Sport
Sport: the benefits
Sport, like recreation, is a way that you can get active and get involved as part of your community. It can help you to stay healthy, as well as being a way you can meet new people and form friendships. Sport also provides a way for you to push your personal limits, and have fun at the same time. You can find out about:
What do people with a disability say?
Australians with a disability shared how they feel about participating in sport and recreation in an online survey* for the Australian Sports Commission.
Over 1000 people shared their thoughts for the survey, including people with physical, sensory, intellectual or psychiatric disabilities, and people with multiple disabilities or other types of disability. Family members and carers provided answers on behalf of some people with disability for the survey.
The benefits of sport
The people who provided responses shared what they enjoy the most about participating in sport. The top 10 most important benefits of participating in sport, they said, were:
- Achievement
- Do something stimulating
- Improve health or reduce risk of disease
- Opportunities to socialise with others
- Enjoy company of friends
- Increase energy level
- Improve self-esteem
- Improve heart and lung fitness
- Be with people enjoying themselves
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Spend time with friends.
What matters to us
What each person enjoys—or doesn't enjoy—about participating in sport can vary. With the online survey*, there were also differences with what people with different types of disability enjoyed about participating in sport.
Socialising, physical improvement, self-development, having a health focus or a mental health focus and enjoying mixed benefits were some of the top common benefits of participating in sport, according to people who identified with different disability groups.
For example:
- for people who identified as Deaf or hearing impaired, having a mental health focus with sport was commonly an important benefit. They valued increasing their energy level, improving their health or reducing their risk of disease, improving their heart and lung fitness, feeling less tension and stress and being able to relax.
- for people with an intellectual, cognitive or learning disability, self-development was commonly an important benefit of sport. They said sport helped them feel like they belonged, provided opportunities for socialising, gave them a chance to experience achievement and to enjoy the company of others, and helped improve their self-esteem.
*You can find out more about what people with disability enjoy about sport in the report, Getting involved in sport: Participation and non: participation of people with disability in sport and active recreation. The report, which is available on the Australian Sports Commission website, includes more information about the online survey discussed here.
Getting active
Being active every day can help you be healthier and happier. The Queensland Government has a fact sheet, Get Active Queenslanders with a disability, that outlines different benefits of regular physical activity. It also includes tips about how you can incorporate healthy eating in your lifestyle.
More information
For more information about the benefits of being involved in sport and getting active, you can:
- visit the Australian Sports Commission website, which has a section about disability sport. It includes videos about sport.
- find out what Queenslanders with disability say they like about sport, as they share their stories with Disability Online.
