Top 10 Health Benefits Of Playing Badminton
Around the world, 339 million people play badminton at least once a week. That is a lot of people, but that number isn’t so surprising when you know not just how fun badminton is, but also the mental and physical health benefits you can get from playing!
10 health benefits that badminton can have are:
- Improves cognitive function
- Releases endorphins
- Boosts focus and productivity
- Encourages social interactions
- Improves sleep quality
- Burns more calories (helping with weight loss)
- Improves cardiovascular fitness
- Develops reflexes and coordination
- Tones your muscles
- Improves bone health
We’ll now go through each of these in more detail!
Mental Health Benefits Of Badminton
Improves Cognitive Function
In badminton, you always need to analyse, strategise, react, anticipate and make quick decisions – whether that’s within the rally or between rallies.
If you’re a beginner you’ll probably be thinking about your technique and movement a lot more on top of that too! And all of this requires a lot of brain power!
Engaging your brain in this way will improve your:
- Co-ordination
- Focus
- Ability to strategise and make good decisions under pressure
These can all translate to other areas of life too. Sometimes we don’t realise just how hard our brain is working when playing badminton!
Releases Endorphins
As you play fast paced rallies that get your heart pumping, the release of serotonin or ‘feel-good’ hormones will be stimulated.
This helps boost your mood and acts as a natural outlet for stress and anxiety.
Also, when you master a new shot or win a point, this sense of accomplishment also releases dopamine. This creates a feeling of reward and motivation to continue playing, further improving your mood!
Boosts Focus & Productivity
Being able to concentrate for a whole match or training session is not an easy task, but as with anything, the more you practice it, the better you get!
So practicing this mental effort over time will definitely improve your ability to focus on tasks off court too.
Also, due to the technical and tactical elements of playing badminton, it will help improve your memory, attention and problem solving skills too.
Encourages Social Interactions
Whether you’re playing singles, doubles or mixed doubles, badminton encourages social interactions between people of all ages.
These interactions encourage teamwork, communication, competition, can help boost your confidence, and also makes playing badminton much more fun!
It’s also a great way to hang out with your friends and family, learn from each other and connect to others with similar interests too. These benefits combine to help you feel a sense of community – which has been found to be essential for happiness.
Having healthy competition and fun social interactions further stimulate those feel-good hormones, boosting your mood even more.
Improves Sleep Quality
Playing badminton regularly contributes to a deeper and more restful sleep, which gives you improved mental and physical recovery.
This is because physical exertion helps you get to sleep, and lowered stress levels also contributes to a more relaxed state, which again helps you get a better night’s sleep.
It’s important to mention that engaging in consistent exercise such as badminton also helps to regulate the body’s circadian rhythm, which means that the right signals can be sent to the body to know that it’s time to wind down.
Physical Health Benefits Of Badminton
Burns More Calories
Recreational badminton raises heart rates to 80-85% of the players’ predicted maximum heart rate which is significantly higher than, for example tennis. The Badminton World Federation (BWF) also state that the average person burns between 475-525 calories per hour playing badminton, with advanced players often burning a lot more than this!
This in turn means badminton can help with weight loss, making badminton a super fun way to lose weight and take care of your body, whilst also boosting self-esteem and confidence.
Improves Cardiovascular Fitness
The constant lunging, explosive movements, and changes in direction in badminton definitely gets the heart pumping, which when done consistently, can improve the efficiency of the cardiovascular system.
This includes strengthening the heart, being able to effectively supply oxygen to the muscles, and improved lung capacity. And all of these can massively lower the risk of major conditions such as diabetes or heart disease.
💡 The combination of aerobic and anaerobic movements in badminton also challenges the heart to adapt to varying intensities, which is a unique quality of badminton!
Develops Reflexes & Coordination
Badminton has a huge variety of shot and movement techniques, with varying speeds and trajectories. Being able to do these during high intensity rallies requires good reflexes and coordination.
So whether it’s learning a new footwork pattern, learning to hit a powerful smash, quickly reacting to shots at the net or to fast smashes in defence, playing badminton enhances your reflexes, movement coordination, and hand-eye coordination.
Tones Your Muscles
Did you know that during just 20 minutes of badminton, players will make at least 350 changes in direction of 90 degrees or more?! These explosive movements often engage lots of different muscles, including the quadriceps, hamstrings, calf muscles, shoulders, forearm, abdominal and more!
These repetitive actions help to build speed, strength, agility and flexibility, which therefore tones your muscles and makes you you feel stronger and faster. Definitely a great full body workout!
Improves Bone Health
Since badminton engages the whole body, the impact of the explosive movements and changes in direction helps to strengthen the bones, especially in the legs, which increases your bone density.
Essentially, the bones cells are continually being stimulated and strengthened as they adapt to the stress being put on them.
The range of motion needed for the lateral and vertical movements in badminton also promotes joint flexibility, which supports healthy joints and therefore bone health. All of this is essential for your long-term health, to keep you moving well for much longer!
Learn More
So we may be biased, but badminton truly does have it all! It is a great, natural way for you to improve both your mental and physical health. We can definitely say that during our time playing badminton it has kept us both mentally and physically healthy and has created so many great relationships and friendships.
And no matter what age or level you are, we encourage you to pick up a racket and play! You can find some friends and book a court, or research a local club to join.
If you want to learn how to improve your badminton, you can check out our ‘Beginner To Intermediate Tutorials + Tips’ playlist on YouTube here, or watch our video on ‘5 Ways To Become A Better Badminton Player’ below!