When you sweat with a happy heart you build up a healthy you. Badminton is a fun, active sport which is an easy game to practice with few painless rules. It boosts up your muscles, adds strength to the muscles, improves blood flow rate and the benefits are endless. Apart from physical health benefits there are mental advantages of playing badminton too. To dive into the benefits of playing badminton is a vast ocean to explore.
1. Improves muscle strength
One among the important benefits of playing badminton is that it boosts up the muscle strength making you strong and fit. The continuous movements from here to there build up your muscle mass, as well as tone them up into perfect structure. It boosts up your core muscles, calves, quads and hamstrings.
2. Improves heart functioning
Continuing movements and hits in badminton strengthens your heart muscles. It also improves the blood flow through our veins and pumps the heart up. It decreases the cholesterol level and reduces the risk of heart attacks or strokes. This also unclogs the blocked walls of the heart and increases the blood flow.
3. It helps to reduce stress
The vibrant game of badminton is a healthy habit to ward off your stress hormones.That’s so soothing right! Stress is something that eats you up day by day. It reduces both your physical and mental ability leaving you a living zombie. But by practicing badminton as a daily sport our body reduces the stress hormones and boosts up the happy hormones leaving you happy and alive.
4. Improves flexibility
The backhand smashing and forehand smashing needs high flexibility. By making it a habit our muscles become flexible and strong. Flexibility of muscles helps you maintain a healthy smart life.
5. Boost your metabolism rate
Having a good metabolism with a high metabolic rate is vital for a healthy life. Badminton is an active sport which sweats you out from tip to toe. The natural sweating of our body burns up the calories and removes toxins inside out and hence helps in weight loss. Increased metabolic rate maintains your physique and keeps you fit and firm.
6. Strengthen your bone
Having a healthy badminton match everyday reduces the risk of bone fractures. The back and forth movements of hands, legs and arms, develops calcium matrix in your bones strengthening the bones within. This also enhances the physical appearance, as we all are nothing but mere skeletons.
7. Improves mental agility
Apart from physical benefits, mental benefits of playing badminton are more striking and interesting. The tiny white cock may deceive you with its meek look but moves like a swift, fast and furious! The player has to focus on the fast moving cock which increases the level of concentration and mental activeness. One has to be alert at any given point, presence of mind is cardinal. By planning where to move, how to move, how to smash it, when to return it back, whether to use backhand or forehand, everything should be kept in mind.This presence of mind benefits you in multiple ways even in your daily life.
8. Helps in social being
Badminton is a game of two or four members and not a single sole play. It’s a healthy competition between two members, you either win or lose, but you’ll always maintain a good social relationship. The benefit of playing badminton is that it is an outdoor game which can be played as a fun time pass with your family or friends while you get together. It connects people and adds spice to their relationship, rather than drowning into the digital world.
9. Helps in weight loss
Fed up with starving diets and low calories, put up a healthy habit of burning up your calories by sweating off with a badminton match. It helps you in controlling your weight and maintaining the body balance thereby. Burning up calories thus boosts up the metabolic rate leaving as healthy and fit
10. Decreases the risk of diabetes
A badminton play sweats you up a lot which decreases the diabetics inside us. It tames the production of sugar by the liver and decreases fasting blood sugar.
11. Reduce the risk of death
Badminton may seem to be a mere sport activity but the health benefits of playing badminton are extremely far reaching and eternal. It’s been found that since badminton increases the heart rate and reduces breathlessness, the risk of death for a regular player is 23% in 20 years. To add to it as a token of gift for your hard work it rewards you with at least 2 years of extra life compared to the normal.
12. Increases your lung capacity
A regular badminton match increases your lung capacity. The lung capacity of a badminton player is higher compared to a normal person. It is our Adrenal hormones which indirectly affect the respiratory system. This indirect connection links with your medulla oblongata (a long stem-like structure located in the brainstem. It is a cone-shaped neuronal mass responsible for autonomic (involuntary) functions ranging from vomiting to sneezing. Source - Wikipedia) making your lungs work more quickly, with pace. Ironically the play which rushes your lungs to catch enough breathe while playing, enhances your lung capacity!
13. Health is nothing without brain
It’s interesting to look at the mental benefits of playing badminton. Most of the physical health benefits of playing badminton are obvious and predictable. But have you ever dreamt of your brain feeling good while playing a sport? Yes, that’s true. A tight badminton match produces endorphins, a neurotransmitter which makes your brain feel good and happy. Strange, but true.
14. You are smart enough
Badminton is a strategic play. It needs plans on where to shoot, how to serve, what kind of smash, when to return, everything is a pre-planned process, an understanding between you, your brain and senses. Thus it wakes up your snoozed brain and forces it to work. This will obviously make you a smart, tricky lad.
15. Increases your reflex action
Being a quick sport, it requires lightning reflexes from one to other both physically and mentally. Physically you have to switch from one to another within a count of seconds, while mentally you have to reflex back to the shots ideally and accordingly. These quick reflexes enhance the way you think and live a daily life too.
So the benefits of badminton are alluring, literally. Now dust off your shuttlecock and racket, smash it off for a healthy beginning.