Benefits of playing sports include a positiveimpact on the body, mind, and spirit. When you consider the advantages of athletics and team sports, the chances are your first thoughts will have to do with the physical benefits of regular fitness.
While it’s true that regular activity is essential in maintaining a healthy lifestyle, research has also shown that participating in exercise and sports may help enhance the mind and spirit, alongside the body.
A significant body of research has found that in addition to the obvious — improved physical health,practicing and playing sports play a positive role in supporting youth development, leading to improved academic achievement, fewer behavioral problems, better psychosocial health, and more. In fact, almost every study reveals benefits in competence, character, confidence, and other critical components of positive development. Because of this, it’s clear that the various facets of playing sports, from the discipline of training to the balance provided by teamwork, could provide lifelong skills.
If you’re interested in how this all plays out in school athletics, you may be interested in checking out this day and boarding school in San Diego County, California and their athletic offerings. This is a school where athletics is a cornerstone and integral to academic excellence, leadership, and character development.
How Sports Benefit You
Following are just some of the advantages and benefits that you can gain through regular physical activity, fitness programs, and team sports at school. If you are wondering how sports and fitness programs can benefit you directly, don’t overlook these key advantages.
- Academic Performance – See your grades and GPA improve.
- Lower Stress – Create more calm in your life and lower stress.
- Learn Important Values – Establish a moral compass and values.
- Achieve More in Life – Set goals, aim high, and feel more confident.
- Personal Growth – Keep learning, moving, and growing as a person.
- Physical and Health Benefits – Improve your overall long-term health.
In case you’re asking, what are team sports? Team sports include: basketball, volleyball, rugby, water polo, handball, lacrosse, cricket, baseball, and the various forms of association football, doubles tennis, and hockey.
The easiest way to differentiate team vs. individual sports is to think about whether the practice is with a team or solo. Examples of solo physical activities could include: skiing, swimming, surfing, jogging, and weightlifting. These are fitness activities, where a student typically does them alone.
Improved Academic Performance
Want to improve your grades? Studies frequently demonstrate the positive impact that playing a sport can have on academic achievement. Largely, this is because of the positive influence that fitness can have on emotional development. Research conducted by the Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute suggests that physical exercise leads to short-term relaxation throughout the body, accompanied by enhanced creativity, improved mood, better memory, and concentration, and even maximized problem-solving skills. This set of psychological benefits consequently result in higher grades.
In regards to academic performance, students who play sports are more likely to go to college, graduate with higher grades, achieve better positions in their careers, and contribute successfully to society. Does that sound good to you?
Lower Stress and Anxiety
Need to lower your stress level? For a burst of relaxation and happiness, few things are more effective than exercise. Physical activity stimulates chemicals in the brain that help students feel happier and more relaxed. Combine those results, with the emotional responses that come from team sports, and you have a comprehensive experience that allows you to unwind and engage in satisfying challenges at the same time.
Being physically active in sports will provide you with a distraction from daily stressors and negative thought patterns. At the same time, regular fitness activities, exercise and playing sports reduces the levels of cortisol and adrenaline in your body, stimulating the production of endorphins so you feel happier and less anxious.
Learn Important Values
Interested in making friends? Team sports support social interaction and encourage individuals to think with a team perspective. Playing a sport as part of a team requires persistence, patience, and practice — all of which can translate into important life lessons.
What’s more, working with other team members teaches you accountability, and encourages you to take responsibility for your own mistakes. This is an important lesson to learn in life. Being able to accept setbacks and learn from them is one of the most crucial steps toward success in life.
Achieve More from Life
Need to set goals? Research into careers and the people who achieve greater success in their chosen occupation have found that 95% of individuals at the level of executive vice president in 75 Fortune 500 companies played sports during their school years.
What’s more, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth found that 32-year-old men who played sports in school were paid wages 31% higher than those who hadn’t played sports. How does that sound to you?
Though it’s impossible to guarantee that playing sports will help you generate a higher income, it is possible to suggest that the development of hard work, discipline, determination, and leadership skills can help students to achieve more from life. Sports are a fantastic way to teach students that hard work pays off, and playing on an athletic team requires training and dedication — important talents to learn for any future career.
Personal Growth and Development
Interested in personal growth? It’s clear that the benefits of playing sports include hard work and determination. These lessons in playing a team sport will help you understand the value of crucial concepts such as: leadership, teamwork, honor, integrity, respect, responsibility, compassion and gratitude.In a team sports scenario, athletes learn to simply put their differences aside and cooperate for the greater good of the team.
At the same time, the act of playing team sports encourages social connections, camaraderie, and helps students form deeper bonds with their peers over a shared passion.
Need a mentor? Also, quite significantly, coaches can also be extremely instrumental in mentoring and guiding you as a teenager. They often promote a growth mindset in athletes and instill strong values.
For this reason, it is not surprising that many high school athletes often cite the benefits of playing sports to include: structure, motivation, accountability, tenacity, perseverance, goal-orientation, and self-discipline. These are often lessons learned from the mentorship provided by both their coaches and teammates.
Physical and Health Benefits
Perhaps it goes without saying that you will improve flexibility, muscular strength, cardiovascular, increase longevity, lower illness and disease, and other aspects of overall physical health.
As a result of sports and fitness participation, you will probably also begin to monitor your sleep and nutrition to optimize athletic performance.
Athletic and Sports Programs at Private High Schools
Checking out private school athletic programs? If you are currently seeking a school change, think about all of your public or private school choices to pursue your athletic and fitness nterests.
There is a whole world of schools out there with different approaches to sports and fitness. While some public and private schools offer a traditional array of sports, some boarding schools, for instance, have a long list of offerings by season. There are even boarding schools on the beachfront or with equestrian programs!
Look for a history of championships, check out their college planning services for athletic scholarships, speak to school coaches and attend live or virtual athletic events on their campus.
Ready to get fit? Take steps to line up a sports and fitness plan. Begin working out and playing team sports early in life from elementary school through high school. It will pay off when you go off to college and need to navigate how to live a balanced life between mental, physical, social, and spiritual pursuits. Guaranteed, you will feel better, do better, and live a happier life!
