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Racket Sports Shown to be the Healthiest Sports, Again
Racket sports provide the ideal combination for health.
Sports such as tennis, squash, badminton, and racketball simultaneously tax the cardiovascular system and the brain, delivering greater health benefits than aerobic exercise alone.
Racket sports build up your fitness while also requiring complex movements (front to back, and side to side) and quick strategic thinking. That combination of high-intensity training, strength building, flexibility, and mental toughness is rare among other sports.
Additionally, racket sports can be played at any age, and they bring you together with other people for social connection, which we know is beneficial for health.
It should therefore come as no surprise that racket sports were once again shown to reduce the risk of death more than any other type of sport.
A study conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), just published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), showed that many types of physical activity lower the risk of death for older adults — but racket sports top the list with a 27% lower risk of death from heart disease.
Playing racket sports regularly was shown to reduce the risk of death from any cause by 16%, slightly better than Running which…