Pickleball Injuries May Cost Americans Nearly $400 Million This Year, According To UBS (bloomberg.com) 121
An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this month, shares of big health insurance companies fell after UnitedHealth Group warned that healthcare utilization rates were up. At a conference the company had said that it was seeing a higher-than-expected pace of hip replacements, knee surgeries and other elective procedures. In a new note out Monday, UBS Group AG analysts led by Andrew Mok offer a surprising theory about one factor that could be driving a higher pace of injuries: pickleball.
As everyone knows, the racket game has become a booming (and sometimes controversial) sport and business. And per UBS, not only are "Picklers" competing with the public for use of park and court space, they're also driving up healthcare capacity utilization and costs. The firm estimates between $250-500 million in costs attributable to pickle injuries in 2023. So how does it arrive at this number? First, it establishes that growth has been absolutely mammoth, with huge and accelerating numbers of participants. This year is expected to see a 150% jump in players, to 22.3 million. Of this 22.3 million, UBS estimates that seniors make about a third of "core players" or those who play it at least eight times a year. Pickleball players also have incomes that tend to skew high (with almost half having income of over $100K per year.)
As everyone knows, the racket game has become a booming (and sometimes controversial) sport and business. And per UBS, not only are "Picklers" competing with the public for use of park and court space, they're also driving up healthcare capacity utilization and costs. The firm estimates between $250-500 million in costs attributable to pickle injuries in 2023. So how does it arrive at this number? First, it establishes that growth has been absolutely mammoth, with huge and accelerating numbers of participants. This year is expected to see a 150% jump in players, to 22.3 million. Of this 22.3 million, UBS estimates that seniors make about a third of "core players" or those who play it at least eight times a year. Pickleball players also have incomes that tend to skew high (with almost half having income of over $100K per year.)
So with American healthcare cost (Score:5, Insightful)
400 million? That is like 2 sprained ankles and a broken hip?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Come on, that's like 3 F22's
Exercise causes injuries (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Exercise causes injuries (Score:4, Interesting)
I honestly feel you're better off not exercising after my experiences.
In 2013 I ran quite a bit, 2 to 4 miles a day. I had been doing this for several years and had a washboard stomach, rippling calves. Was never much of an arms guy. During one of my runs that year my knee did something it never did before, it bent backwards. I had pain on the inner knee that wouldn't go away. I went in to see my doc at Kaiser.
"You're 5'10 and 180 lbs, you need to lose weight"
"But I'm all muscle!"
"Ortho won't do anything for you at that weight"
Kaiser in all their infinite wisdom had cursed me that day. Despite being in the best shape of my life, sleeping soundly, tons of energy, my doc just looked at a BMI chart and decided the state of my health. I'd later self diagnose this as a torn meniscus, something pretty easy for them to fix. They're just not going to do it. With my body unable to burn calories like it did before, my weight has shot through the roof.
With that, I'd say not doing exercise might have been better. What I wouldn't give to be able to just walk a mile without pain, or up a flight of stairs without the knee clicking.
Re: (Score:2)
"You're 5'10 and 180 lbs, you need to lose weight"
"But I'm all muscle!"
If this was the conversation you had the find a real doctor who didn't get his degree in a cereal box. This isn't an issue with health and exercise, it's an issue with idiots in the medical system.
With that, I'd say not doing exercise might have been better.
A torn muscle and a bit of weight is the least of what exercise is about. I know plenty of people with perfect BMI, thin and fit looking, who none the less run out of breath walking up the damn stairs. They will die young, and tearing a muscle doing a bit of exercise is likely quite preferable to that outcome.
Re: (Score:3)
>This isn't an issue with health and exercise, it's an issue with idiots in the medical system.
I think it was an issue with the medical system first, doctors second.
Kaiser is an HMO, not an insurer. You can almost think of an HMO like a Gym membership. Everyone pays a fairly flat fee and gets access to various bits of equipment (or healthcare in this instance) There is a few problems though.
1. You cannot really sue an HMO in California for Malpractice. So this allows them to make shitty judgement ca
Re: (Score:2)
1. You cannot really sue an HMO in California for Malpractice.
You can't sue an HMO for "malpractice" (injury caused by denial of care) in *most* states, I think. (There are a few states that do allow it). But you can always sue a *doctor* for malpractice, regardless of who the insurer is.
2. The Doctors at Kaiser also own stock.. So indirectly the doctors have an incentive to deny care, especially if they think it will be costly to the hospital bottom line.
Possible, I guess, but it's a stretch. Even if we assume that the doctor is operating out of pure self-interest... Kaiser is a *huge* company, and one doctor is not going to have much of an impact on their stock price. The doc has a much bigger incentive to do whatever keeps his
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
With my body unable to burn calories like it did before, my weight has shot through the roof.
Calories don't appear magically in your body. That you may not have been able to refrain yourself for either eating healthy, or eating less, or both, is another issue entirely.
Or maybe it is the same issue, if you were actually doing exercise to compensate your bad eating habits.
Also, if you had been in a country with good public healthcare (like in Western or Northern Europe), this wouldn't have been a problem either.
Re: (Score:2)
>Calories don't appear magically in your body. That you may not have been able to refrain yourself for either eating healthy, or eating less, or both, is another issue entirely.
Cereal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and a proteins, side veg and roll for dinner.
>Or maybe it is the same issue, if you were actually doing exercise to compensate your bad eating habits.
Or maybe it's like I said, I can't even walk a mile now without pain. My mobility has been severely limited to the point where the onl
Re:Exercise causes injuries (Score:4, Insightful)
Cereal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and a proteins, side veg and roll for dinner.
Sorry, I don't buy it. Or maybe your sandwich is an XXL size, and you may forget some other stuffs you are eating.
the only way I would have stayed at 180 would have been a 700 calorie a day diet.
Unless you are the equivalent of a human unicorn, your body at rest consumes a lot more than 700 calories a day, at rest. You say you are 5'10, which means at 180, your BMI was indeed high. If you were exercising at the time, that may indeed have been muscle (but if your exercise was running/cardio, then it may not have been only muscle...). But when you stop exercising, and start to lose muscle mass, you also lose weight (fat weights less than muscle). If your weight "shot through the roof" as you say, there is no magic involved: you took in a lot more calories than you think you did.
To lose weight the process is pretty simple, but can be quite long before you start seeing tangible results: take in less calorie than you consume.
If you are ~40 years old, 5'10 and ~180lbs, then your BMR (basal metabolic rate) is around 1500-1600. That is with a very sedentary lifestyle. If you are truly only eating "Cereal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and a proteins, side veg and roll for dinner.", then I don't see how you can gain weight. Unless your sandwich is not a sandwich, but something made of pure grease, and your roll not a roll, but an XXL bigmac. Or if you are eating some other things here and there: maybe an apple someday, an icecream on sunny days, some potato chips while binge-watching netflix...
Re: (Score:3)
Cereal, bread, more bread.
You're eating highly processed, high calorie, low nutrient value foods. That's why you gained weight.
Grains should be a very small fraction of your caloric intake, and you should be getting most of your carbs from healthful things like fruits and vegetables. I can eat literally as much as I can fit in my stomach with 2 large meals a day (1500+ calories each) and I won't gain any weight. Even with smaller portions, adding in a couple pieces of bread will lead to weight gain for me.
Re:Exercise causes injuries (Score:5, Informative)
Hmmm. 5'10" and 180 sounds like an ideal weight. The "BMI" is a very messed up metric system - it does not account for muscle ratio. The doctor should have known that. The BMI really should be not be used - I don't know why they use it.
Running every day was not a good idea - it did not allow for recovery. A young person could tolerate that, but someone over, say 40, would be risking injury from not having enough recovery time.
If you don't have a structural issue, and if there has been no damage to the meniscus, then your knee should fully heal, and you should be able to run again, but I would advise running no more than a few days/week, and no more than a few miles at a time. People who can tolerate daily runs their whole life are genetic anomalies.
I am 67 and have been running ~2 miles a few times/week since I was 16. My knee X rays show that there is no harm. The movement of the joint and its fluids are how the joint repairs itself - that's why gentle cycling is good for healing. But running causes stress, and the joint needs healing time between runs.
Re: (Score:2)
If you are overweight then running is
Re: (Score:2)
Here's a few pics for you from 2012. A before and after (2009 to 2012)
https://imgur.com/a/iz5Rqg4 [imgur.com]
Shirt off pic. You can see the washboard forming, pectorals were starting to form too. I was wearing a size 34.
https://imgur.com/a/ppsb6bh [imgur.com]
You can build muscle with cardio and running. Sometimes it's genetics. My 14 year old son has been doing road bike racing the last 2 years, and has seen some crazy gains on his legs.
Re: (Score:3)
That's horrible that happened to you but to claim that because of that all exercise is bad is kind of absurd. Swimming, exercise bikes, and rowing machines are all super low impact (unlike jogging) and are great for keeping in shape and burning calories.
Not that that helps you now with the bum knee while being jerked around by your doctor. Might be something to consider though when you hopefully get your knee fixed.
Re: (Score:2)
You are still not better off skipping exercise. If your body weight is more than your frame can handle (regardless of whether it is all muscle or not) then you should be doing different exercises. Safer ones, to be precise.
Aerobic exercise is the healthiest, but running is a joint-threatening way of getting it (especially as you get older). So, swim instead. Or run on an elliptical. Or bike. Or stationary bike. Any of these will put your knees at much lower risk of injury while still giving you the m
Re: (Score:2)
Your problem probably wasn't exercise, your problem was probably locking yourself into an HMO (perhaps to save a few dollars on premiums?).
Did you demand a referral to ortho? If so, was the demand rejected and did you appeal the rejection?
Did you change primary care doctors which is, in my experience, just a click of a mouse @Kaiser (at least in the two or three years I had them - although I never actually used them for anything except vaccinations).
In the ten intervening years why haven't you selected a mo
Re: (Score:2)
>your problem was probably locking yourself into an HMO (perhaps to save a few dollars on premiums?).
It wasn't a problem when the wife and I first signed up many moons ago. Her mother was a director of an unnamed department at the hospital, so we were always treated well. Once she retired though that changed.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Physical therapy and/or stem cell therapy may be able to help with the meniscus. There's exercise you can still do to stay in shape.
Mostly, medical professionals will lead you down the path of the knife every time. I don't trust them. They always go for the extreme. They offered to put screws in my back due to lower back pain, with no other indications of the cause. They fuck people up.
Re: (Score:2)
You seem to be the only person in this entire thread that has had the Kaiser "Thrive" experience.
Re: (Score:2)
Exercise causes injuries, but not doing exercise is even worse.
A bit oversimplified really. There is a large difference between doing calisthenics in a supervised pool and helicopter boarding virgin mountain chutes. Believe it or not you can work up close to the same calories per minute but one suspiciously has far worse injuries on average, if not fatalities. Exercise with a incredibly high risk can easily become statistically more harmful than a coma patient who just atrophies. If we are talking health, low risk exercise would be the most healthy.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Exercise doesn't necessarily cause injuries: infrequent and incorrect exercise does.
I practice jujitsu (and karate, and...) and have done so for the past 5 years. I am not a young man anymore, but most practitioners are. I'm also about 'average' for bodyweight - fit at 180lb.
When I started jujitsu, I was arguably in the best shape of my life. But I was injured frequently: toes broken, fingers sprained, et cetera. And when you're dealing with force-on-force, you've got to contend to a much higher degree with
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There was approximately zero chance it wasn't going to end up endemic.
Punchline to an old joke. (Score:2)
"...and if you don't cut that out, that Tennis Elbow is never going to heal."
Wouldn't be so off-put... (Score:2)
...if they hadn't chosen the name, "Pickleball". It's a very, very stupid name.
It would also have been nice if they'd taken a very similar tennis-forecourt and used it for the dimensions of a Pickleball court. That way municipalities could build dual-purpose courts that wouldn't require competing sets of lines.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
...if they hadn't chosen the name, "Pickleball". It's a very, very stupid name.
You can say that again. Makes me immediately think of picklefucker [youtube.com], and wondering what you have to a take a bite of in pickleball.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but it has not remained this. There are now leagues for kids and parenting-age adults, and municipal parks that aren't in proximity to where pensioners have settled, built like tennis courts with perimeter fencing.
I'm not going to say that tennis is easy, but having played games like tennis, racquet ball, volleyball, and even a bit of badminton, it seems like it's getting undue attention and resources committed to it when it feels like a fad. I'm expecting that municipalities that spend a lot of mone
Morning Brew story (Score:3)
They can afford it (Score:2, Insightful)
Pickleball players also have incomes that tend to skew high (with almost half having income of over $100K per year.)
So the ones that can actually afford medical care. Gotcha.
Re: (Score:1)
Geez, get a real job and you're covered...
Hell, work as a contractor in a field you can get a good bill rate at (IT for instance)...and you can readily set up a HSA, get a "high deductible" policy and you're good to go.
I've done it, and it isn't that $$$.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure where you got the impression that ACA is "forced to pay for insurance we can't afford to use". I have a low-income family member that gets good insurance with an ACA subsidy. Nobody forced them to get it.
Yes there is a deductible, and the monthly premium is still a hit if your income is low, but it is hugely better than what would be available without the ACA.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Those on low incomes have zero access to healthcare except for their yearly checkup"
You seem to be completely uninformed about all of this. There are multiple levels of ACA insurance depending on what you want to pay, but gold-level is basically identical to a good subsidized insurance policy you get through your employer. There's a deductible and a co-pay. You also get the negotiated rate for services and medications.
My family member pays $370/month for a gold-level policy, the annual deductible is $750.
Re: (Score:2)
I've been a contract worker on and off for many years. As such as I've had to shop for health insurance for myself and family. ACA has been a mixed bag, even with subsidies. Pre ACA, I was able to get pretty darned good insurance for myself, my wife, and our only child (at the time) for about $700/month. This was a low deductible pan with a $20 copay. I don't recall the exact deductible but I think it was between $1k-$2k. My wife had a pre-existing condition at the time; there was a waiting period for benef
Re: (Score:2)
Pre-ACA was more than 13 years ago, healthcare costs have shot up enormously since then and it has nothing to to with the Affordable Care Act. I am sorry that people who earn a reasonably good income like yourself don't get much subsidy, but the ACA was mainly targeted for low income folks who have no insurance. A better solution would have been great, but all of this took place with immense opposition from the GOP who have no healthcare plan whatsoever.
Personally I think we should have single-payer insuran
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah sorry but that $700/month insurance policy was a ripoff. The reason your premium increased is that a few minimum standards of coverage were required. And it wasn't much, just some reasonable things you might have thought were in there.
https://www.ehealthinsurance.c... [ehealthinsurance.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure where you got the impression that ACA is "forced to pay for insurance we can't afford to use".
Because I have insurance and it is too expensive to use. Not that doctors can help with my twisted ankle much. Dont walk on it and take a lot of ibuprofen and naproxen. That will be $150 or whatever it is.
Don't need to spend money on shit I already know.
Re: (Score:2)
The $150 is more than what you want to pay, but that isn't expensive. See what it would cost you to visit a doctor and get some meds for your condition without the insurance.
Re: (Score:2)
Just because it is less bad, doesn't mean it isn't still no longer bad.
Re: (Score:2)
Things could stand for a lot of improvement no doubt, but without the ACA millions of people would have zero health insurance.
Someone has to pay for your healthcare treatments. There are people who say it should be you alone, and you should get no subsidy. They vote for the GOP. Then there are people who say we should control healthcare costs and all band together to pay for it, they vote for Democrats. Elections have consequences.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A "high deductible" policy is basically worthless for a minor sports injury and will cost you many thousands for something serious. Not appropriate for most people.
Re: (Score:2)
To qualify as a "high deductible" policy, I believe the deductible still only has to be roughly in the $1500/yr range.
That's not going to break the bank an any serious contractor with a real job.
Re: (Score:2)
You want to bet that healthcare "insurers" are going to use this as basis for denying care in the future?
I had an exercise-related injury recently and it was like hell trying to get it paid for by insurance.
Cardio... (Score:5, Insightful)
And what is the cost savings on the cardio side of the equation?
Life is too precious to waste people's time with unactionable partial datasets.
Re:Cardio... (Score:5, Informative)
This is a well-known phenomenon from cycling. There's a lot of concern about the dangers of cycling. In the US almost a thousand cyclists are killed per year. If you start cycling regularly, for example bike commuting, you expose yourself to that new danger, but your life expectancy *still* goes up.
Re: Cardio... (Score:2)
Better bike lanes, slower speed limits, and improved signals would solve our bike death problem better than not exercising.
I wonder if pickleball injuries would go down with some warm ups, regular doctor visits, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
Lower speed limits reduces injuries [peoplepowe...vement.org]. I live on a mountain highway that is popular with cyclists and the 40 MPH posted limit is devastating when cyclist are hit at 50+ MPH.
Average Joe should hop on a functional public transportation network or a bicycle or mobility scooter.
Re: (Score:2)
It's well established that drivers regulate their speed by what *feels* appropriate for an area, not posted speed limits. So the best way to regulate car speed in a place where it poses a nuisance to abutters and other users is to engineer a piece of road so drivers *naturally* restrict their speed without having to be told.
The Netherlands has mastered this. If you are traveling on a country road that enters a village, there will be a roundabout where the speed limit changes, on the other side of of that
Re: (Score:2)
Yes but you can also jump rope for 30 minutes a day and get that same bump to life expectancy without the risk. Actually if you just jump rope or even run in place to get your heart rate up and lift free weights sets, mixing in the high intensity activity as needed to maintain heart rate you get drastically increased benefits and grow/maintain healthy lean mass rather than cannibalizing it through extreme endurance activity.
The bursts of high pressure in the lifts expands the capacity of your circulatory sy
Re: (Score:2)
"[B]ut you can also jump rope for 30 minutes a day and get that same bump to life expectancy without the risk."
Jumping rope is scarcely risk-free. If you trip on or get tangled in the rope, you can get seriously injured. In fact, as you realize further down in your own post, *no* exercise is risk-free. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
Re: (Score:2)
Jumping rope is scarcely risk-free.
Seriously. It's a great form of exercise, but I pulled my achilles skipping rope and wasn't able to walk right for quite a while. Cycling is the least damaging activity I've found to burn a lot of calories. If you want to be really safe, ride on an indoor trainer.
Re: (Score:2)
If you want to be really safe, ride on an indoor trainer.
And bored. You forgot bored.
Re: (Score:2)
"It's a great form of exercise, but I pulled my achilles skipping rope and wasn't able to walk right for quite a while."
You can pull a muscle cycling or doing pretty much any exercise. The real problem is the hip and knee replacements that come a few decades down the line. This isn't unique to cycling, it is a big factor in running, dancing, and skating as well. The problem is that these are endurance exercises and depend on largely unvaried repetitive stress motions and impacts. Among them cycling *is* one
Re: (Score:2)
"Jumping rope is scarcely risk-free. If you trip on or get tangled in the rope, you can get seriously injured."
Anything is possible I suppose but since you don't really have any directional momentum it is unlikely. You are also less likely to be hit by a stray missile than if you were biking or even walking... assuming the increased probability of impacting rain drops with movement rate also carries over to stray missiles.
Your odds of being hit by car at some point go from 'probable' to 'highly improbable.'
Re: (Score:2)
"Anything is possible I suppose but since you don't really have any directional momentum it is unlikely."
*You* don't have any momentum. The rope, on the other hand, has plenty.
Re: (Score:2)
Plenty for what? The rope doesn't have enough mass to overcome inertia which is why it harmlessly thwacks against your leg. You just start jumping in place and I'll twirl the rope as fast as I can and wack your legs with it just above the ankle where leverage maximizes the effect and it still won't move your leg. YOU might move your leg if I crack it like a whip but that is a different thing and not something you'll be doing to yourself.
I should qualify the directional momentum bit though. I'm just talking
Re: (Score:2)
Heart disease is the leading cause of death for men, women, and people of most racial and ethnic groups in the United States.
One person dies every 33 seconds in the United States from cardiovascular disease.
About 695,000 people in the United States died from heart disease in 2021—that’s 1 in every 5 deaths.
Heart disease cost the United States about $239.9 billion each year from 2018 to 2019. This includes the cost of health care servic
Re: (Score:2)
I think you're missing the point of the discussion about cycling in the USA. It's about the shit infrastructure. 1000 cyclists dying in the USA a year a abysmal and insanely unsafe compared to cycling in many other countries.
If you're in it for the exercise, there's far safer ways to extend your life expectancy, ... especially in America.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If your exercise jeopardizes the lives and well-being of others needlessly, something tells me you probably deserve that added risk.
Perhaps get off the roadways and get an exercise bike?
Re: (Score:2)
Cyclists do not endanger other road users to any degree that's worth worrying about. In the US about a thousand cyclists are killed by motorists a year; zero motorists are killed by cyclists.
Just because you *feel* threatened by a weirdo in lycra on a bike doesn't mean you're in danger. It just means you feel threatened by people who are different you. If the hundred million Americans who ride bikes regularly were really dangerous, we'd see it in the death and injury statistics.
There is a somewhat more
Re: (Score:2)
My thoughts exactly. We should be encouraging people to get out and exercise. There are clearly limits to what activities to promote ("get out and practice firewalking!" is probably asking for trouble), but in my experience pickleball is no worse than tennis or other sports that require modest running and jumping.
Re: (Score:2)
And what is the cost savings on the cardio side of the equation?
Life is too precious to waste people's time with unactionable partial datasets.
This is pretty obviously the case.
To move the conversation past the "story is stupid" stage I'd say there are various considerations to consider when exercising.
1) What's the likelihood of injury? Dunno how pickleball actually stacks up here but high impacts and side-to-side movements probably increase the change of injuries.
2) What's the fitness benefit? Not only the amount of cardio, but the variation of movement. I used to do a lot of running, which was awesome for cardio and a few muscle groups, but if
Obesity (Score:4, Insightful)
So we should stay home and be fat instead? What does obesity and all its problems cost?
Re:Obesity (Score:4, Funny)
So we should stay home and be fat instead?
Works for me.
Re:Obesity (Score:5, Insightful)
higher-than-expected pace of hip replacements, knee surgeries
Definitely it's due to obesity. As obesity rates have skyrocketed over the decades, hip and knee replacements have been on the rise and the average age of the recipients has decreased. What was once a procedure nearly exclusive to the 60+ crowd a few decades ago, today it's not unusual for someone in their 30s to require the procedure because their joints are shot from having to carry too much weight. Obviously problems in joints will arise sooner and more frequently if you are carrying around 20, 50, or 100+ lbs than what your frame was designed to carry, and also as obesity rates increase.
Blame the anti-fatshaming & hijacked-by-fat-people bodypositive movement for filling gullible minds with "You are healthy at any weight" bullshitcrap. So instead of acknowledging the problem and dealing with the problem, they blame Pickleball instead-a game that is so slow paced that most often you have enough time to walk to the spot where the ball is heading to return it.
Re: (Score:2)
Obese people have a lower lifetime cost to insurance companies because they die sooner. It's shortsighted thinking, but it is how these statisticians think.
Re: (Score:2)
Not without an array of hard-to-manage chronic health issues though.
Helmet requirement (Score:2)
Make them wear helmets. That'll bring down the popularity and hence the costs.
Re: (Score:2)
South Texas Pickle Tickle (Score:2)
I guess this isn't the same thing.
Paywall (Score:4, Informative)
If you want to actually RTFA, you can find a non-paywalled version here. [archive.is]
Ummm... (Score:2)
"As everyone knows, the racket game has become a booming"
Do they because I've never heard of... what did they call it? Pickleball?
Re: Ummm... (Score:2)
Nobody plays it here. But when I travel the US it seemingly came out of nowhere and took over.
I'm more of a discgolf fan. But I live in an area with lots of space for parks in hilly forests where discgolf makes sense.
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting. I thought racketball [all forms] was mostly a dense urban thing and not really something taking the country by storm. I don't think I've ever even seen a racketball court in person.
Discgolf I've at least heard of but isn't that just frisbee variation?
Games that have 'taken the country by storm' are baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and soccer. I'd be very surprised to discover these games have overtaken even less popular games everyone has heard of like tennis, golf, darts, billards, air
Re: (Score:2)
Yea. discgolf is like golf with frisbees. The courses are usually free, the gear is cheap, and it's common for people to drink beer and smoke weed while playing it. It's very much a working class game.
As a spectator sport, Baseball is on the decline. As a sport adults informally play it is almost nonexistent. Softball is played on rare occations by adults but usually as part of a big outing for a company, church, club, or union. My wild guess at the order of popularity for what adults actually play would be
Re: (Score:2)
Oh wow that is definitely putting it higher on the popularity list than I would have guessed. Though you seem more focused on athletics/sports than general recreational activities.
Bowling, bar games [billards and darts], air hockey, hiking, and putt putt pair with a causal evening and drinking are therefore fairly common among most all adults. Anything that only athletic and sports oriented people do is definitely going to be drastically lower on the list because that is a small subset of the population but
Re: (Score:2)
There are competitive leagues, even for amateurs, for all the sports I listed. I don't think it is accurate to lump everything into recreation.
but then that is generally the only time most adults play an actual sport as a recreational activity, let alone one requiring more than two people.
I disagree. Adults play "actual" team sports frequently. This is popular for couples in a tennis or bowling league, and it's a helpful way for couples to make friends together. It is of course very common to see adults in a pickup basketball game where you team changes every time you play. Is bowling an actual sport? Well my parents certainly played it with gusto and
real price? Chargemaster price? price they will ta (Score:2)
real price? Chargemaster master price? price they will take?
Big Insurance Doesn't Want You To Play Pickleball (Score:2)
DHMO have kill and injure way more people (Score:2)
We must ban DHMO.
Shortsighted buffoons (Score:2)
These disgusting vile demoniacs.. Why don't you go take a ride in your bullshit submarines.
Better than not exercising (Score:2)
As others have pointed out. This is only an issue if pickleball were especially dangerous, something that they have presented no evidence for. What's the injury rate compared to, say, tennis?
mostly old folks (Score:2)
"pickleball players go to emergency departments at a rate of about 0.27%, with the majority of injuries occurring among those 60 years or older."
Totally understandable. You are generally going to be more prone to strains and sprains as you get older, especially if you are out of shape to start out with. Pickleball involves a lot of quick steps and lunges, it is real easy to roll your ankle or torque your knee. Reasonably good aerobic exercise though and I am wondering what the savings in health costs are as
Spin the wheel (Score:1)
A little reminder for anyone that claims Jesus. His idea of health care is contained in a story he was reported to have told. In it, the national enemy of a man who was beaten and lay in the road picked him up took him to an inn, had him housed and paid for all of it until he was healed and then checked back in. Meanwhile the beaten man's betters in his own nation left him in the road. You can read the story of the him telling the story yourself. You know where to fi
Not injuries? (Score:4, Insightful)
Could it not also be that senior citizens who would otherwise have delayed knee or hip surgery another year, are now having it done so that they can enjoy the sport? How many of those patients already needed surgery, and stopped putting it off so they could return to activity. It could be a double win for these patients. They get the overdue surgery and become active at the same time.
Always divide by population (Score:2)
A third of a billion in America, now, so $1.20 per person.
Re: (Score:2)
As a tennis player I despise Pickleball (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Pickleball players are mostly out of shape couch potato non-athletes.
they promptly get injured because their bodies are not used to the stresses of moving quickly and rapidly changing direction
This is a good summary of the sport. Same as squash, mostly played by dynamic young executives who want to exercise for 30-60 mins while having fun. They don't stretch before, their bodies are not attuned to that kind of effort, but as they are young, they get by. Until age/stress catches up, and they injure themselves. Speaking as a former dynamic young executive, who played the game for a few years; luckily I managed to do so without any injury, but in the club I was playing so many people had to stop bec
Lying liars (Score:2)
Insurance companies. Lying liars and the lies they tell. They'll never take us picklers down!
(Note: I've never actually played it, but it looks like fun, and less likely to end up in a heart attack than squash)