The best activity to maintain physical and cognitive function may surprise you

Pickleball is growing so fast that it is difficult to know the exact number of participants. The Association of Pickleball Professionals’ Pickleball Participation Report (sorry – couldn’t resist) says it was 36 million people worldwide in 2023. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 339 million people that a 2019 Nielsen survey estimated were badminton players, second only to soccer participation around the world.

Both are racquet sports that are relatively inexpensive to participate in, appeal to people of all ages and are fun to play. Fitness level and skills aren’t critical to beginners, yet the games can be extremely competitive and demanding at higher levels.

Turns out pickleball, badminton, and racquet sports, in general, have much more to offer than social and moderate exercise benefits.

A word of caution to my fellow cyclists: do not read this unless you are sitting down with your nerve-calming sedative of choice at hand. Never again will we be able to sit atop our bikes, puff out our chests, and look down our noses at those baggy-shorted, gimpy-kneed, primarily silver-haired pickleballers we occasionally disparage.

Those of you who play pickleball, tennis, badminton, and racquet sports in general, grab your “I told you so” caps and T-shirts, stand on a strong and steady chair, and shout out to the world that your sport provides more health benefits, both physically and cognitively, than cycling ever will.

This column will focus on the cognitive benefits of playing racquet sports. We all know that almost any exercise is good for our physical body, so let’s get that painful part out of the way first.

A UK Daily Mail article on a recent study by the National Cancer Institute (British) stated that “Regularly playing a (racquet) sport like tennis for at least 2.5 hours each week between ages 59 and 82 could reduce a person's all-cause risk of death 16 percent.”

The numbers attached to other sports are: running 15 percent, walking 9 percent, golf 7 percent, aerobic exercise 7 percent, swimming 5 percent, and cycling 3 percent. Seriously? Walking and golf are both more than twice as beneficial to our physical health as cycling— and racquet sports are five times better?

What about cognitive health? Is there redemption for cycling there?

Afraid not. With the rapid growth of pickleball, and the continued huge worldwide participation in badminton, there are an increasing number of studies that suggest racquet sports significantly improve mental cognition in all age groups, children and seniors included.

Racquet sports significantly improve mental cognition in all age groups, children and seniors included

Sports and exercises are categorized as Open skills or Closed skills.

Closed-skill sports require motor skills that are performed with minimal variation in a predictable and stable environment, such as pushing bicycle pedals round and round. Not a lot of strategizing or instantaneous decision-making going on here.

Open-skill sports require motor skills that are adaptable to constantly changing and unpredictable conditions such as racquet sports provide, and demand the continual interaction between our brains and muscles which provides cognitive and executive function benefits.

Multiple quick steps, forward, backward, and laterally, demand agility. Unwavering concentration on a ball or birdie in unpredictable motion demands psychological stability, and making successful contact between racquet and ball demands high visuomotor integration. These cognitive functions—perception, attention, visual and spatial processing, memory, and others—are all continually challenged, and exercised, while playing racquet sports.

Executive function is our higher-order cognitive process, including inhibitory control, working memory, mental flexibility, planning, reasoning and problem solving—all critical to navigating daily life, and all mentioned in any discussion about the loss of mental faculties as we age.

These connections between exercise and cognitive and executive function are not new and have been well-researched. What is new are recent studies differentiating between the ability of Open skill and Closed-skill sports to improve these mental functions, and linking Open skill sports, specifically racquet sports, to the best results.

Our cerebellum, a small portion of our rear brain, contains more than half the total nerve cells in our brain and has a heavy workload. At a minimum, its functions include keeping us balanced, timing muscle actions, coordinating eye movements, and learning motor skills. As well as these physical jobs, the cerebellum also contributes to speech and language processing and plays a role in mood adjustments and thinking.

The parietal lobe of our brain is home to our somatic sensory cortex, the portion of the brain that processes and integrates sensory information from various parts of the body, including sight and touch.

Add in our frontal brain lobes, and the value of racquet sports to maintaining and exercising our cognitive and executive functioning becomes crystal clear. Our frontal lobes influence voluntary movement and manage higher-level executive functions; our ability to plan, organize, initiate, and control our responses in order to achieve a specific goal. These are skills that would be employed to their maximum while players strategize where to place their next volley or how much spin and speed are needed to win the point.

Racquet sports, especially when played competitively or for fun with vigour and passion, are a whole brain-whole body workout that cycling, jogging and swimming cannot match.

Ouch.