Pickleball Just Dethroned Tennis—And the Data Proves It
Pickleball Is Eating Tennis's Lunch — and the Apple Watch Has the Receipt
Pickleball used to be the punchline at the back of the rec center. Not anymore. The Apple Heart and Movement Study (AHMS), run out of Brigham and Women's Hospital with Apple and the American Heart Association, just dropped a look at what hundreds of thousands of Apple Watch wearers are actually doing on the court. The numbers say what your neighborhood courts already do: pickleball is everywhere, and the people playing it are getting a real workout.
Here's what stood out.
Pickleball passed tennis for the first time
Across the AHMS cohort, tennis participation has held roughly steady month to month (with the usual summer bump). Pickleball just keeps climbing — through winters, through summers, through whatever. In July 2023, more Study participants logged a pickleball workout in a single month than a tennis workout. August 2023 sealed it: 1,331 pickleball players versus 1,243 tennis players, with about a hundred people doing both.
Zoom out to the full window (Jan 2021 through Aug 2023) and tennis still has the larger lifetime player pool — 7,780 versus 4,799 — but the trajectory isn't subtle.
The "pickleball is for retirees" stereotype is half right
Pickleball players in the Study skew a bit older (average age 44) than tennis players (40), and the age curve is much flatter — meaning you see strong participation well into the 60s and 70s. The oldest logged pickleball workout came from an 84-year-old. The oldest tennis workout? A 92-year-old. So much for either sport being age-locked.
Both sports leaned male, but pickleball pulled in a higher share of women than tennis did. And Utah, of all places, was the per-capita king — roughly 1 in 16 Utah participants tried it at least once, which tracks with the state having one of the highest court-per-capita counts in the country.
Pickleball sessions run longer than tennis sessions
This one surprised me. The conventional wisdom is that pickleball is the shorter, easier cousin. But across more than 250,000 workouts:
- Average pickleball session: 90 minutes (±47)
- Average tennis session: 81 minutes(±38)
People are staying out there. Probably because the games are quick, you rotate in and out, and four people fit on a court the size of a badminton court.
Tennis is more intense, but pickleball isn't a stroll
Using heart rate data from roughly 70,000 workouts in 2022, the Study compared peak heart rates and time spent in heart rate zones:
- Average peak heart rate during tennis: 152 bpm
- Average peak heart rate during pickleball: 143 bpm
- Tennis players spent about 9% more time in moderate-to-vigorous zones (Zones 2–5) than pickleball players.
Important context: both sports, across every age group from 19 to 74, averaged a peak heart rate north of 70% of estimated max. That's squarely in the territory cardiologists care about for cardiovascular benefit. Pickleball is genuinely exercise, not a glorified social hour — it just runs a touch cooler than tennis.
The mental health signal is real (with caveats)
AHMS participants can fill out a quarterly mental health survey that includes the PHQ-2, a short depression screener. A score of 3+ flags for further evaluation.
Among Study participants who played pickleball or tennis frequently (10+ sessions in 2022), the median PHQ-2 score was 0 — versus 0.5 for the overall population. After adjusting for age, sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and overall reported activity level, frequent pickleball players were 60% less likelyto screen positive for depressed mood. Frequent tennis players: 51% less likely. Each step up in self-reported general activity also dropped the odds by about 47%.
The honest caveat the researchers themselves flag: PHQ-2 is a screener, not a diagnosis, and the people who fill out optional surveys aren't a perfectly representative slice. But the direction of the finding lines up with a decade of research linking regular movement — especially social, outdoor movement — to better mood.
It's not all upside
The Study also followed up by phone on falls and counted 38 confirmed pickleball- or tennis-related falls, ranging from scrapes to hip and wrist fractures. That's a floor, not a ceiling — it's only what got reported. The takeaway isn't to skip the game; it's to warm up, wear decent shoes, and talk to a doctor before picking up a paddle if you have reason to.
So what does this actually mean?
A few things worth chewing on:
- Pickleball's growth isn't a fad signal — it's a participation signal.People aren't trying it once and bouncing. They're logging long sessions, repeatedly, across age brackets.
- It earns its cardiovascular keep.Lower peak heart rate than tennis, sure, but still well inside the zone that moves the needle on heart health.
- The social, low-barrier format may be the actual product. Older players, more women, longer sessions — that's a sport doing something tennis structurally doesn't.
- Whichever racquet you pick, the mood benefit shows up. The Study can't prove causation, but the association is strong and consistent with everything else we know about movement and mental health.
If you've been on the fence about giving pickleball a shot, the data is doing its best to nudge you onto a court.
Source: Apple Heart and Movement Study, "Serving up Fun and Fitness: Pickleball in the Apple Heart and Movement Study," October 18, 2023. Brigham and Women's Hospital.