The health benefits of Champs: what the science of tennis says

Tennis is associated with some of the best health outcomes of any sport ever studied, with one major study linking it to 9.7 extra years of life. Researchers think the social side of the game may be part of the reason. Champs takes exactly that combination of fast intermittent exercise plus a built-in crowd, then turns it into a 90-minute weekly habit.

Before we dive in, an honest note from me. I founded FunTennis because tennis is joyful, not because I run a lab. The studies below are real and I will describe them carefully, including what they cannot tell us.

What did the Copenhagen City Heart Study find about tennis?

The Copenhagen City Heart Study, published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings in 2018, followed thousands of adults over decades and compared different sports. Tennis players lived on average 9.7 years longer than sedentary people. That was the largest gain of any sport studied, ahead of cycling, swimming and jogging.

Here is the crucial caveat: this is correlation, not causation. Tennis players may differ from sedentary people in lots of ways, so nobody can promise you a specific number of extra years for picking up a racket. What we can say is that when researchers ranked sports by how long their players lived, tennis sat at the top.

The researchers offered a fascinating suggestion about why. The sports at the top of the table were the social ones. They proposed that the social element of tennis may be part of the reason for its standout result, not just the running.

What does the wider research say about racket sports?

A 2017 study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, led by Oja and colleagues, looked at different types of exercise across a large population. Racket sports were associated with a 47% lower risk of death from any cause compared with doing no exercise at all.

Same caveat, cheerfully repeated: association, not proof. But two large independent studies pointing the same way is worth paying attention to. Whatever the mechanism, people who play racket sports seem to do remarkably well.

Part of the picture may be how tennis makes you move. It is intermittent high intensity exercise by nature: short bursts of sprinting, lunging and scrambling, followed by recovery between points. In Champs that pattern is turned up to eleven, because the Host feeds a new ball the moment a point ends, then the rotation hands you a breather.

How does Champs fit the NHS activity guidelines?

NHS guidance recommends adults do at least 150 minutes of moderate activity every week, plus strength work twice a week. Most of us know the number. The hard part is actually doing it, week after week, forever.

A standard Champs session is 90 minutes. One session takes a serious bite out of your weekly target in a single evening, without a treadmill in sight. Two sessions and you have cleared it. You will still want your strength work, but the biggest slice of the guideline gets handled by something you would honestly do for free.

That is the quiet genius of exercise you enjoy. Nobody needs motivation hacks to do the thing they are already looking forward to.

Why does the social side matter so much?

Because the thing that kills most fitness plans is not injury or laziness. It is invisibility. Solo gym workouts have high dropout because nobody notices when you skip. You cancel on yourself once, then twice, then the membership quietly becomes a donation.

Champs makes skipping visible in the nicest possible way. Every session has its own crowd chat and weekly sessions keep one continuous crowd: same court, same time, same people. Miss a week and someone will ask where you were. That tiny bit of friendly accountability is worth more than any tracker.

There is a deeper layer too. Adult friendships are hard to make and loneliness genuinely matters to health. A weekly session that doubles as a social life is not a nice-to-have on top of the exercise. If the Copenhagen researchers are right, it may be part of the medicine.

How do I actually start?

Gently, then weekly. Open the FunTennis app, find a Champs session on the map of more than 25,000 public UK courts and book a place for £12. If nothing runs near you yet, request a session at your local court and nearby Hosts get alerted.

If you are coming back after years away from the game, our guide to returning to tennis as an adult covers the nerves and the practicalities. If you are the organised sort who could see yourself running the whole thing, look at becoming a Host.

Nobody can promise you 9.7 extra years. What Champs can promise is 90 weekly minutes of sprinting, laughing and plotting your return to the champion end, alongside people who will notice if you stop coming. The science suggests that combination is about as good as exercise gets.