Everyone knows that daily physical activity and exercise lead to healthier living. Physicians recommend about 30 minutes of exercise per day, yet how many of us have the time to follow a routine? For many, work, family, and recreation take up most of the day, so playing amateur sports is a great way to introduce more physical activity into a packed schedule. You may not have the opportunity to play a cricket match straight away, but any time spent outdoors is worthwhile. Here’s how else cricket can be good for your health.
Improves hand-eye coordination
If you’ve never tried to bat during a cricket match, you must appreciate the difficulty. The bat is relatively wide, but it doesn’t mean making contact with the ball is easy. The entire point of bowling is to make it hard for the batsman to put the ball in play and score runs. You have to rely on hand-eye coordination to hit correctly, following through with the swing to put the ball in play where you want and not where the bowler wants you to hit. The fun part about cricket is that your swing is most likely not as crisp as a professional cricketer, so be sure to wear proper cricket protection. After all, we’re discussing amateur sports. Entertainment and healthier living is the idea.
Builds cardiovascular endurance
One of the most impressive things about professional athletes is their endurance. Their energy level seems endless, yet the truth is that they didn’t develop such conditioning overnight. Instead, it took years upon years of practice, eating well, and extraordinary self-discipline to stay in tip-top shape. Regarding cricket specifically, however, the game has much downtime between batsman and innings, which makes the action stop and start. Fielders have to quickly anticipate where the ball will land and sprint to that spot. This action builds cardiovascular endurance as the body learns to preserve energy for quick bursts.
Social support and friendship
Lastly, we can’t finish this post without mentioning the emotional aspects of playing cricket to get healthy. For many, being unhealthy and not physically fit can affect self-esteem, self-confidence, and lower quality of life in general. But playing team sports is a great way to build new friendships with like-minded amateur cricketers. You might start at the bottom of the batting order, but you’ll nonetheless be on the team.
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The sports cliche is that you can experience the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat,” but there’s more to it. The team triumphs, not the individual, so you have a chance to be a part of something special. The benefits to mental health, in this case, are numerous as you’ll learn to be more confident and have more energy. Most people assume that being healthy only involves physical fitness; however, mental wellness is equally as vital, if not more so.
Overall, those reasons are why cricket is a great activity for healthier living.
