Tennis is a game involving movement, skill and strategy, making it an excellent sport for both mind and body. When playing tennis, you use every muscle and move every joint in your body and this helps maintain the three key factors required for long term sporting performance… strength, flexibility and balance.
If you keep these three key factors at their optimum level, then you are giving yourself the best chance of playing the sport you love for many years to come, plus, you will gain many secondary health benefits that this sort of exercise gives you.
Strength To understand the importance of maintaining your muscle power, or strength, it’s necessary to understand a little about how your muscles age. Basically, you have two types of muscle fibres: Slow ones for endurance and fast ones for power and speed. If you do not keep the fast fibres working as you age, they can begin to waste from the age of 30 so you lose around 1% of your muscle mass per year. This means that by the time you are 70, you could have lost between 30-40% of your muscle mass if you haven’t kept yourself fit. However, there have been plenty of studies that show it doesn’t matter what your age is, you can always build up those muscle again if you start exercising. This is important as strong muscles protect your joints against arthritis and will keep your reaction times faster, helping to prevent falls or stumbles.
Flexibility The more flexible you are, the better your body and muscles can react to stretching so they are less prone to injury. Tight muscles mean that you don’t move your joints through their full range of movement, which reduces the flow of nutrients to the whole of the joint, predisposing it to arthritic changes. Good flexibility means healthier joints and easier movement.
Balance Your balance dictates how quick your reactions are and is often used as a measure of biological age. The fitter you are, the better your balance so you are less likely to injure yourself.
Of course, tennis also improves lung and heart function, can help reduce blood pressure, cholesterol levels and osteoporosis, so there’s plenty of reason to keep playing all year round throughout your life. There’s also a great social aspect to tennis and all of these benefits help to make tennis players healthier both physically and mentally.
Tennis is fun, demanding, exciting and rewarding. What a great way to exercise without the monotony of a repetitive exercise programmes! Everyone knows how hard it is to keep the motivation going for regular exercise, but playing tennis is so easy. Tennis is a game for life and tennis players will gain these benefits for life.