What do we mean by sports? The term surely encompasses all forms of games but we, the school authorities in general, prefer some forms over others, popularize them based on commerce and deprive children of the fun they could have had with the games we ignore.
This keeps us away from indoor games, a very lively section of sports that is in no way inferior to outdoor games. Here, we discuss six advantages indoor games have over grueling outdoor sports.
6 factors on which indoor sports beat outdoors
1. Greater agility with climate control:
Be it physically demanding sports such as basketball or table tennis, a combination of air-conditioned complexes, 24×7 lighting and smooth floors reduce the chances of injury to negligible. Games such as Billiards, chess etc have absolutely no chances of physical injury.
On the other hand, reduced chances of injury allows players to give in all of their energy to the game with greater agility and reflex.
2. More networking, faster coordination:
Indoor spaces are far smaller than outdoor fields. This requires games to be conducted in smaller space, which in turn prompts for better cognitive reflex than outdoor sports.
Take Wimbledon and table tennis for example. The former takes up a bigger space and allows more time to react to the opponent’s move as compared to the latter, where all the action happens in fractions of seconds over a table.
3. Tests mental strength:
Kids’ indoor games such as Monopoly, Chutes and Ladders and Ludo challenge participants’ patience. While Chutes and Ladders and Ludo are driven by luck, the quest for reaching the end point after facing various hurdles surely drains the mind and makes it stronger.
4. Precision over physical strength:
Games such as Billiards, Snookers and Carrom rely more on the precision, particularly the angle of the strike and the amount of force applied to put the target into the holes. Mastery over these forms of sports makes a player highly precise in approach towards life.
5. Analytical thinking and reflex
Games such as Chess challenge the decision-making ability of a player. Chess taxes the brain the most. The algorithmic dynamics of this sport and its countless benefits in intelligence development has made it India’s most coveted indoor sport. A card game such as Karuta requires players to memorise multiple short poems, listen to an orator and pick the card with the poem being recited as fast as possible. This requires immense reflexes.
6. Equally exciting
Games such as basketball, ice hockey, chess, table tennis etc have international championships organized the year round. They require intense, decade-long training for a player to be able to compete in global platforms and is thus, no less demanding and exciting than Cricket or Football.
We hope that the facts mentioned above would serve as an eye-opener for all school authorities to recognize the benefits of indoor games and encourage children to take them up with excitement equaling that of outdoor games.