Are you considering taking up the game of tennis, perhaps for yourself or for a child? If so, take a moment to read about just how beneficial the game can be for any player or any age.
Below you’ll discover 35 ways you can benefit from playing tennis derived from and an expansion of Jack L. Groppel’s ‘Health Benefits of Tennis: Why Play Tennis?‘.
1. Aerobic Fitness
Most experts believe that aerobic exercise is the most essential component of fitness. People who engage in regular continuous exercise live longer, have better work capacity, and have a lower risk of coronary artery disease, cancer, and diabetes, according to studies.
2. Anaerobic Fitness
Anaerobic exercise is comparable to aerobic fitness, but it utilizes a different kind of energy – it burns calories fast and efficiently. High-intensity interval training (HIIT), weight lifting, circuit training, Pilates, yoga, and other types of strength training are examples of anaerobic workouts.
This kind of exercise has many health advantages. It’s a fantastic method to increase your cardiovascular endurance, develop and retain muscle, and shed pounds. Anaerobic exercise, in addition to aerobic (or cardiovascular) exercise, should be a component of your weekly workout regimen.
3. Acceleration Ability
Acceleration ability depicts an athlete’s rate of change in velocity over a certain time period or over a certain distance, indicating how quickly they can achieve their maximum or submaximal speed from rest. It is an essential skill for sprinters and other ball games.
4. Powerful First Step
Because tennis players seldom sprint more than five meters in a single direction throughout most points, a fast initial step is critical. The first step is either the one that follows the split step or the first step in any direction.
5. Speed
The speed with which a tennis player can reach the tennis ball is referred to as speed. Agility refers to a player’s ability to change direction rapidly while retaining excellent balance and body control and without wasting time in the process.
6. Leg Strength
Tennis players create power on their serve through timing, leg drive, and the hips and upper body response that results from that leg drive. As a result, leg strength plays a big role in how much speed and spin players can produce. Second, tennis players use rotation to create power on groundstrokes.
7. Improved Coordination
Because you must respond to the other person’s movement and what they do with the ball, table tennis, tennis, squash, and racquetball all are great for enhancing your hand-eye coordination. You must use your eyes and hands to monitor the ball and respond appropriately.
8. Gross Motor Skills
Gross motor skills are the talents that allow us to do activities that require the use of big muscles in the torso, legs, and arms. They entail full-body movement. From sprinting to raking leaves, we utilize gross motor abilities in a variety of physical tasks.
The majority of individuals utilize these abilities on a regular basis and without thinking about it. However, gross motor abilities are more complicated than they seem.
They include muscular coordination as well as the nervous system. They have an effect on one’s balance and coordination. They also serve as the foundation for fine motor abilities, which allow us to do tiny motions such as writing with a pencil.
9. Fine Motor Skills
The coordination of tiny muscles in movements—usually requiring the synchronization of hands and fingers—with the eyes is known as fine motor skills. Humans have complex degrees of manual dexterity, which may be ascribed to and shown in nervous system-controlled activities.
10. Agility
Agility is a crucial component of tennis success because you must be able to change direction quickly, while retaining balance and control in certain high-pressure circumstances. Being nimble not only enables you to get to the ball quicker and better prepare for shots, but it also enables you to strike the ball with the correct balance.
11. Dynamic Balance
Dynamic balance, often known as kinetics, is a field of mechanics concerned with the effects of forces on the motion of a body or system of bodies, particularly forces that do not originate inside the system itself.
While a player’s dynamic balance is improved, he or she becomes more agile and efficient when changing directions quickly on the court. This excellent warm-up or skill-building activity encourages your participants to collaborate in order to create and maintain dynamic balance.
12. Cross-Training
Athletic training in sports other than the athlete’s primary sport is known as cross-training. The objective is to improve overall performance. It takes use of one training method’s unique efficacy to compensate for the inadequacies of another.
You’ll need to embrace workouts that are more popular in other sports, such as anti-rotational core movements, direct abdominal flexion, and complex explosive leg workouts, if you want to see gains in both your game and your fitness levels.
13. Bone Health
Tennis is a bone-strengthening sport that requires you to rapidly move your body in a variety of directions, so make sure you warm up and stretch before you play. To preserve your ankles, choose tennis shoes with excellent support. Keep your racquet handle dry with sawdust or hand chalk to avoid hand blisters.
14. Immune System
According to the European Food Information Council, tennis may make you less vulnerable to mild viral diseases like colds and flus since cardiovascular activities have been linked to stronger immune systems.
Tennis may help wash germs out of the airways and lungs via physical exercise. This may significantly reduce your risks of getting the flu, a cold, or other contagious diseases. Antibodies and white blood cells are also affected by physical activity. White blood cells are immune system cells that aid in the battle against illness.
15. Nutrition
Nutrition is more important on a daily basis than it is on the day of a competition. The emphasis throughout the competition phase is on maintaining general weight and muscle mass, as well as fuelling for exercises and matches. Carbohydrates are the most important fuel for tennis’ high-intensity, maximum-outburst exercise.
16. Eye-Hand Coordination
Tennis players develop fast-twitch muscles in their arms and legs, allowing them to react to visual information more rapidly. They also develop more fast-twitch muscles in their eyes, which helps them perceive the location of the ball more rapidly. They can’t react to something they can’t see, after all.
17. Flexibility
Dynamic stretching not only prepares the muscle for high-intensity exercise, but it also improves general flexibility. Tennis players may not need the same level of flexibility as gymnasts, but it is still necessary to train on this area on a regular basis to avoid injuries.
18. Work Ethic
You need a lot of drive, grit, and desire to make it to the top as a professional athlete. Grit, tenacity, and drive are important work ethic principles that most of us can apply to our own lives.
19. Discipline
Sports discipline is essential to participation in sports. Sports may contribute to a child’s development and growth in a variety of ways.
Discipline instills in children the importance of hard work. There are no shortcuts in life, as there are in other things. Any player, regardless of skill level, must put in the necessary effort to develop and achieve their maximum potential. Hard effort is frequently just as important as “natural” athletic ability. To make it clear, skill alone isn’t enough to be successful in tennis.
20. Mistake Management
Because we are flawed, our brains make errors when dealing with very complex calculations of ball trajectory and time. The game of tennis is just too complex for a human brain to discover the ideal answer in every circumstance. We are not supercomputer-brained robots.
Tennis is a sloppy sport. This may sound like an odd statement, and it is likely one you haven’t heard before, but if you can accept it as the truth, your tennis pain and frustration will almost vanish.
21. Learn to Compete
When attempting to acquire and understand new strokes and techniques, “thinking” comes in handy. When it comes time to participate, the tension of the game may cut off our inner thoughts. Making technical adjustments in the middle of a game and evaluating whether you’re playing well or badly is a waste of time
Choose to play with confidence, responding to shots and filling your mind with goals. Save the analysis for when you’re back in the clubhouse.
22. Accept Responsibility
Tennis involves more than simply signing up for lessons. It takes dedication to train, show up for games, and be the greatest player you can be. Players learn the value of accountability as a result of this.
23. Manage Adversity
Let’s face it: life is full of hardship. Every day brings new difficulties, whether it’s school, work, health, or even tennis. Many players have no idea what it is like to struggle hard until they begin playing tennis. With tennis, you fight through adversity when things get really difficult.
24. Manage Stress
Swinging a tennis racket, or engaging in any physical exercise, releases endorphins (feel-good chemicals) that help reduce stress and muscular tension.
Tennis may not only help every player to reduce stress, but the nature of the game (fast-paced, quick-thinking, high-intensity play) can educate players how to handle stress efficiently.
25. Learn to Recover Emotionally
Tennis is a wonderful game to play, but it can also be an emotional rollercoaster at times. Enrolling in a tennis program may help practitioners to learn to control their emotions and stress during games, which can assist in many other areas of their life.
26. Plan & Implement Strategies
Tennis players use several tactics to improve their own strengths and exploit their opponent’s shortcomings in order to gain an edge and win more points. Players usually specialize or play naturally in a particular manner depending on what they are great at.
27. Learn Problem Solving
Problem solving is linked to performance and success in sports. From a tactical standpoint, being able to address various issues while opposing my opponent is critical in any sport.
Tennis is an individual sport that requires a constant study of the opponent and the circumstance in order to determine how and where to play the next shot, the next point, and the strategy to use in order to win the match.
28. Develop Performance Rituals
Performance routines seem to be particularly helpful in sports with closed skill and self-paced activities, such as free-throw shooting in basketball, serving in tennis, kicking in football, and putting in golf.
29. Sportsmanship
One method of teaching sportsmanship is via vocal repetition and role modeling. If a parent or coach instructs a young tennis player to be courteous and cordial throughout a match, the young tennis player will listen. They listen if you demonstrate how to shake hands and congratulate the opponent.
30. Win Graciously
Winning and losing are natural parts of the game. As a result, we must educate our minds to accept both good and bad things.
We are also facing loss in tennis owing to a lack of consistency and a lack of a game plan. As a result, we must devise a game plan and a playing strategy to cope with failure. But first and foremost, we must learn how to cope with failure.
31. Teamwork
Remember that excellent doubles’ cooperation, aka teamwork, is essential for match success. The majority of shots are sent into the middle third of the court, which can be dominated by a strong team.
A well-developed team may frequently defeat a more skilled pair of players who do not connect well via persistent attacking, opportune poaching, and excellent communication.
32. Develop Social Skills
Tennis necessitates that you point out your own flaws. Cooperation, communication, and collaboration are all taught via doubles and team play. Tennis necessitates learning manners and treating people with respect. Tennis allows individuals to meet new people and create new acquaintances.
33. Teaches Players to Have Fun
Tennis may be enjoyed as a sport or as a leisure activity with friends and family. Tennis, in any case, is a fun activity for maintaining your health, fitness, strength, and agility. Tennis offers many social and mental health advantages in addition to fitness and physical health benefits.
34. Tennis Grows Relationships
Communication is one of the most essential elements of the coach-athlete relationship.
Coaches may more successfully lead, guide, and manage their teams when they communicate clearly. In exchange, both the team and individual athletes are allowed to voice their thoughts and concerns for the benefit of everyone, which can play out both on and off the court.
35. Tennis is for All Ages
Tennis may be started at any age and is beneficial to both your physical and emotional health. Tennis is a sport that you may enjoy for the rest of your life, regardless of how old you are when you begin.