So when life hands me an opportunity to check my daily fitness box without swiping my key tag, I take it.
Mow a lawn? That’s a workout. Partake in a three-legged race? That counts, too. Complete a spirited pub crawl? Depending on the mileage, it might even get me off the hook for tomorrow’s sweat session.
You know what else you can add to the list? Broomball.
Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of the sport. I hadn’t either, but when NBC recently invited me to try it out on an episode of 1st Look, I jumped at the chance.
Broomball is silly, but simple: You run around wearing tennis shoes on ice, flailing clumsily and swatting at a ball with a plastic paddle that sort of looks like a broom.
It’s a lot like hockey, but with twice as many wipeouts. See for yourself:
An hour into my first broomball game, I was sweating so much that steam was rising off of my body. The next day, my glutes and obliques were wrecked, as were the muscles supporting my lower back.
The aches were so glorious, I realized I should be trying more new sports I know nothing about—and so should you. Here’s why:
1. You’ll grow muscle faster.
It’s not that broomball is a more efficient workout than CrossFit. It has the advantage of putting you off balance, sure. But so do surfing, skateboarding, and those stupid hoverboard things.
I was sore simply because I was doing something new.
“Whenever you try a new sport or exercise, you stress your muscles in a way that they are not used to,” says Joel Martin, Ph.D., an assistant professor of kinesiology at George Mason University.
You’re not just engaging different body parts—your muscles are physically contracting in unique ways. You’re also moving at different speeds and directions to meet the demands of the sport.
As you improve, your muscles will adapt. That’s good if your goal is to impress women with your superior athleticism. But if you’re trying to improve your fitness, adaptation actually undermines your progress.
“If your main reason for playing a sport is to get in shape, you almost want to avoid becoming too proficient,” says Martin. Once your muscles learn to keep up, you begin burning fewer calories with each new match.
2. You’ll build brainpower.
Do you remember the first time you played volleyball? Odds are you embarrassed yourself. Every ball that came to you ended up in the net or out of bounds.
But your humiliation wasn’t a waste: You were nurturing new brain cells. In one study, researchers scanned the brains of 40 people, then asked them to practice learning a new motor skill for 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week.
In this case, the subjects were learning to juggle. After six weeks of training and a 4-week wash-out period, the researchers looked at the participants’ brains once again. Grey matter in their dorsal parietal and primary motor cortexes was measurably thicker.
Related: 6 Easy Fixes You Can Do Today to Build Your Brainpower
By the end of the study, people with the most grey matter at the start also turned out to be the best jugglers. It’s a reinforcing loop: Grey matter helps you learn motor skills faster, and learning motor skills helps you build more grey matter.
So the more time you spend learning tennis, skateboarding, and air hockey, the quicker you’ll pick up seemingly unrelated activities, like soccer, snowboarding, and fly fishing.
3. You’ll break out of a fitness funk.
There’s no reason you should dread your workouts. You should look forward to them, and you should notice appreciable gains.
If you’re not excited to break a sweat, you may just need some novelty.
“Way too many people go to the gym and do the same routine over and over for years,” says Martin. “It’s more effective to make systematic changes to your workout routine.”
These changes, Martin says, can be quantitative or qualitative: You can add more reps or weight to your old routine (that’s a quantitative change), or opt for a complete workout overhaul (a qualitative change).
“Many college strength and conditioning coaches will program 4-to 6-week blocks to focus on different aspects of fitness: strength, power, hypertrophy, endurance, and so on,” he says. That’s how their athletes avoid fitness plateaus.
Think about that. What if, after every 4 to 6 weeks in the gym, you took a 4- to 6-week hiatus to focus on a new sport?
It could be rock climbing, ultimate Frisbee, or even broomball. Doesn’t matter. You’d likely stay motivated, and overall, you’d be more fit.
The only downside is that you have to be the guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Think you can handle that?
Why You Should Play a Sport You Really Suck At
