Page 62 - Tennis Magazine April 2019

Tennis F I T N E S S
Life

The In two recent

studies, tennis

players were

shown to live

longer lives

than people

Game who played
any other

sport. How can

the game use

that to its

advantage?

of Bill Lipton liked what he saw when he opened his New York Times

one morning last fall. Lipton turned 50 in 2018, and he had recently
picked up his racquet after a 33-year hiatus from tennis. Over those
three decades, this former high-level ping-pong player, who describes
himself as “tenacious” when it comes to anything sports-related, had
taken up running, rowing and weight training. But after all of that
stress and strain on his body, Lipton found he was happiest chasing
down tennis balls on the soft Har-Tru courts at his local club.
Now the Times was telling him that he may have made the right
choice, at the right age.
Life “THE BEST SPORT FOR wealth and age, researchers found

After controlling for education,
A LONGER LIFE? TRY
TENNIS,” a headline in the
that people who played tennis added
paper’s Health section read.
an average of 9.7 years to their lives,
compared to 6.2 for playing badmin-
The subsequent article
went on to report the
details of a new study out
jogging and 1.5 for those who worked
out in health clubs. These numbers
of Denmark. Among 8,600 ton, 4.7 for playing soccer, 3.2 for
adults who were followed echoed the results of a 2017 study of
for a 25-year period, those 80,000 British men and women, which
who played tennis lived significantly found that adults who played racquet
longer than those who were sed- sports lived longer than runners.
entary. That was hardly a surprise; These statistics have begun to
exercise has long been linked to make the rounds, and have caught the
increased longevity. The shock to attention of the USTA.
many was that tennis players also “We’ve got to get the word out,” says
lived longer than other adults who Kurt Kamperman, CEO of the USTA
were regularly active. National Campus in Lake Nona, FL.

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