Playing tennis burns fat, improves cardiovascular fitness and helps the body maintain higher energy levels. The American College of Sports Medicine has cited that more calories are burned in short, high-intensity exercise, and that’s exactly what tennis provides.
It is interval training, due to the nature of how points are played. Because the heart rate gets into a fat-burning zone and then can easily go higher, tennis has been recognized as one of the leading activities that help to burn fat. Also, because the intensity of tennis can get fairly high, depending on how hard a player works while playing, and because tennis is purely an interval sport, more fat is burned after working out than during the time on court. Thus, physical capacity gets stronger and players have more energy later on for what matters most in life.
As a testimony to this, Bloomfield and colleagues determined that 7- to 12-year-old tennis players had a superior cardiovascular endurance compared to casual sport participants. It has also been determined that singles tennis meets the intensity criteria established by the American College of Sports Medicine for developing and maintaining cardiorespiratory fitness. In another study of 141 tennis players, ages 30 to 74, Galanis observed that even moderate physical activity improved overall lung function.
It’s well accepted that the maximum amount of oxygen people can take in diminishes as they age, which means heart-lung capacity also declines. However, Therminarias found that playing tennis regularly seems to decrease the rate of this age-related decline. Senior players can also realize another benefit from tennis. When studying senior tennis players (55 and older), Howley and other scientists observed the older players to have higher HDL (good cholesterol) and a higher HDL to total cholesterol ratio than a control group. In reviewing 17 different studies, Pluim and her associates found that singles play allowed a player to be in the 70 percent to 90 percent range of maximum heart rate, which makes tennis an outstanding activity for improving cardiorespiratory function.