Is pickleball good for longevity? The short answer: probably, but no study has proven it. Large cohort studies link tennis and racquet sports with lower mortality and longer life expectancy. Pickleball has not been studied that way. What the research does support is playing regularly, socially, and without getting hurt.
I get this question in the clinic every week. I have treated athletes for 23 years, spent 13 NFL seasons with the Atlanta Falcons and 10 with the Atlanta Dream, and I am writing a book about pickleball longevity. So I have a stake in the answer, which is exactly why I want to be careful with the numbers. A lot of what gets repeated online is stretched past what the studies show.
Which studies link racquet sports to living longer?
Three large studies get cited most, and they are worth reading correctly.
Schnohr and colleagues, 2018, Mayo Clinic Proceedings. This is the Copenhagen City Heart Study, which followed 8,577 Danish adults for up to 25 years. Compared with sedentary people, tennis players showed up to 9.7 years of added life expectancy, the largest gain of any activity measured. Badminton was next at 6.2 years, then soccer, cycling, swimming, and jogging. The limits: activity was self-reported once at the start, the tennis group was small, and Danish tennis players tend to be wealthier and healthier to begin with.
Oja and colleagues, 2017, British Journal of Sports Medicine. This pooled 80,306 British adults from national health surveys. Racquet sport players had a 47 percent lower risk of death from any cause and a 56 percent lower risk of cardiovascular death during follow-up. The limits: self-reported activity at a single point in time, and a racquet sport group that mixed tennis, squash, and badminton.
Watts and colleagues, 2022, JAMA Network Open. This one matters most for older players. It followed 272,550 adults aged 59 to 82 in the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study. Racquet sports were associated with a 16 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality and a 27 percent lower risk of cardiovascular death, the strongest association of the seven activities studied. The limits: a mostly white, relatively affluent cohort, and no way to separate the exercise from the kind of person who chooses it.
Why does the social part of the game matter?
The Copenhagen authors made a point that I think is the real story. The activities with the biggest life expectancy gains were the ones you cannot do alone. Tennis, badminton, and soccer beat jogging and the gym by a wide margin, even though the gym crowd often trained harder.
That lines up with Holt-Lunstad, Smith, and Layton, 2010, PLOS Medicine, a meta-analysis of 148 studies covering 308,849 people. Stronger social relationships were associated with a 50 percent greater likelihood of survival over the study periods, an effect comparable to quitting smoking. The limit: it measured relationships, not sports, and it cannot tell you that four people on a court counts the same as a close friend group. But anyone who has seen a Buford pickleball crowd on a Tuesday morning knows connection is a big part of why people keep showing up.
What does the research say about pickleball injuries?
Here is where pickleball has actually been studied, and the news is more sobering.
Ghattas and colleagues, 2024, Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine, pulled emergency department data from the national NEISS database for 2002 through 2022. Pickleball fractures rose roughly 90-fold, reaching an estimated 5,400 per year. Most were upper extremity fractures after a fall, most often in women over 60, and the wrist was the most common site. The limit: NEISS only captures emergency visits, so it misses everything treated in clinics like mine, and it has no count of how many people were playing, so it is not a true injury rate.
Myers and Hanks, 2024, International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy, tested 92 recreational players. Forty-two percent reported falling during play, and 30 percent had fallen more than once. The leading causes were lunging and moving backward. Players who fell were older and slower on a change-of-direction test run on a court. The limit: a small, single-site sample that relies on players remembering their falls. But the practical finding is clear. Backpedaling for a lob is where a lot of players get hurt, and it is trainable.
| Study | Journal, year | Key finding | Main limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Schnohr et al. | Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 2018 | Tennis linked to up to 9.7 added years of life expectancy | Self-reported, small tennis group, healthy-player bias |
| Oja et al. | British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2017 | Racquet sports linked to 47 percent lower all-cause mortality | Observational, mixed racquet sports |
| Watts et al. | JAMA Network Open, 2022 | Racquet sports linked to 16 percent lower mortality in adults 59 to 82 | Observational, limited cohort diversity |
| Holt-Lunstad et al. | PLOS Medicine, 2010 | Strong social ties linked to 50 percent greater survival odds | Measures relationships, not sport |
| Ghattas et al. | Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine, 2024 | Pickleball ER fractures up about 90-fold, 2002 to 2022 | ER visits only, no participation denominator |
| Myers and Hanks | IJSPT, 2024 | 42 percent of players reported a fall, mostly lunging or moving backward | Small sample, self-recalled falls |
What does none of this prove?
I want to say this plainly. None of these studies prove that pickleball extends your life. Not one of the longevity studies included pickleball at all. They studied tennis, badminton, and squash, and pickleball is a different sport with a smaller court, shorter rallies, and an older average player. Every one of them is observational, which means association, not cause. Healthy people choose racquet sports, sick people stop playing, and no statistical adjustment fully removes that. The Long Game protocol does not claim pickleball adds years to your life, and you should be skeptical of anyone who does.
What the evidence does support is narrower and still useful:
- Regular racquet sport play is consistently associated with lower mortality across three large cohorts on two continents.
- The social, partner-based nature of these sports may be part of why.
- Pickleball injuries, especially fall-related fractures in players over 60, are rising fast and are partly preventable.
Put those together and the sensible conclusion is not "pickleball makes you live longer." It is "pickleball is worth playing for a long time, so protect your ability to keep playing."
What does this mean for a player in Buford?
It means the goal is durability. The players I see still on the court at 75 are not the ones who played the hardest. They kept their hips strong, their balance sharp, and their backward movement under control, and they got small problems looked at before they became big ones.
That is what our Pickleball Medicine Program at Georgia Spine and Sports Rehab is built for. It starts with a 60-minute movement screen that tests what the research points to: hip strength, single-leg control, ankle mobility, and change-of-direction speed. From there we treat what needs treating, build a prevention plan around your actual weak links, and clear you for a tested return to play rather than a guess. No program can promise you will never get hurt, but you can stack the odds.
To schedule a screen, call the clinic at (770) 614-6551. If you want the full protocol, my book The Long Game: A Pickleball Longevity Protocol is coming soon, and you can join the waitlist at drjoepickleball.com.
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