Can Playing Tennis Really Add Up to 10 Years to Your Life? Here's What the Research Shows

A 25-year Danish study found that tennis players lived 9.7 years longer than sedentary people, more than any other leisure sport it measured. For a region with fewer sports halls per head than almost anywhere comparable in Sweden, that finding is not a curiosity; it is a planning input.

What the Copenhagen study actually found

The Copenhagen City Heart Study, published by Schnohr and colleagues in Mayo Clinic Proceedings in 2018, followed 8,577 people for up to 25 years. It compared eight leisure-time activities against a sedentary lifestyle and calculated multivariable-adjusted gains in life expectancy¹.

The ranking was striking:

• Tennis: 9.7 years
• Badminton: 6.2 years
• Football: 4.7 years
• Cycling: 3.7 years
• Swimming: 3.4 years
• Jogging: 3.2 years
• Calisthenics: 3.1 years
• Health club activities: 1.5 years

Tennis and badminton players also had the lowest multivariable-adjusted mortality risk of all eight groups². The International Tennis Federation has since communicated these findings directly to its membership³.

So when people ask whether tennis increases life expectancy, this is the study they have usually heard about, often without the detail that badminton, football and the other racket sports sit close behind.

A second, larger cohort points the same way

One study is one study. A British cohort of more than 80,000 adults, tracked for nine years and published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, found that racket-sport players had a 47 per cent lower risk of death from any cause and a 56 per cent lower risk of cardiovascular death compared with inactive people⁴.

Different country, different method, different decade, same direction of travel. The United States Tennis Association notes that around three hours of tennis a week is linked to more than a 50 per cent lower risk of heart disease⁵.

Why racket sports, and not simply any exercise

The Copenhagen authors offered a plausible explanation for the ranking. The three activities at the top — tennis, badminton and football — all require at least one other person. The activities lower down the list — jogging, swimming, gym work — can be done alone⁶.

That matters for how a facility is designed. A court is not only a place to raise a heart rate. It is a standing appointment with another human being, usually at the same time each week, often for decades.

The strongest longevity evidence we have points not to the gym machine but to the court, where the exercise comes with someone on the other side of the net.

It also matters for who keeps playing. Racket sports can be played at seven and at seventy-seven. Few activities with this evidence base have that range.

The caveat, stated plainly

All of these studies are observational. They follow people who chose their own activities; they do not randomly assign anyone to tennis or to the sofa. The authors are careful about this, and so are we⁷.

People who play tennis may differ from inactive people in income, education, baseline health or social network, and the researchers adjusted for several of these factors without being able to eliminate all of them. Nine point seven years is an association, not a promise.

What survives the caveat is still substantial: across two large cohorts in two countries, social racket sports are consistently among the activities most strongly associated with living longer and with lower cardiovascular death. For a municipality weighing where to put capital and land, that is more evidence than most interventions can show.

What this means for the Stockholm region

Stockholm has 32,300 inhabitants per sports hall. Gothenburg has 12,700. The shortage has persisted for more than twenty years, and the region is projected to reach 2.7 million inhabitants by 2030.

Put the two sets of facts side by side. The activities with the strongest longevity evidence are indoor, court-based and social. The region has a long-standing structural shortage of exactly that kind of space, and a growing population competing for it.

The consequence is not that Stockholmers are unhealthy. It is that access to the most evidence-backed form of lifelong physical activity is rationed by queue, by membership list and by geography. Those queues fall hardest on the households least able to drive to an alternative, and on girls and newly arrived residents who are not already inside a club system.

Facilities as public health infrastructure

The World Health Organization's Global Action Plan on Physical Activity 2018–2030 confirms that physical activity can contribute to 13 of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals⁸. That is the policy framing: activity is not a leisure category sitting beside health, education, equality and community safety. It feeds into all of them.

The Dome Sweden is designed on that premise. Tennis, squash, padel, beach tennis, touchtennis, badminton, table tennis and fitness under one roof, with professional coaches, a 15,000-seat centre court, education all year round, and an outdoor sports park with climbing walls, exercise machines, fields and a running track frozen for skiing in winter.

The project's own assessment is a direct impact on 6 UN Sustainable Development Goals and a supporting impact on 7 more, with full alignment to the four fundamental principles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The ambition is to be the first fully sustainable and smart arena in Scandinavia.

What a municipality can do with this

A municipal partner can treat the evidence above as a basis for decisions rather than a talking point:

• Count court hours per thousand residents alongside hall numbers, and track who is using them.
• Prioritise multi-sport capacity that serves a seven-year-old and a seventy-year-old in the same building, since lifelong participation is where the longevity effect sits.
• Protect unbooked and low-cost hours, so access does not depend on an existing club membership.
• Report participation outcomes against public health, integration and safety responsibilities, not only against construction cost.

The research will keep refining itself. The shortage will not resolve on its own, and the population curve is already set.