New York Times article: better aging through practice

[gzhpcu]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/op...tice.html?_r=0

Cool article.

THERE are quantifiable benefits often associated with taking up something like tennis and getting better at it. Your brain, it’s thought, will be recast and strengthened. Denise Park, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Dallas, randomly assigned more than 200 older people to different new activities for roughly 15 hours a week and found that only those who had learned and refined a complicated skill improved their memories. Other researchers say the intense and prolonged physical exertion of a game like tennis may fend off cancer by slowing the decline of your telomeres, the tiny caps on the ends of your DNA strands that tend to shorten and fray with age, and leave the DNA subject to greater risk of mutation during cell division and replication. You will, I am convinced, do good things for your heart: Senior Olympians have been found, on average, to have a cardiovascular “fitness” age 20 years less than their chronological age.

[don_budge]

Pickle Ball…3 times a week

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/op...tice.html?_r=0

Cool article.

My Dear Father plays pickle ball three times a week. When I saw him play for the first time in December he was 88 years old. Once that ball was in play he was thirty years younger. I was a amazed…and I have know this man all of my life.

[stotty]

Cool article indeed...

That was indeed a cool article. Exhilarating to read for me, actually. My position is the reverse of the author. He wants to write less and play tennis more. I would like to give less time to tennis and more time to writing. I am even thinking of tracking the author down to ask if we could coach each other at our respective trades. Now that would be really cool.

[johnyandell]

Stotty,
Other than your excellent posts here, what are you writing?

[stotty]

Good forum writers...a rare breed

Stotty,
Other than your excellent posts here, what are you writing?

Well that's just the thing. My time is so limited that my writing is restricted to what I do here on the forum. I do a few other bits and bobs but that's about it. I have been offered a few writing roles but have had to decline them due to my busy coaching life, plus the fact I don't want my time here on the forum to be diluted.

In a few years time I intend to devote more time to writing and in particular to writing tennis articles. Until that time comes I will just write when I can.

I've made some good friends on the forum. I wish there were more of us but I guess dedicated forum writers are a rare breed.

[bottle]

For Steve, too

Well that's just the thing. My time is so limited that my writing is restricted to what I do here on the forum. I do a few other bits and bobs but that's about it. I have been offered a few writing roles but have had to decline them due to my busy coaching life, plus the fact I don't want my time here on the forum to be diluted.

In a few years time I intend to devote more time to writing and in particular to writing tennis articles. Until that time comes I will just write when I can.

I've made some good friends on the forum. I wish there were more of us but I guess dedicated forum writers are a rare breed.

Here's a Brit expert on Dostoievsky who wrote more than anyone, including at his home called Phudd Bottom halfway up in New York state. Henry Miller adored him, Annie Dillard who tried to learn her tennis from VIC BRADEN'S TENNIS FOR THE FUTURE, too. Me, I'm on page 420 of A GLASTONBURY ROMANCE with only 700 pages to go.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/08/an-irresistible-long-winded-bore/378329/

[don_budge]

Thanks bot!

Wonderful article!!! John Cowper Powys. I have a book by him in my collection…"Visions and Revisions". Seventeen chapters…each about a different author. Dostoyevsky one of the chapters…which I just read. Utterly fantastic. It's nice to read something so brilliant with all of the other nonsense floating about.

There was a bookmark in the book. A business card of a girl named Kat. At one point I contemplated chucking it all and moving out to Hawaii to be with her. I wonder where that road not travelled would have led me.

The book sat in my book shelves for twenty years…unfinished. Unread finished that is. I just finished a second Dostoyevsky novel that had also sat unfinished for twenty years…"The Devils". Perhaps the most disturbing novel that I have ever read. Also the most brilliant. Seven hundred and some pages of genius…1870…a forewarning of the Russian revolution to come. I am rereading it…for clarity.

In this novel are the "famous" words that I had only known as a quote before…"the second half of a man's life is merely repeating the same habits that he has acquired in the first half".

That was such a great article…one you won't see posted on too many tennis websites. Tennisplayer.net can get a bit eclectic at times. Thanks.

[stotty]

Interesting article indeed. One should write and play tennis for the sake of it and nothing more.

I too enjoy many Dostoyevsky's observations on life. I also enjoy Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's. One of my favourites of his:

“Education doesn't make you smarter.”

Think about that one for a few moments.

[gzhpcu]

Education makes you more knowledgeable. You can't learn how to be smart. Either you are or you aren't.

[klacr]

Tennis...
Great at any age.

http://nypost.com/2016/05/17/this-63...g-tennis-star/

Kyle LaCroix USPTA
Boca Raton