#Tennis might just be the best thing you can do to extend your life.

A new study from #Denmark shows that playing tennis may extend your life by nearly 10 years. That’s a remarkably big benefit, one that even the study authors were surprised at.

It’s been well-established for a while now that exercise helps you live longer. For example, the Cardiovascular Health Study found that people over the age of 75 can expect to gain 1 to 1.5 years of healthy living by being active rather than sedentary. Others studies have looked at the effects of running or walking and found similar positive benefits.

The authors of the new study wanted to look at other sports activities, not just running. Using a large cohort of healthy 20,000 people in the Copenhagen City Heart Study, they identified 8,577 who were in the study from the early 1990s until 2017 and who met a variety of other criteria for inclusion. This gave them 25 years of followup, long enough to ask the question: how does participation in sports affect life expectancy?

In particular, they looked at tennis, badminton, soccer, jogging, cycling, calisthenics, swimming, and health club activities (which included treadmills, ellipticals, and weights).

The bottom line: compared to a sedentary lifestyle, playing tennis extends one’s life expectancy by 9.7 years. The other sports all provided benefits too, though tennis was the clear winner. Here’s a summary:

• Tennis: 9.7 years gain in life expectancy
• Badminton: 6.2 years
• Soccer: 4.7 years
• Cycling: 3.7 years
• Swimming: 3.4 years
• Jogging: 3.2 years
• Calisthenics: 3.1 years
• Health club activities: 1.5 years

Read more at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2018/09/17/want-to-live-longer-take-up-tennis/#872bed3301b7

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