stronger cardiovascular system.
A study conducted in 2017 established that participating in racquet sports correlated to a 56% reduction in deaths reported from cardiovascular disease. This is just one of the many benefits of playing tennis.
Aids Weight Loss
Playing tennis protects your heart and helps you to lose weight simultaneously. A study conducted in 2012 states that obese women and men who engaged in aerobic exercises five days a week lost drastic amounts of weight over a period of 10 months, regardless of whether they adjusted their diets or not.
Depending on your overall BMI, you can burn hundreds of calories per hour when playing tennis. Therefore, you should ultimately combine this activity alongside a healthier diet in order to obtain the healthiest weight.
Increases Your Range of Motion
The broad arm movements involved in playing tennis, such as reaching and swinging, are the perfect means of enhancing your range of motion. These dynamic motions lubricate your body’s joints and strengthen tendons. It is imperative that you warm up prior to playing tennis to prevent injury. Warming up prior to playing tennis has also been proven to enhance your performance overall.
Moving joints through their normal range of motion enhances the blood flow to your muscles, especially the knees, thoracic spine, and shoulders. You should repeat a number of controlled repetitions in order to prepare your body for swinging and running.
Improves Your Balance
Good balance is essential when playing tennis, especially if you do not want to fall over every time you lean across to backhand the ball. When using a racquet, you are training yourself to maintain a balanced equilibrium while you are serving and hitting. Using a two-foot extension of your arm helps you to maintain balance overall.
Decreases Your Osteoporosis Risk
Osteoporosis will occur whenever the formation of new bone in the body is unable to keep up with the deterioration of old bone, which inherently causes bones to break easily. More often than not, this condition tends to impact women more than men.
While you may believe that exercising increases your risk of fractures, the opposite is true. Engaging in physical activity like tennis can undoubtedly prevent osteoporosis from occurring. Weight-bearing exercises are also great for reducing your risk.
When playing tennis, you are working against gravity every time you raise your racquet to hit the ball. This force helps your bones to become stronger over time.
Promotes Overall Agility
Playing tennis enables you to become more agile due to the footwork that is involved when playing the game, helping you to become lighter on your feet. Tennis is not a sport that is played in a straight line, players need to move from side to side as well as backwards and forwards.
This continual swathing of momentum and movement trains your brain and body to adapt more quickly, ensuring that you become more agile.
Conclusion
To conclude, this article has outlined the numerous physical and mental health benefits that occur from playing tennis. Tennis undoubtedly helps to improve your cardiovascular health, decreasing your risk of developing cardiovascular diseases. Playing tennis also provides you with a full-body workout which strengthens your bones and reduces your risk of incurring fractures.
I hope that you have found this article to be insightful and informative. Thank you for reading.
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