The benefits of tennis

Yes — you’re thinking of a specific analysis within a long-running health project out of Denmark called the Copenhagen City Heart Study (CCHS), and it did find that tennis was associated with the largest increase in life expectancy compared with several other common sports — but with important caveats.

🧠 What is the

Copenhagen City Heart Study

?

The Copenhagen City Heart Study is a large, long-term prospective population cohort study started in 1976 in Copenhagen, Denmark. It follows individuals’ health, lifestyle, and outcomes over many years to understand risk factors for heart disease and mortality.

• Thousands of people from the general population are enrolled.

• Participants are periodically examined and surveyed about habits including physical activity.

• Researchers then link this data to death registries and health outcomes over decades.

So it’s not a controlled experiment (like a randomized trial), but rather a long-term observational study. Because of that, it can show associations but not prove causation.

🎾 The finding about

sports and longevity

In one 2018 analysis from the CCHS published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, researchers looked at how people’s leisure-time sports activities related to later mortality over about 25 years.

🧍‍♂️ Key results (after adjusting for age, education, lifestyle, etc.):

Compared with people who reported no physical activity, the estimated life expectancy gains for people who regularly played different sports were approximately:

Sport

Estimated added life expectancy vs sedentary group

Tennis

~+9.7 years

Badminton

+6.2 years

Soccer

+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

This is where the idea that “tennis adds the most to longevity” comes from.

🧩 Important context & limitations

📌 Observational — not causal

The study did not prove that playing tennis causes you to live longer — only that people who reported playing tennis tended to live longer over the follow-up period.

There are many possible explanations for the association:

• healthier people may be more likely to play tennis in the first place

• tennis players in Denmark may have lifestyles or socioeconomic advantages that also influence longevity

• the social interaction inherent in many of the more beneficial sports may itself provide health benefits

• the intensity pattern (interval bursts, agility, coordination) may be particularly beneficial

The authors explicitly note that it remains uncertain whether the relationship is causal.

🍃 More than just exercise

The study and other interpretations observed that sports such as tennis, badminton, and soccer often involve social interaction, teamwork, and varied movement patterns — which could contribute to better health outcomes beyond pure physical exertion.

🧾 Where you can see this documented

The specific analysis linking different sports to life expectancy is published as:

• Schnohr et al., Various Leisure-Time Physical Activities Associated With Widely Divergent Life Expectancies: The Copenhagen City Heart Study, Mayo Clinic Proceedings (2018).

The PubMed abstract for this analysis clearly shows the relative life expectancy gains for each sport.

📌 Summary

• The Copenhagen City Heart Study is a large Danish population cohort study that tracks health, lifestyle, and mortality over decades.

• In a 2018 analysis from this study, researchers found that people who reported playing tennis regularly had the largest estimated increase in life expectancy compared with other sports and sedentary lifestyles — around 9.7 extra years.

• However, the findings are associational, not proof of causation. Other factors such as social engagement, lifestyle differences, and baseline health may contribute to the observed effects.

If you want, I can summarize how this study measured sports participation and how it controlled for other risk factors (e.g., smoking, education, BMI) or what other major analyses have found about physical activity and longevity.