Live longer with sports

At AREENA, we love playing sports for a lot of reasons. When you're on a good team, playing in a good match, the whole world can disappear while you just have…fun. You can meet new interesting people, get off the couch and out of the house, and go on a journey of self-improvement.

But perhaps the most powerful reason to love sports is health. When you're chasing down a ball at full speed, you're not even thinking about how hard you are pushing yourself physically. Only the ball exists, only the play, only your team and the other team. This means that it's just so much easier to get the exercise you need when playing a sport. You don't need monumental will power to push yourself through a long session on the treadmill.

New research is backing up just how impactful this is. A study out of Copenhagen followed ~9k participants for 25 years to see how leisure time activity affected all-cause mortality. The results? Playing a sport like tennis was associated with increasing lifespan by almost 10 years. Can you imagine if a new drug or procedure promised that?

Different sports had different results - soccer increased life expectancy in the study by 4.7 years, while cycling increased it by 3.7 years. As an observational study, this doesn't prove causality, but it's easy to see how this could be the case. More exercise, and more social interaction, have been shown in multiple studies for a long time to have huge benefits.

"Interestingly, the leisure-time sports that inherently involve more social interaction were associated with the best longevity"

It's not all about the long term either. Another recent study showed that patients with COVID-19 who were consistently inactive had a greater risk of hospitalization, admission to the ICU, and death when compared to patients who were regularly active.

Our mission is to make it really easy to have an awesome time playing sports throughout the year.  Our leagues uniquely run on a 4 week, back-to-back schedule, allowing anyone to join anytime and start playing within weeks. If your goal is to build a habit playing basketball or soccer, it won't get much easier then playing with us.

We currently offer leagues in the Dallas Fort-Worth area, but are expanding quickly. Check out some of them here, we'd love to see you out there!