Ping pong or table tennis, an Olympic sport since 1988, is played by millions of people worldwide.
Besides being an indoor sport, ping pong is accessible to all where virtually anyone can grab a racket and play anywhere. Ping pong involves physical exercise and has a low-risk injury rate. People of all ages and fitness abilities love playing ping pong.
Playing ping pong can indeed be fun, entertaining, addictive, fast and for sure has excellent health, social and psychological benefits that can help to improve your overall fitness and wellbeing.
Who knew playing ping pong could help you stay fit, burn calories, lose weight, boost brain power, enhance reflexes and balance skills, and increase hand-eye coordination? Let us take a closer look at some of the most significant ping pong’s health benefits, which may surprise you.
HEALTH BENEFITS
Playing ping pong can help you to stay physically active. The sport is both an aerobic and anaerobic exercise. It helps to enhance coordination and reflexes. Here is a listing of the most significant health benefits of ping pong.
HAND-EYE COORDINATION
In ping pong, players must keep their eye on the ping pong ball to determine its path, spin, and speed so they can hit the ball with their racket. It implies that you require strong hand-eye coordination – usage of vision and arm/hand. This requires practice – the more you play the better your hand-eye coordination gets. Hand-eye coordination impacts your balance and reflexes as well when playing ping pong.
REFLEXES
You need quick reflexes and reaction time when playing ping pong. The fast-paced elements of the sport of ping pong, the short distance plus the footwork and body movement requires great reflexes and reaction time to hit the ball. Good reaction time is also the ability to anticipate where the opponent is going to hit the ball to you.
EASY ON THE JOINTS
Playing ping pong is easy on the joints. It can also help you to tone and develop muscle in your arms, legs, and core without overusing your joints. Get fit playing ping pong.
BALANCE
Ping pong can help you with your balance and coordination. Your body is moving constantly when playing ping pong. Therefore, staying balanced after each stroke and movements, especially when you are changing directions so fast is not easy to maintain balance. This is more noticeable and important in our senior and standing disabled players.
BURN CALORIES & WEIGHT LOSS
Another great health benefit of playing ping pong is that it can help you burn calories and weight loss. Ping pong is a great cardiovascular exercise. If it is played regularly and intensely it can promote burning calories and weight loss. According to a study done by NutriStrategy, a 155-pound person could lose up to 281 calories per hour, while a 180-person could burn up to 327 calories when playing ping pong.
So, if you do not like jogging or getting on the treadmill, playing ping pong can be a great alternative to working out. When playing ping pong there is constant movement while trying to hit the ball back and forth, and even after the rally when you have to retrieve the ball from the floor.
Because ping pong is fun, addictive, and entertaining you will be playing more often than you thought, and this will promote burning more calories.
PSYCHOLOGICAL BENEFITS
Ping pong is a physical activity and as such is well known to be effective in helping people with mental health, including treatment and prevention for depression and dementia. Playing ping pong regularly besides being beneficial to your concentration and coordination, research shows that it can help lower stress and anxiety levels, increase self-confidence and boost self-esteem, all of which will contribute to the improved mental health of those that play.
Ping pong is “the world’s best brain sport” according to Dr. Amen, a psychiatrist and brain-imaging expert. Dr. Wendy Suzuki also agrees that table tennis is the best sport for the brain because you use most parts of your brain when playing.
Playing ping pong can also help develop discipline, good sportsmanship and integrity while having fun.
In addition, Alzheimer’s Weekly reports “a clear increase in motor skills and cognitive awareness from playing table tennis, after a series of preliminary clinical studies in Japan found that table tennis markedly increases the flow of blood to the brain, and could possibly prevent dementia.”
Researchers have also suggested that playing ping pong may offer benefits as a form of physical therapy for people with Parkinson.
Ping pong is a very mental game. It is a fast-paced individual sport with extraordinarily little help if, and when, things are not going in your favor, then the negative thoughts can take over impacting the results of your match. You need to know when to calm yourself down in a match. So, we need to find our comfort “mental zone” for the duration of the match.
SOCIAL BENEFITS
Ping pong is a social sport that allows you to meet new people, make new friends and expands the social bond. Playing the sport helps to increase the bonding between people and enjoying quality time with the family or coworkers. When playing a match, it can also boost your confidence and positive feelings as a result of social interaction with others. Because ping pong allows players of all ages and levels it does not have any social barriers of any kind.
Start playing ping pong today in a positive learning environment. Ping pong is the right exercise for the whole family. However, young people and seniors can benefit the most from playing ping pong as it helps them to improve agility and mental health.
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