hey guys in today's video I want to talk about whether tennis is a good way to lose
weight and what are people obsessed with when they're trying to lose weight well they're
obsessed with counting calories so is tennis a good way to burn calories let's find out
so let me start off this video by talking about whether tennis is a good exercise
and whether it burns a lot of calories and I can tell you that tennis is one of the best
activities that you can do to burn calories but it's going to highly depend on how you play
tennis so the range of calories that you can burn within one hour is between 200 and 600 so it's a
wide range so if you are for example working on technique with a coach and you're serving
and there's just a lot of stationary hitting you're probably going to be burning on the low
spectrum of the range probably around 200 calories and interestingly if you're playing doubles at
the recreational level I would estimate the hourly calorie burn to be somewhere around
200 calories however in singles the calorie burn has got to be much greater but one important
caveat to the general calorie burn in tennis is how you play tennis because a lot of players at
the recreational level have a tendency to stand around and not move and of course if you stand
around you're gonna get less tired you're going to burn less calories you're going to get less
exhausted however independent of whether you're playing doubles or singles if you play with a lot
of intensity in other words if you move your feet on every ball if you try really hard to set every
single ball up perfectly you of course are going to get more tired more exhausted but you also are
gonna burn more calories and one of my students that has an issue with intensity said something
really funny I keep telling him to play with more intensity do move his feet because a big cause of
his mistakes is his footwork and his intensity because he has pretty good technique and he told
me Nick if I play with intensity I'm going to get tired faster and that's why I don't do it
well see therein lies the problem if you don't play tennis with intensity your game is going to
suffer tremendously you're going to commit a lot of mistakes by always being forced to improvise
and being stuck in these emergency situations so it's in the interest of you maximize your tennis
potential and to burn the most amount of calories and also to build up your stamina to try as hard
as you possibly can when you play tennis and I can tell you that when you try hard and you're playing
singles you can burn up to 600 calories per hour now think about it when you play a two hour three
hour or even a four hour match you can burn up to 2400 calories by playing tennis that is a
tremendous amount of energy expenditure so you're probably thinking Nick tennis must be one of the
greatest sports to lose weight if you're burning so many calories but I can tell you that tennis or
any exercise in general is not a good way to lose weight and in today's video I'm gonna explain why
and I've had so many students that were out of shape that came to me with the goal of getting
into shape by playing tennis and every single one of them failed and this is not due to the
training because if you ever seen my lessons they are very tough I focus on intensity and something
that I learned from my dad because he trained me in the same way I make the students work extremely
hard are taking them close to the limit so that they can build up their stamina which is going
to come in extremely handy in match play also unless I'm working on technique I always make my
students move and hit on the run because this is what students are going to experience in a
match situation so it's not for the fact that my training is not Tough Enough that my students
didn't lose weight but it's more for the fact that exercise in general is a very poor way to lose
weight and guys I'm gonna have to change locations I'm squinting like crazy there's sweat rolling
into my eyes I'm sweating I'm gonna go in a shade somewhere and continue this video but I want to
tell you several factors why exercising or playing tennis more specifically is not a good way to lose
weight and the number one reason is that the body gets used to the exercise so in other words let's
say that you're training two hours a day very very high intensity okay the more you do that the less
calories you will burn during that time span this is just a natural thing for
human beings is that you get used to the exercise and your body figures out how
to use less energy for that exercise there was a great study about an African tribe where the
whole day basically consisted of them walking and jogging around so an unbelievably active
lifestyle and they compared this group of tribal Africans too just regular Western sedentary people
and you cannot believe the results because both of these groups of people burned the same amount
of calories so you're probably thinking Nick how is that possible that doesn't make any sense well
first of all all the studies that I'm referring to in this video I'm going to link them in my
description you can read the research for yourself but what the research has stated is that the
primary reason why those tribal Africans burn the same amount of calories as sedentary westerners is
because if the body didn't adapt to do that they would basically be suffering from starvation now
when it comes to tennis or any other sport your body is going to act in the same way your body
is going to get used to that exercise and you're going to be burning less calories over time with
the same amount of exercise now especially at the recreational level to increase the exercise
is going to be unsustainable so for that reason if you're looking at calories burned and calories
consumed this is not going to be an easy thing to measure according to a Stanford researcher
when they tested a lot of these tracking devices that measures your heart rate and the calories
burned they found that while those devices measure the heart rate very accurately there
are highly inaccurate at measuring the calories because the measurement of calories is a very
complex calculation that's impossible to conduct by any device that you're wearing on your wrist
or on your chest now another important factor to consider when we talked about exercising to
lose weight is that you have to consider the following Factor when you are just sedentary
let's say you're sitting on a couch all day your body is still going to burn between 1300 to 2
000 calories depending on your age your weight your muscle to Fat ratio and many other factors
but you have to understand that even if you don't do anything the body still requires calories to
run the system everything that occurs in the body requires a calorie burn so even though you're not
doing anything you're still burning calories so think of the following scenario let's say that
you play a four hour match maybe once in a lifetime you get a match that seven six six
seven seven six in the blistering heat okay I've had matches like this here in southeast
Florida and you go home and you're trying to rest what's going to happen because you have
burned an enormous amount of calories in this match naturally your metabolism is going to slow
down because of it so there's going to be things happening inside your body that are going to even
out your daily calorie burn so why does the body do that to protect you from exhausting yourself
too much and possibly causing dangerous health effects so what you have to keep in mind that
even if you are exercising like a lunatic and you doing four hours five hours a day at the end of
the day your calorie burn is going to even out because the rest of your body is going to slow
down your metabolic rate is going to slow down again I'm gonna link to all this research in my
description so what is the only proven way to lose weight well that's going to be your diet now one
important thing that I want to stress is that by no means saying that because exercise or playing
tennis is not an effective way to lose weight this doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it you should
exercise every day you should try to play tennis every day because this is a very healthy thing to
do for the body it's something that you definitely should do but for all you guys that are trying to
lose weight by playing tennis it's not going to work you're going to fail and you have to get your
diet in check I'm not going to try to persuade you to adapt a specific diet I have done a video
on my private membership site a documentary so to speak where I describe how I eat I've been on
a plant-based vegan diet for the last 12 years is something that works really well for me but
whatever you do with your diet you have to figure out a way where you're going to eat healthy you're
gonna have to learn about calorie density and when you get your diet in check and on top of that you
exercise then the weight loss is more probable of course any weight loss is going to depend on other
factors such as genetics and how much weight you actually have to lose because there is some data
to suggest that the heavier you are the more your metabolism slows down after exercise so it's more
difficult to lose weight the heavier you are but in any case the perfect combination for you guys
that are trying to lose weight for playing tennis is going to be playing tennis hopefully on a daily
basis or as often as you can and then getting your diet in check and getting rid of the junk food