Sport Specific Strike Zone

Adult kickball players have so much fun they forget they’re exercising
By Glen Rosales For the Albuquerque Journal

Kickball. It elicits memories — some good and some bad — of grade school gym class. But it’s no longer just a kids’ game, and adults who play it need to be aware that just as with any other sport, it should be taken seriously.

It’s a sport that can be a tremendous way to exercise and keep fit without really going through the drudgery of a workout, says local certified personal trainer Brenda Rule-Osburn, who operates Bodies Be Fit.

“It’s a great sport to get great exercise,” she says. “You can exercise in a lot of different ways outside of the gym. In kickball, you’re exercising, but you’re having fun so you don’t really think of it as exercise.”

Participants can burn as many as 600 calories during a game, says Tiffany Ficklin, spokeswoman for the World Adult Kickball Association and a player herself.

“What I feel are those quick-twitch muscles,” she says. “It’s those quick bursts of energy that get you.”

That’s the real benefi t of the sport, Rule-Osburn says. “You have a lot of quick stops and quick starts. That gets your metabolism going and keeps it going for longer periods of time.

“Jogging is a great activity, but running like this off and ..s you keep going for a longer period of time.”

While the sport is played recreationally much like beer-league softball, it’s extremely competitive, says player Alfredo Moreno, who works in the University of New Mexico sports-media relations department.

“I don’t think it’s anything that anybody goes out and trains for,” he says. “But you are competing and you want to show what athletic skills you have left. And you don’t want to be sore the next day. You want to jog a little beforehand, do some minor stretching, because once the game starts, people are playing it seriously.”

Knocking around

A track athlete while attending school in southern Oregon, the 29-year-old Moreno says he got into the sport on a lark, knocking the ball around in the evening with college friends.

“That was before we knew there was a national association and that there were people in the Northeast who were taking this thing extremely serious,” he says.

His team reached the semifinals of a national tournament in Washington, D.C., before disbanding, although he stuck with the sport by signing as a free agent with another team.

As with any sport, injuries do happen. “You see some of the soccer-related injuries,” Moreno says. “Pulled hamstrings, sore groins. After a tournament, playing six hours in a day, I’m definitely sore the next day.”

Many of the injuries involve new players, Ficklin says. “People vividly remember playing in the fifth grade,” she says. “The first thing they’ll do is get out there and take a great, big, gregarious kick. The first thing they pull is their quad.”

One way to avoid injuries is through a solid warmup, Rule-Osburn says. She recommends something that again goes back to childhood: jumping jacks.

“Jumping jacks increase your metabolism and get your heart going,” she says. “It’s just a good exercise overall because you’re using all parts of your body.”

While exercise is one health benefit of the sport, there are others, Ficklin says, not the least of which is stress relief. “There’s nothing like taking out your aggression on the big red rubber ball,” she says. “We’re really just a bunch of adults running around and having fun like kids.”

It’s also a great social sport for people looking to make new friends. “It’s really about being young at heart,” Ficklin says. “We have people who played sports in college. We have working people. We have people that sit behind a desk all day. And we have people who were picked last in gym class. The great thing about WAKA is you’ll never get picked last again.”