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> We know from one study that people who played tennis a few times per week lived roughly 10 years longer than average. So we'll use that value going forward.
by koolba 1y ago
> We know from one study that people who played tennis a few times per week lived roughly 10 years longer than average. So we'll use that value going forward.
There has to be some incredible correlation between having the time and money to play tennis “a few times per week” and being significantly wealthier than the average person. And being wealthy is clearly the healthiest thing you can do.
- giantg2 1y agoVery much this. While tennis has become more accessible and lower cost over time, it has always been an expensive sport.
- ceejayoz 1y agoHonest question: Why? There's a free court near me, and both balls and racquets can be gotten for peanuts.
- cpursley 1y agoThey're talking from a North American perspective (probably). In most of Europe, there are plenty of outdoor and other free exercise opportunity. Another downside of the incorrect build environment (poor city planning) is that Americans simply don't have built-in ways to move their bodies. When I spent time in Eastern Europe, there was literally a free tennis/basketball court across the street. And a variety of other courts, including outdoor gym. And when house sitting around, there was nearly always an outdoor park with greenspace for strolling, exercise. All free.
- huhkerrf 1y agoWell, while we're talking about anecdotes, my neighborhood in a poor Texas town also had a free tennis court. There were a couple more down the road. My in-laws suburb has walking trails end basketball courts.
- matthewdgreen 1y agoIf you live in a place with inexpensive land, tennis infrastructure is relatively cheap. If you live in a dense city where space is at a premium, that’s when it gets relatively expensive.
- cpursley 1y agoI think the catch is, Americans have to spend so much time driving for ADLs (activities of daily living) that there is no time to walk over to the local court (if there is one, usually there is not). This is due to the sprawl Ponzi scheme (which spreads everything out). It's also the primary cause behind America's mental health crises (lack of 3rd places, everyone is isolated). And yeah, I'm not talking SF or NYC, but 90% of the rest of the country.
- bluGill 1y agoThat is false for every american I know. Driving means less time than transit users in every study I've seen - that time is of course more stressful but we spend less time commuting and thus have more time. Working hours can be longer but for many it isn't much longer. There are a lot of couch potatoes that don't use their time, but they have it.
- ndriscoll 1y agoIt always blows my mind when I see how many subscribers Netflix has. Americans are so busy driving and working that they don't have time to do anything (cook, grocery shop, exercise, etc.). How are 90M households finding the time to watch movies or binge on TV shows?
- ndriscoll 1y agoAt least in all of the US suburbs I've lived, there's been free tennis courts and a variety of other courts all over the city. The high school down the street from me has 4 tennis courts. I hear them being used all the time when I'm on a walk (incidentally, along a greenway with a shared use walking/bike trail that wraps around the school grounds and connects via a tunnel under a highway to the rest of the city bike trail system).
- haswell 1y agoChicago has over 100 free tennis courts across the city. https://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/facilities/tennis-courts https://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/facilities/tennis-courts
- 0_____0 1y agoSeriously, tennis courts are one of the most popular facilities to include in an urban/suburban public park.
- impossiblefork 1y agoTennis is very difficult though. One of the highest barrier to entry sports skill-wise. Non-athletic adult people can't step onto a tennis court and consistently get the ball back to you, even if you hit it to them. I thought Padel was easy, but when I organized a Padel after-work I saw that that was not reality, and Padel is much easier than tennis.
- firesteelrain 1y agoThat’s why people are gravitating towards Pickleball. It has a lower barrier to entry
- impossiblefork 1y agoIt's very sad though. Much better to practice so you can play tennis or padel.
- firesteelrain 1y agoI am for whatever keeps people moving
- impossiblefork 1y agoI suppose I can't argue with that.
- lapcat 1y agoNon-athletic adults can't do anything consistently. Which sports do you think are easier? Certainly not baseball or American football. Perhaps soccer, but only because soccer is more generous about inconsistency: play doesn't stop if you lose the ball or kick it inaccurately, as long as it doesn't go out of bounds. On the other hand, non-athletic adults are going to tire very quickly constantly running around the field with no stoppage.
- impossiblefork 1y ago
- kqr 1y agoTennis requires a certain proficiency to have fun with. Beginners tend to have trouble getting the ball reliably across the net onto the other player. This proficiency takes time to build. Thus, unless one makes a big up-front time investment, tennis is not particularly good exercise. Up-front time investments are expensive. Also one cannot tennis alone. Anything one must practise with a partner is more expensive due to scheduling requirements.
- lapcat 1y agoThe OP was talking about monetary wealth. Here you're redefining "expensive" to mean something other than wealth, i.e., time. Also, the whole point of the submitted article is that the investment of time into exercise is totally worth it. Yes, there's a learning curve to tennis, as with any sport. You could just go jogging/running by yourself, but the advantage of sports, including tennis, is that they're usually a more fun and less boring form of exercise than jogging/running by yourself. If exercise is fun, then you're more likely to stick to it rather than skipping it.
- YetAnotherNick 1y ago> "expensive" to mean something other than wealth, i.e., time. I don't think they did say that. They just said wealthy people have more freedom on schedule that non wealthy people.
- lapcat 1y ago> They just said wealthy people have more freedom on schedule that non wealthy people. I'm not sure that's true though, unless by "wealthy" you mean trust fund kids. But there are millions of tennis players of various levels of income. A lot of salaried workers in upper income brackets work more than the usual 40 hour week, have less free time. I'm guessing these engineers weren't playing a lot of tennis: https://www.folklore.org/90_Hours_A_Week_And_Loving_It.html https://www.folklore.org/90_Hours_A_Week_And_Loving_It.html
- GuB-42 1y agoTradition, mostly. Tennis is seen as an upper class sport and prices will be set accordingly, it is not the case everywhere though. Another reason is that a tennis court takes significant space for just 2 (or 4) people. So unless it is subsidized, when land is at a premium like in a large city, it is going to be expensive.
- giantg2 1y agoIt depends. In suburban areas there are free courts generally available at parks and schools. Rural areas don't have many options. Urban areas have fewer free options that tend to be crowded. Balls are the next largest cost since they are expendable - get lost, go dead, etc. Historically these were much larger costs due to manufacturing and construction differences. My guess is that a lot of this is generational carryover as the free courts are generally newer (1980s+) and the carryrover where well of players from prior generations mostly inspired their kids to follow suit.
- esperent 1y ago> has always been an expensive sport Since I've been a child, living in multiple countries across Europe and Asia, there's always been either free or cheap tennis courts near me. I don't even play tennis much and I know this, I'm sure if I was searching I'd find way more low cost options. It's more likely that the demographic who play tennis tends to be wealthy, rather than the sport itself being expensive.
- flatb 1y agoThe Williams sisters started playing tennis in Compton. Tennis is cheap, but not so culturally accessible.
- esafak 1y agoI just charge it to the Underhills.
- jjav 1y ago> While tennis has become more accessible and lower cost over time, it has always been an expensive sport. How can tennis be an expensive sport? My kid just bought (a few months ago) a couple of used rackets for $5. Tennis balls can be had for a few dollars. Courts are free. Aside from jogging, tennis seems like one of the cheapest sports possible. I think the only cheaper sport might be swimming, but only if you live near the ocean.
- javier2 1y agoAlso, if you have health issues, you will not be playing tennis twice a week. Plus tennis is on the expensive to stay active in when you need a club membership and courts to play.
- bluGill 1y agoEvery town I've lived in has free courts in a park that anyone can use.
- rs186 1y agoThese days they are often repurposed for pickleball in the US.
- firesteelrain 1y agoPickleball nets are often portable and good co use with Tennis courts. That’s what we do Plus pickleball is popular so you will find more people to play with
- impossiblefork 1y agoPickleball will not provide high-intensity exercise.
- firesteelrain 1y agoIt has some moderate sections of exercise depending on length of play but it’s a great way to keep moving regardless which is great (and other intrinsic benefits)
- lapcat 1y agoYes, that has become a problem for tennis players, but it's a quite recent problem. Before pickleball became popular, though, free public tennis courts were widespread in urban and suburban areas. Perhaps not in rural areas, though I can't speak definitively on that.
- almost_usual 1y agoThere are plenty of wealthy people who are unhealthy. Wake up at 4:30am and go for a run. You’re already accomplishing more at that point in the day than most wealthy people who are comfortably laying in bed. The hard thing is doing the thing. Just do, that’s it.
- seeEllArr 1y agoDon't wake up at 430 unless you went to bed early. A full night of sleep is crucially important.
- swat535 1y agoYes, also exercising with lack of sleep has the opposite effect, especially if you are doing heavy lifting or anything like that.
- kqr 1y agoYou seem to be forgetting that insufficient sleep is also unhealthy.
- almost_usual 1y agoNope. I get 8-7.5hrs every night. I’m asleep within 15 minutes, zero screen time.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kqr 1y agoI believe it is uncommon to have a schedule that allows a bedtime of 8.15 pm. Maybe I'm wrong.
- xboxnolifes 1y agoSure, but this is missing the point. It doesn't have to be 4:30am. It doesnt even need to be ~30 minutes earlier than you usually wake. Its any stretch of time you dedicate during the day to exercise.
- throwaway22032 1y agoIf you're disciplined enough to put something in your calendar and do it over a period of months, without someone breathing down your neck to do so, whether you feel like doing it or not, then you are likely able to apply that effort in other areas of life. So then it's a bidirectional correlation. You're more likely to be fit if you are wealthy and more likely to be wealthy if you are fit. Essentially, what you're looking at is that people who engage in self improvement end up better off than those who don't. It's a priori obvious but some people are uncomfortable with it for some reason - trauma response / coping mechanism, something like that.
- tonyedgecombe 1y agoI've never really bought this argument. The average American spends five hours a day watching TV.
- credit_guy 1y agoExactly. Some guy once told me that "research" shows that people who play golf live longer. I still didn't pick up the sport yet. Not sure I'll pick it up anytime soon, although I like the idea of living longer.
- caseyohara 1y agoIt's just like the headline that was going around a few years ago: "Studies show that women who own horses live 15 years longer than those who don’t". It's not surprising there's a strong correlation between "rich people" hobbies (horses, golf, tennis, sailing, etc.) and health outcomes/longevity.
- hombre_fatal 1y agoI am begging HNers to at least pull up the study in scihub and see if there was multivariate adjustment (there was) before they hip-fire the first thought they had when they saw someone summarize a study in a blog post.
- martin-t 1y agoI understand but incompetence is so common everywhere in society that mistakes like this genuinely are the first thought people should have. I have the opposite opinion - if criticism like this is so obvious (and it is), then it's up to the article to refute it immediately - this saves time of everyone reading it and gives it more credibility.
- hombre_fatal 1y agoSo any mention of a study in an online comment or blog post has to couch it in a bunch of pre-responses to potential kneejerk dismissals from people who won't even look at the study? You can tell who never looks studies up on scihub because they have no idea that multivariate modeling for confounders (especially income and education) is something pretty much every study does, so it makes no sense to assume you just blindly outsmarted the study when you thought of the first confounder that came to your mind. Yet it everyone else's responsibility to defend casual mention of every study from a critique you came up in 5 seconds.
- martin-t 1y agoNobody has an obligation to assume competence. Incompetence is very common on both sides. It is reasonable to assume incompetence. Given it's such common criticism and refuting it is simple, yes, the author should pre-respond. Otherwise everyone else has to look at the study which costs more time in total and also allows incompetent scientists to get away with it because unless people investigate further, both look the same on the surface.
- hombre_fatal 1y ago
- andrew_lettuce 1y agoI bet it's even simpler than that: people who can play tennis a few times a week are a healthier cohort than people who are unable to physically do this
- ponector 1y ago>>lived roughly 10 years longer than average I'm curious how affects lifespan having a private chef at home and a private driver.
- IAmGraydon 1y agoOf all the excuses I’ve seen here, this one is particularly hilarious. Have you never lived in a city? There are public courts everywhere. https://www.usta.com/en/home/play/facility-listing.html https://www.usta.com/en/home/play/facility-listing.html
- thrance 1y agoSo you're saying there's no correlation whatsoever between playing tennis regularly and socio-economic status?
- sn9 1y agoThere's really overwhelming evidence that exercise itself has a causal role, and it only gets more impactful the more effective it is at raising your fitness (i.e., given the logistical constraints of your life, the more that the exercise you can do raises your strength and endurance, the greater the benefits without a clear obvious ceiling (though the benefits do get increasingly marginal)). Even if we lived in a world where it didn't causally extend lifespan, the extension to healthspan [0] or QALYs [1] alone would be reason enough. Derek Thompson's written about recent research to this effect [2]: "Last year, Ashley and a large team of scientists conducted an elaborate experiment on the effects of exercise on the mammalian body. In one test, Ashley put rats on tiny treadmills, worked them out for weeks, and cut into them to investigate how their organs and vessels responded to the workout compared to a control group of more sedentary rodents. The results were spectacular. Exercise transformed just about every tissue and molecular system that Ashley and his co-authors studied—not just the muscles and heart, but also the liver, adrenal glands, fat, and immune system. "When I asked Ashley if it was possible to design a drug that mimicked the observed effects of exercise, he was emphatic that, no, this was not possible. The benefits of exercise seem too broad for any one therapy to mimic. To a best approximation, aerobic fitness and weight-training seem to increase our metabolism, improve mitochondrial function, fortify our immune system, reduce inflammation, improve tissue-specific adaptations, and protect against disease." Everyone really should be making it a priority to work up to at least meeting the physical activity guidelines as well focusing on the other core pillars of health described by the Barbell Medicine guys [3]. Anyone focused on biohacking and supplement stacks without having these in order is fundamentally unserious, majoring in the minors. [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/healthspan https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/healthspan [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quality-adjusted_life_year#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quality-adjusted_life_year#En... [2] https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-sunday-morning-post-why-exercise https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-sunday-morning-post-why-... [3] https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/where-should-my-priorities-be-to-improve-my-health/ https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/where-should-my-priorit...