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 your muscles, adds strength, improves blood flow, and the benefits are endless. Apart from physical health benefits, there are mental advantages to playing badminton too. To explore the benefits of playing badminton is a vast ocean.
1. Improves muscle strength
One of the key benefits of playing badminton is that it enhances muscle strength, making you stronger and fitter. The continuous movements from here to there build up your muscle mass, as well as tone them up into perfect structure. It strengthens your core muscles, calves, quads, and hamstrings.
2. Improves heart functioning
Continuing to move and hit in badminton strengthens your heart muscles. It also improves blood flow through our veins and pumps the heart. It lowers cholesterol levels 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 stress hormones. That’s so soothing, right? Stress is something that eats away at you day by day. It reduces both your physical and mental ability, leaving you a living zombie. However, by practicing badminton as a daily sport, our body lowers stress hormones and boosts happy hormones, leaving you feeling happy and alive.
4. Improves flexibility
The backhand and forehand smashes need high flexibility. By making it a habit, our muscles become flexible and strong. Flexibility of muscles helps you maintain a healthy, intelligent 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 head to toe. The natural sweating of our body burns calories and removes toxins from the inside out, thereby helping with weight loss. An increased metabolic rate helps maintain your physique, keeping you fit and firm.
6. Strengthen your bones
Having a healthy badminton match every day reduces the risk of bone fractures. The back and forth movements of hands, legs and arms develop a calcium matrix in your bones, strengthening the bones within. This also enhances the physical appearance, as we are all merely skeletons.
7. Improves mental agility
Apart from physical benefits, the mental benefits of playing badminton are more striking and interesting. The tiny white cock may deceive you with its meek look, but it 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 must be alert at all times; presence of mind is essential. By planning where to move, how to move, how to smash it, when to return it, and 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 for two or four players, not a single player. 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 that can be enjoyed as a fun time with your family or friends while you get together. It connects people and adds spice to their relationship, rather than drowning in the digital world.
9. Helps in weight loss
Fed up with starving diets and low calories, put up a healthy habit of burning calories by sweating off in a badminton match. It helps you control your weight and maintain a balanced body. Burning up calories thus boosts the metabolic rate, leaving us healthy and fit.
10. Decreases the risk of diabetes
A badminton player sweats a lot, which helps decrease the risk of diabetes. It reduces the liver's production of sugar and lowers fasting blood sugar levels.
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 norm.
12. Increases your lung capacity
A regular badminton match increases your lung capacity. The lung capacity of a badminton player is higher than that of 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 that makes your lungs work harder to catch enough breath while playing actually enhances your lung capacity.
13. Health is nothing without the 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 sport. It requires plans on where to shoot, how to serve, what kind of smash, and when to return. Everything is a pre-planned process, an understanding between you, your brain, and your senses. Thus, it wakes up your snoozed brain and forces it to work. This will obviously make you a bright, tricky lad.
15. Increases your reflex action
Being a quick sport, it requires lightning reflexes from one to another, 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.