The best sport for a longer life?

Study says those who played tennis, badminton or soccer tended to live longer

Playing tennis and other sports that are social might add years to your life, according to a new epidemiological study of Danish men and women.

The study found that adults who reported frequently participating in tennis or other racket and team sports lived longer than people who were sedentary. But they also lived longer than people who took part in reliably healthy but often solitary activities such as jogging, swimming and cycling.

The results raise interesting questions about the role that social interactions might play in augmenting the benefits of exercise.

At this point, no one doubts that being physically active improves our health and can extend our longevity. Multiple, recent epidemiological studies have pinpointed links between regular exercise and longer lives in men and women.

But whether some activities might be better than others for lengthening life spans remains in dispute. One widely publicised 2017 study of more than 80,000 British men and women found that those who played racket sports tended to outlive those who jogged.
Associations

For the new study, which was published this week in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, researchers looked at a variety of sports and their associations with life and premature death. They zeroed in on 8,600 of the participants who had been a part of the study for about 25 years.

They cross-referenced records with the national death registry to see if and when any of these people had passed away.

Then they compared activities and life spans.

The most obvious finding was that people who had reported almost never exercising were more likely than the active to have died in the ensuing decades.

The associations between particular activities and life span were more surprising.

Cycling was the most popular activity among the Danes in the study, many of whom reported riding for four or more hours every week. Their pedalling was associated with a lengthier life span, adding an average of 3.7 years to riders’ lives, compared to sedentary Danes.

Running likewise was associated with an extra 3.2 years of life.

But these gains were notably less than for playing tennis, which was linked to 9.7 added years of life, or badminton, which was linked to an extra 6.2 years, or soccer, which added almost 5 years to players’ lives.

These associations remained unchanged even when the researchers controlled for people’s education, socioeconomic status and age.

Why and how some sports might add more years to people’s lives than others is impossible to know from this kind of observational study, says Dr. James O’Keefe, a study co-author and the director of preventive cardiology at the Mid America Heart Institute at Saint Luke’s Health Center in Kansas City, U.S.

The differing physical demands of some sports could play a role, he says, although little of the exercise in this study was heavily intense, whether people were cycling or backhanding a shuttlecock.