There’s a moment, usually somewhere between eighteen and twenty-five, when a person plays a game for the last time and doesn’t know it.
Nobody announces it. There’s no final whistle. You just move city, or the five-a-side group loses two players and never rebooks the pitch, or the season ends and the WhatsApp group goes quiet, and then it’s eleven years later and the last time you ran flat out for a ball you didn’t know it was the last time.
After that, if you do anything physical at all, it’s exercise. Which is a completely different activity, wearing the same clothes.
I’ve been thinking about this since a friend dragged me to a badminton club last winter — a proper one, in a leisure centre that smelled exactly like every leisure centre I’ve ever been in, full of people between thirty and seventy who were mostly not very good and clearly did not care. I played for two hours. I was dreadful. I laughed more than I had in months, and afterwards realised I’d done more hard running than in any gym session that year, without once thinking about it as training.
And it occurred to me that adults have made an enormous, largely unexamined swap: we gave up playing and took up exercising, and we’ve assumed those are the same transaction. I don’t think they are. I think we lost something in the exchange and it might be the reason so many of us struggle to keep any of this going.
How movement got detached from play
For most of human history nobody exercised, because the concept didn’t need to exist. Movement was either work or it was games. You walked because that’s how you got there. You lifted because things needed lifting. And then, separately, you played — because humans have always played, in every culture anyone has documented, usually competitively and usually with an audience.
Exercise as a distinct category — movement performed for the physiological effect, decoupled from any purpose or opponent — is fairly recent as a mass phenomenon. It really takes off in the second half of the twentieth century, when work stopped being physical for most people and a gap opened up that had to be filled deliberately. The jogging boom arrives. Gyms move from being niche institutions for a certain kind of enthusiast to being on every high street. Aerobics happens. Then the machines, the classes, the wearables, the apps.
It solved a real problem. But it solved it by inventing an activity with no intrinsic reward at all. A rep is not fun. Nobody has ever been absorbed in the fourth set of a leg press the way a child is absorbed in a game. The entire reward structure of exercise is deferred — you do the unpleasant thing now so that in eleven weeks you’ll look slightly different, or in thirty years you’ll have better bone density.
That is a very difficult thing to ask of a human being. We’re extremely bad at deferred rewards. The whole self-help industry exists because we’re bad at deferred rewards.
Games don’t have this problem. The reward is immediate and it’s baked in. You want to win the point. You want to beat the person opposite you, or beat your own last attempt, or just make the shot come off properly. Nobody has to be disciplined about a game.
What a game gives you that a gym doesn’t
Four things, I think, and none of them are physiological.
A reason to be there that isn’t your body. This is the big one. When your only motive for training is how you look or how long you’ll live, every session is a referendum on your appearance and your mortality, which is exhausting. When you’re playing, the reason you turned up is that it’s Tuesday and Tuesday is badminton and Dave will take the piss if you’re not there. Your body becomes incidental to the thing, which is precisely where a body works best.
Skill. Exercise has almost no skill ceiling. Once you can squat properly, you can squat properly forever; the only variable left is the number, and numbers plateau. Games have effectively infinite skill ceilings. You can be improving at tennis at sixty-five. There’s always a shot you don’t have. That keeps people engaged for decades in a way that a rep scheme simply cannot.
Other people, non-optionally. You can skip the gym and nobody notices. You can’t skip the game — there are four of you and it doesn’t work with three. That’s not a trick you play on yourself; it’s a genuine obligation, and genuine obligations survive bad weather and low motivation in a way that private intentions never do. It’s also, in a period where an awful lot of adults are quietly short of friends, a structural solution to a problem most people are trying to solve individually.
Movement you’d never programme. Sport makes you move in ways that no sensible training plan would ask for. Sudden changes of direction. Reaching awkwardly. Reacting to something unpredictable. That’s genuinely valuable — the ability to react and catch yourself is a large part of what stops people falling over at eighty — and it’s very hard to train deliberately, because the essential ingredient is that you didn’t know it was coming.
The obvious objections
“I was never sporty.” Almost everyone who says this means they were bad at PE at fourteen, in front of people, in a compulsory setting designed around the kids who were already good. That is not information about your adult capabilities. It’s information about a badly designed institution. Adult clubs are, in my experience, startlingly welcoming, partly because they need numbers and partly because most of the people there are also not very good and have made their peace with it.
“I’d be embarrassing.” Yes, for about three weeks. Then you’d be mediocre, and mediocre is a fine place to spend twenty years. Nobody at a Tuesday-night club is evaluating you. They want a fourth.
“I don’t have time for a whole club.” Fair. But look at the actual arithmetic — an evening a week is often less than people spend on getting to and from a gym for three sessions, and you get the social element bundled in rather than as a separate obligation.
“It won’t build muscle.” It won’t. This is the one real limitation, and I’d be lying if I said otherwise.
The honest caveat: play doesn’t replace lifting
Games are excellent at cardiovascular fitness, coordination, agility and enjoyment. They are not sufficient for strength, and they’re not sufficient for bone density, and after about forty those become the things that quietly determine how the rest of your life goes.
There’s also a nasty little trap in the other direction: playing a sport without any underlying strength base is one of the more reliable ways for a thirty-eight-year-old to tear something. The classic version is the man who hasn’t sprinted in fifteen years, plays a charity football match, and pulls a hamstring in the first ten minutes because his body wrote a cheque his tissues hadn’t been trained to cash.
So the sensible arrangement isn’t play instead of the gym. It’s the gym in service of play. Two short strength sessions a week — squat, push, pull, hinge, nothing clever — as the maintenance work that lets you go and do the thing you actually enjoy without breaking. The lifting becomes instrumental rather than the point, which, interestingly, makes it much easier to sustain. Doing twenty-five minutes of dull work so you can keep playing is a far easier sell to yourself than doing it in the abstract hope of looking different.
