Tennis Won’t Help You Lose Weight

More than ever, people are worried about staying healthy. Heart disease is one of the leading causes of death in the US. People are obsessed with counting calories, and try out new sports like pickleball. Pickleball is great, but you surely don’t move as much as in tennis. So, is tennis a good way to burn calories?

Calories

I can tell you that tennis is one of the best activities you can do to burn calories, but it's going to highly depend on how you play tennis. The range of calories you can burn within one hour is between 200 and 600, so it's a wide range.

If you are working on technique with a coach and serving with a lot of stationary hitting, you're probably going to be burning on the lower spectrum of the range, around 200 calories. Interestingly, if you're playing doubles at the recreational level, I would estimate the hourly calorie burn to be somewhere around 200 calories.

However, in singles, the calorie burn has to be much greater. But one important caveat to the general calorie burn in tennis is how you play tennis. A lot of players at the recreational level have a tendency to stand around and not move, If you stand around, you're going to get less tired, burn fewer calories, and get less exhausted.

However, independent of whether you're playing doubles or singles, if you play with a lot of intensity—in other words, if you move your feet on every ball and try really hard to set up every single ball perfectly—you are, of course, going to get more tired, more exhausted, but you also are going to burn more calories.

Intensity

If you don't play tennis with intensity, your game is going to suffer tremendously. You're going to commit a lot of mistakes by always being forced to improvise and being stuck in these emergency situations. It is in your best interest to maximize your tennis potential, burn the most calories, and also build up your stamina by trying as hard as you possibly can.

I can tell you that when you try hard and you're playing singles, you can burn up to 600 calories per hour. Now think about it, when you play a two-hour, three-hour, or even four-hour match, you can burn up to 2400 calories by playing tennis—that is a tremendous amount of energy expenditure.

Losing Weight

Tennis, or any exercise in general, is not a good way to lose weight. This is not due to the training because sessions should be tough. Focus on intensity, work extremely hard, and push to your limits so you can build up stamina, which comes in extremely handy in match play. Unless you're working on technique, it is a good idea to move and hit on the run because this is what you will experience in a match situation. Therefore, it's not that training isn't tough enough that you won’t lose weight; it's more that exercise, in general, is a very poor way to lose weight.

Now, think of the following scenario: let's say you play a four-hour match, maybe once in a lifetime, you get a match that's 7-6, 6-7, 7-6 in the blistering heat. You go home and try to rest. What's going to happen? You burned an enormous amount of calories in this match, so your metabolism is naturally going to slow down because of it.

There are things happening inside your body that will even out your daily calorie burn. Why does the body do that? To protect you from exhausting yourself too much and possibly causing dangerous health effects. You have to keep in mind that even if you are exercising like a lunatic and doing four or five hours a day, at the end of the day, your calorie burn is going to even out. The rest of your body is going to slow down—your metabolic rate is going to slow down.

Diet

What is the only proven way to lose weight? Well, that's going to be your diet. One important thing I want to stress is that by no means am I saying that because exercise or playing tennis is not an effective way to lose weight, you shouldn't do it. Y ou should exercise every day, you should try to play tennis every day because this is a very healthy thing to do for your body. It's something you definitely should do. But for all of you guys who are trying to lose weight by playing tennis, it's not going to work. You're going to fail, and you have to get your diet in check.

I'm not going to try to persuade you to adopt a specific diet. Whatever you do with your diet, you have to figure out a way to eat healthily. You have to learn about calorie density, and when you get your diet in check and exercise, then weight loss is more probable. Of course, any weight loss is going to depend on other factors, such as genetics and how much weight you actually have to lose.

There is some data to suggest that the heavier you are, the more your metabolism slows down after exercise, so it's more difficult to lose weight the heavier you are. But in any case, the perfect combination for you guys that are trying to lose weight by playing tennis is going to be playing tennis, hopefully on a daily basis or as often as you can, and then getting your diet in check and getting rid of the junk food.