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.
Plus pickleball is popular so you will find more people to play with
"Tennis is great for you" "there's probably a correlation with being rich" "Also unhealthy people don't regularly play tennis so there's survivors bias". "But there's free courts" "Nope they turned those into pickleball courts" "Wake up at 4:30am and go for a run" "Bro if youre waking up at 4:30 when are you going to bed" etc
People will find any reason they can to be unhealthy. Its better to just not engage with them.
>"Tennis is great for you" "there's probably a correlation with being rich" "Also unhealthy people don't regularly play tennis so there's survivors bias".
But these seem like pretty reasonable objections? At the very least you should retort with a study that at least tried to control for confounders.
>"Wake up at 4:30am and go for a run" "Bro if youre waking up at 4:30 when are you going to bed" etc
I can't tell which side you're trying to strawman here. What's wrong with running at a normal time?
I disagree. The fundamental premise here is that regular exercise has profound health benefits. Tennis is simply one example.
The rebuttals to tennis here ignore the obvious truth -- there are limitless ways to get regular exercise; you just have to have some time and be willing to put some effort in. With very few exceptions there is nobody in the world for whom it's not a realistic goal.
People who simply do not want to can come up with endless excuses to rationalize it.
The source of this bug is the same reason why when someone says "I wake up at 4:30am to go on a run", you'll 100% always get someone to respond "adequate sleep also matters, what time are you going to bed, you're missing out on important life events that happen after 8pm" etc. The cardinal sin is jealousy; getting up at 4:30am is hard, playing tennis multiple times a week is hard, the opposing side feels jealousy because they aren't doing something that's hard, so they need to find any way to minimize that hard thing they're doing to feel like equals.
Even you're doing this, and you don't realize it: "What's wrong with running at a normal time?". Nothing at all. Literally, seriously, no one even remotely implied there was anything wrong with running at a normal time. Someone choosing to run at 4:30am does not mean not running at 4:30am is bad; but you think it is. Why? Because it is true that running at 4:30am is harder. Harder doesn't always even mean better, especially when it comes to getting up at 4:30am, but it does definitely mean Harder. So: You minimized their strain by asserting that running at 4:30am is "not normal".
This isn't a university, and you're not a test subject. You're a human, who needs to take care of their body. Arguing about the minutia of the results of some research paper is Mindset; its forest for the trees. Literally, no one who adequately exercises would care that much about studies on tennis which adequately control for confounding factors, because they're too busy actually playing tennis, and they've seen and felt the positive effect it has had on their body and don't need a research paper to tell them its healthy.
(I'm just using tennis as an example here; there's plenty of other sports that follow this vein)
What is true is that if you are the kind of person who can learn to play tennis well enough that it becomes fun, then you are likely to live a lot longer than if you are the kind of person who cannot do that because either your eyes, brain, your muscles or your cardiovascular system do not function well enough. For example, tennis sucks if your eyes and your brain does not work well enough for you to be able to learn to reliably hit a ball going very fast with the center of the racket, which a lot of people (and even a lot of people in the prime of their life) cannot ever learn to do.
My point is that it seems like the only people who bring up trivia like "maybe tennis isn't as good for you as you think it is because there's survivors bias in the population of people used to do studies on the sport" are people who never play tennis. Similarly, if you're a runner you've probably multiple times had people say, directly to you, "oh I could never do that to my knees, running is so bad for them!"
You're explaining micro-gravity in orbit to an astronaut [1]. Leave the science and the confounding factor enumeration and the hypothesis to the academics. Just go play tennis.
Incidentally, yes if you have knees with tendency to hurt, you should not run much. That is not controversial, that is what doctors will tell you: running regularly can often cause pain in the knees from overuse. People who self identify as runners do run a lot. They are not doing 5km twice a week, they do something like 10km every day. And not everyone, especially not older people, can do that sort of load without damaging knees.
And those overuse injuries can make you stuck at home having to skip any kind of sport for very long time.
Did every city you lived it had a free golf course as well?
Now that I think about it, many decades ago I lived in apartment complexes (Indianapolis, as if it makes a difference) that had tennis courts. I don't know if that's a thing anymore or not.
It was very common. That's where I learned how to play. I have no idea how common it is with new apartment construction though.
In NYC, it's 15/hr or 100/season. In the town I grew up in it's 20/yr for residents and 40/yr for non residents. I'm my current town it's free. And I suspect that there are waivers/discounts for folks that can't pay that amount.
My neighborhood (California) has free (city-maintained, open to all) tennis courts. Seems pretty common. Also basketball, soccer and bike trails and swimmin g pool.
I find tennis an incredibly cheap sport to do recreationally. Basketball can be cheap, too, but I think you'd go through shoes pretty fast, especially on a city hard court. Soccer maybe cheaper, but it's too much organization (hard to get 10+ people on the same page at the same time).
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.
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.
How many of those questions do you feel is adequate to pre-respond to any time you link a study? Especially when assuming incompetence on the person asking the question thus you can't possibly know the questions they are most likely to ask (since they're incompetent)?
And if I'm incompetent, why would anyone trust my summary and pre-responses to the study?
None of this makes sense. And we're getting awfully close of just pasting/linking the study so the person with the questions can just read the dang thing.
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.
Wind down starts at 7pm, do some miscellaneous things like dishes etc, take a hot shower. In bed by 8pm.
I avoid driving as much as possible. I will always walk, run, ride a bike, or take public transit rather than drive.
Driving is tremendously expensive when it comes to time.
There is no free lunch and compromising sleep quality and amount is really a fool proof way into physical and mental issues.
About that, what hours people that wake up at 4.30 am go to bed? If they're so conscious about their well being I'd assume at least 8 hours of sleep, so maybe they go to bed at... 8~9 pm? my question is what do they do to end their day at 9pm? If you work 9-5, you have just 4 hours left after work. Less if you commute, have dinner and a "go to be" routine of maybe 30 min. How about social life after work? Run errands? In my case, if I need to do anything out of my house it has to be after work hours (because almost everything is closed between 6am and 9am when I start work).
So, what's the secret?
There isn't one. Its a trade-off. I get up between 4:15 and 4:45 (depending on the day) to exercise. I go to bed between 9 and 10 pm (usually 9:30.) I exercise with a group of people, and that ends up being most of my socializing time. 5 - 9 is family time.
My employer is fine with me working from the train to and from work. I get there early and I leave early.
Weekends are arranged to buy other items in bulk.
My bed time routine is probably 15 minutes of reading a book before I fall asleep.
My fiance and I don't have kids. I'm sure this is the biggest factor to allow me to live by this schedule.
Having a short commute helps a lot obviously, but I still was able to keep this schedule back when I had an hour commute. Back then, if we had even one errand to run after work, it was straight to bed when we got home, so we usually tried to keep errands to the weekend. Even if we had no errands, a lot of days we only had time to cook dinner and watch an episode of the Office.
Now we have a 10min commute, so after work we have time for an errand or two, then go to the gym, then we can even watch movie or something before bed.
I cook easy meals, things that don't take long and don't require more than a pot or a skillet. I don't mean microwave garbage or instant ramen either. I mean things like soups and beer-steamed sausage.
However, this usually leads me to eating the same few meals over and over. If I ever want more variety, I meal-prep on the weekend.
My fiance and I don't usually clean on weekdays. We probably live like slobs by some people's standards, but we're never more than 20min from a clean house.
As for social life... All of our friends live too far away to see them on weekdays anyway.
I don't live somewhere with sidewalks, so running is out for me. (Plus I don't like it much.) I do a basic circuit with pushups, lunges, and pull-ups, first thing in the morning, while the coffee is still brewing. It's my "I don't feel like fussing with a proper routine" bare minimum, but it's enough. Then I have breakfast, shower, and get on with the day. It takes no actual equipment (anything that supports your weight is fine for pullups) and costs nothing but time.
My kid was only 16 months old at the time. So when I got out of the hospital, I got to deal with the guilt at almost leaving her fatherless through terrible decision making.
So now I make better decisions. Running early works best for me (and I collect an immense amount of data so I can prove that). I’ll usually go to bed at around 10:30, sleep until 4:30, do my exercise for the day, have breakfast and get to work. I snack on proteins, have a very small meal for lunch and then take a nap. I’ll usually walk in the afternoon or maybe play some pickup tennis in a nearby park, rinse and repeat. I have a very full life, enjoy every moment of it and can work with the schedule I have.
It’s just a tradeoff. Angiograms suck and I don’t recommend them. Having limited unstructured time isn’t great, but it beats the hell out of a poke in the heart. :)
The 4:30 part helps me with performance in a roundabout way. One of my weirdo obese habits was this messed up relationship with productivity, where I had all these great resources to learn how to get fit but wouldn’t do it because it took time away from work. Dropping pounds and adding in running boosted my productivity a lot - I could do much more in fewer hours. With morning runs, I get a nice little productivity hit that makes exercise even more habit forming because I get the reward mechanisms from the exercise, those boost productivity which gives me another set of reward mechanisms later on in the day when I’m starting to wind down. I’m really just an addict chasing different highs.
A different time might be better for you - the key is to do something, be consistent, turn it into a habit and slowly improve.
Looking through this thread is hilarious. The top comment is a guy claiming that the author must be rich because he plays tennis (what kind of bumpkin says this?) and that’s the true secret to his health. It’s all just excuses. Those who want it go and get it.
I pay for a gym membership with group classes. You have to book your attendance in advance. I make a habit of doing it the night before. In the morning I get up at five to go to the class I booked the night before. If I wait until the morning, it doesn’t happen. Other people I know are in running groups where they plan to meet their friends at an early hour.
WFH on Friday so I can go train in the morning and have my Friday evening and week-end with wife and kids.
Some of this was harder to plan when kids were younger. Wife would 'dump' them in daycare/school and I would pick them up in afternoon, homework, diner, etc. between 3pm-6pm. Any errands, I'd stop coming back from work or do on weekends.
I used to do furniture delivery as a truck driver as my student job while in university and the waking up early stuck after being used to it. Obviously, you need to have an employer which is fine with this work schedule.
No one said correlation is 1. It's just on average wealthy people live longer.
There's a free court near me, and both balls and racquets can be gotten for peanuts.
How come it's the opposite in practice?
It’s not. “In practice” ≈ “your assumption”
There are a lot of couch potatoes that don't use their time, but they have it.
Not sure how they count, but for example I have a "free" netflix subscription through a tmobile phone plan. So it's easy to pump the numbers. I only watch like one episode of something every other year on netflix, so not exactly a real user of it.
Yes transit uses in practice get more, but it is incidental and lower quality exercise than someone who uses their extra time on a well developed gym plan. (There are of courseetransit users with a well developed gym plan)
Transit is indeed slower, but there are several big assumptions in there that don’t support your conclusion. In the US, only 15% of trips are commuting to work, the majority of trips are shopping, errands, and leisure. People with cars make more trips than transit users, and go out of their way for shopping, errands, and leisure more often, because they can, because it’s “faster” than transit. Driving commuters tend to drive to lunch, while transit commuters tend to bring one or walk. Transit users can sometimes get things done that can’t be done while driving, which can in some cases more than negate the added travel time. I think that’s a minority of transit users, but I spent a couple years commuting by train and working on the train, and I saved a considerable amount of time compared to driving. Because a lot of people spend this “more time” they saved commuting doing more driving for things other than work, drivers don’t actually have more time in practice.
The average US commute is less than 30 minutes, people aren't spending all that much time. And with a 30 minute commute, they are likely doing the same thing I am, passing by stores that are reasonable for many of their needs.
My grandmother would go collect them, and we always had a basket full of balls by the door.
By the early 2000s, people stopped using the tennis court very often, and the city tore down the chain link fence around the court to use as overflow parking for the adjacent little league fields.
The poor town that I spent time in has 4 tennis courts in great condition that are almost never used.
https://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/facilities/tennis-courts
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.
Tennis you can't play truly badly since the ball is in the air, so there's a skill floor, probably not too dissimilar from the skill floor required to play baseball.
Some sports that have a lower skill floor than tennis are table tennis, pickeball, badminton, association football and ice hockey. The thing to understand is that it's not about fitness, it's the skill floor. It's that the beginner will miss the ball or not be able to control it.
I think baseball requires significantly more coordination than tennis.
Moreover, baseball (as opposed to just playing catch with a baseball) requires two whole teams, whereas tennis can be played with only two people.
> ice hockey
[John McEnroe voice] You cannot be serious
Ice skating by itself is difficult for beginners. They fall all over the place. Ice skating while trying to follow and control a moving puck is even more difficult.
> it's not about fitness
Ok, but in the current context, the ROI of exercise, it's all about fitness. What's the fitness ROI from table tennis or badminton? Even pickleball tends to be less exercise than standard singles tennis. And in baseball too, there's a lot of standing around and sitting (when your team is at bat). I would say that in terms of exercise, singles tennis has one of the best ROI. (Doubles not so much.)
Or even just one and a brick wall.
In the current context fitness matters, that wasn't the context of my statement about what makes tennis hard: what makes tennis hard isn't fitness. It's that people can't control a ball with a racket that actually keeps the energy in the ball.
> you can struggle
We may have different criteria for "fine".
In any case, the debate between hockey and tennis is largely moot, because the availability of ice skating rinks is vastly more limited than tennis courts, even in Minnesota and Wisconsin, though I can't speak for Sweden.
But everyone, even the foreigners, could skate. It was normal.
Also one cannot tennis alone. Anything one must practise with a partner is more expensive due to scheduling requirements.
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.
I don't think they did say that. 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
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.
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.
What does that mean?
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.
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.
It's not surprising there's a strong correlation between "rich people" hobbies (horses, golf, tennis, sailing, etc.) and health outcomes/longevity.
I'm curious how affects lifespan having a private chef at home and a private driver.
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
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quality-adjusted_life_year#En...
[2] https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-sunday-morning-post-why-...
[3] https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/where-should-my-priorit...