These Are the Best Sports for Building a Stronger, Fitter and More Athletic Body – Ranked

Just play a sport.’ That’s a surprisingly robust recommendation for anyone looking to improve their fitness. Perhaps more so, in many cases, than joining a gym.

While a gym membership is great for building targeted muscle, strength and weight management, taking up a sport can often provide those things in addition to a host of other benefits.

Most sports provide excellent cardio, for example, whether you’re running up and down a football pitch or across a tennis court. Better yet, they do this while making it fun, motivating and even social. If you play enough sports, you can lose weight without it feeling like work.

But it actually goes much deeper than that. You see, these same sports also include cutting (rapidly changing direction), acceleration and deceleration, tempo changes, varied intervals of exertion and strategic recovery, object tracking, situational awareness and more. It’s multiple systems of the body working in concert with one another in a way that most static gym routines never touch.

And as for strength and muscle, just take a look at a gymnast’s biceps, a swimmer’s back or a boxer’s shoulders, to see what sports can do for your physique. Indeed, many sports are known for the identifiable mark they leave on an athlete’s body.

But therein lies the problem. Because getting to the top of any sport will inherently mean elevating certain traits over others. Many pro-athletes are such specialists in their chosen field that they suffer glaring deficits in other areas.

So, if you want to add a sport to your routine, which will offer the most bang for your buck? Which sports are the most effective for developing a truly ‘all-round’ athlete? In the spirit of competition, let’s pit these sports against one another and see what each has to offer.

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What it trains: Many would argue that gymnastics builds the best all-round performance in athletes, and it’s easy to see why. Gymnastics incorporates a vast range of different challenges that require tremendous control over the entire body. To perform superhuman-looking feats such as planche, handstands and iron cross, gymnasts must develop all the usual mirror muscles, but also scapula control, pelvic control and more.

To flip and spin acrobatically, athletes must build tremendous explosive strength in the legs and core, along with incredible body awareness (proprioception). If you’ve ever tried to learn a backflip, you’ll know what a killer ab workout that is.

Then there’s the rings. Training with this apparatus develops an immense strength-to-weight ratio (proportional strength), plus unrivalled core and shoulder stability.

Weaknesses: Limited max strength development for legs. Less useful for endurance and weight loss. Ranks among the sports with the highest rates of injury.

Training methods: Gymnastic strength training, conditioning, prehab, mobility, technical drills, routine practice.

Signature exercise: Hollow body hold – a foundational core exercise.

Peak athlete example: Kōhei Uchimura.

Overall fitness rating: 8.5/10

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What it trains: Rock climbing, like swimming, is a sport that emphasises pulling (both vertical and horizontal). However, experienced rock climbers will actually try to minimise the amount of work their arms do by taking more weight on their legs, more often.

Climbing a route involves pulling with the arms and pushing through the legs against resistance (your own body weight), with short rest periods while you catch your breath. This makes it a great full-body workout that more closely mimics weight training than the other options on this list.

Mobility comes into play, as you’ll be reaching overhead and extending your hips to reach distant holds. There’s a surprising amount of strategy involved, too, as you try to find the most efficient route up the wall; so much so that shorter bouldering climbs are actually referred to as ‘problems’.

Perhaps most profound of all, though, is what rock climbing does for grip strength. Rock climbers have incredibly powerful fingers and hands – crucial for countless expressions of functional strength.

Weaknesses: Can lead to poor posture, ie, climber’s back. Risk of climber’s elbow (medial epicondylitis) and tennis elbow (lateral epicondylitis). No upper-body pushing movements.

Training methods: Fingerboard training, calisthenics, mobility training, limit bouldering, traversing.

Signature exercise: Fingerboard pull-ups – for simultaneously developing strong fingers and lats.

Peak athlete example: Alex Honnold.

Overall fitness rating: 8/10

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What it trains: Like football players, rugby players need to develop endurance across all energy systems. They get the same cognitive and vision benefits, too.

On top of this, rugby players tend to carry more muscle on wider frames. Repeated high-force contact develops powerful legs, core stability and a uniquely thick neck, which, as any looksmaxxer will tell you, makes a physique look instantly more imposing. More usefully, stronger necks help us absorb impacts to better protect the brain. This may even improve eye-head coupling, which controls attention while in motion.

Being a contact sport also lends rugby another advantage: mental resilience. There’s a certain toughness required to run headlong into an opponent on a wet field, or to be on the receiving end of a brutal takedown.

Weaknesses: High impact includes risk of injury. For casual athletes, most upper-body strength development will come from supportive weight training rather than the sport itself. Limited for mobility.

Training methods: Sprint drills, conditioning, strength and power training, agility drills, technical drills, contact practice, unit drills.

Signature exercise: Sled push – for strong legs, strength endurance and ankle stiffness.

Peak athlete example: Eben Etzebeth.

Overall fitness rating: 8/10

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What it trains: Boxing is a high-intensity sport that’s about generating huge power through efficient biomechanics. Boxers typically have highly developed shoulders from hitting the bag, along with robust aerobic and anaerobic fitness thanks to the round-based structure.

Boxing also develops the back to a surprising degree, as the fist needs to be rapidly retracted following each blow. The rotational motion of punching places focus on an entire plane of motion ignored by most modern strength training.

But what’s perhaps even more overlooked is ‘psychomotor vigilance’. This term describes the ability to stay focused and alert under heavy fatigue and stress. This trainable attribute could keep a long-haul delivery driver focused at the wheel or a surgeon steady during a long procedure.

Weaknesses: Punching and holding guard can cause a rounded posture and ‘boxer’s shoulder’. Minimal leg development. Risk of damage associated with repeated head trauma. Risk of asymmetry (in posture).

Training methods: Sparring, pads, bag work, agility/footwork drills, combination drills, strength and conditioning.

Signature exercise: Jump rope – for endurance and rhythm.

Peak athlete example: Vasyl Lomachenko.

Overall fitness rating: 7.5/10

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What it trains: When you picture a swimmer, you think of huge lats and overall back development. But swimming is a great workout for the legs and core, too.

It also develops smaller supporting muscles, eg, the tibialis anterior and rear delts, helping us lift our feet off the ground as we get older and improving posture.

As the entire body is in constant motion, swimming trains the cardiovascular system comprehensively. This combines to develop very lean and desirable physiques plus all-round general fitness – and it’s low impact.

Weaknesses: Minimal development for upper-body pushing muscles. Swimmer’s shoulder and slouch.

Training methods: Stroke practice, strength training, conditioning, tempo work, interval drills.

Signature exercise: Straight-arm pull-downs – perfectly mimics overhead strokes.

Peak athlete example: Michael Phelps.

Overall fitness rating: 7/10

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What it trains: Football is what’s called an ‘open skill’ – rather than relying on repetitive movements in a predictable environment, it has you constantly moving and adapting to high-pressure demands.

This unpredictability results in powerful and resilient legs accustomed to launching off the ground from various angles. It also challenges more intangible traits, such as sports vision – our ability to track objects and predict their movements using working memory. This is crucial for other activities like driving, where useful vision involves much more than just the physical health of the eye itself.

Throw in the substantial cardio benefits that challenge multiple energy systems (you’ll be walking, jogging and sprinting) and you can see why footballers are so generally fit.

Weaknesses: It involves very little resistance training for the upper body and minimal mobility work. Hamstring tears and other injuries are common.

Training methods: Sprint drills, conditioning, functional strength training, technical drills, small-sided games/conditioned games (ecological training).

Signature exercise: Leg extensions – for powerful kicks.

Peak athlete example: Cristiano Ronaldo.

Overall fitness rating: 6.5/10

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What it trains: More than the other sports on this list, tennis trains hand-eye coordination. It also develops quick reflexes, which many non-athletes lose as they age, and object tracking.

Plus, tennis is an excellent form of cardio that acts as interval training. Short periods of waiting are repeatedly punctuated by explosive movements, as you run towards the ball. A lot of those movements are in the frontal plane (meaning side-to-side), which is sorely under-serviced by most gym routines.

Weaknesses: Limited for strength development and mobility. High risk of asymmetry.

Training methods: Technical drills, conditioning, functional strength training, plyometrics, agility drills, game-based drills.

Signature exercise: Lateral bounds – for rapidly moving from side to side.

Peak athlete example: Carlos Alcaraz.

Overall fitness rating: 6/10

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Golf

What it trains: Golf may not immediately appear to place the same demands on an athlete as rugby or boxing, say, but you’d be surprised just how beneficial it is for overall health and performance.

Golf involves a lot of walking, which is one of the best forms of low-impact, steady-state cardio for weight loss. The sport also features a huge explosive rotational movement in the swing. That same rotational power translates to a variety of other movements, from throwing to punching and even running.

Putting, conversely, demands total precision, control and concentration. This is where golf reveals itself as an extremely psychological game. The most successful golfers engage what functional coaches refer to as ‘the quiet eye’ – a steady gaze held without breaking. Accomplishing this becomes increasingly difficult as pressure mounts, but it’s certainly a skill worth developing. We could all use a little more calm focus under pressure.

Weaknesses: Limited for strength, mobility and serious endurance. Golfer’s elbow.

Training methods: Technical drills, competitive practice, pressure drills, range work, functional strength and conditioning.

Signature exercise: Diagonal cable pulls – these train both sides to address imbalance.

Peak athlete example: Tiger Woods.

Overall fitness rating: 5/10

We combine elements from different sports to create an unstoppable physical force

While each of these sports offers something unique, none of them represents a complete all-round performance profile. That goes for the sports we didn’t include here, too, such as basketball, cycling, parkour and martial arts.

In fact, as an athlete increasingly specialises in a single sport, other aspects of their performance drop off due to the ‘law of specificity’. For example, a 2003 study in the Journal of Electromyography and Kinesiology found that swimmers had a lower jump height compared with the general population. This isn’t to do with a lack of strength in particular muscles, but rather the pattern of activation across the leg muscles that swimming reinforces.

So, to build a perfect hybrid athlete, we’d need to combine multiple attributes from each sport.

This sounds fun, but in reality, it’s an impossible task. The more challenges we introduce, the less time we have to train in each one and the greater the recovery cost. So, we must make do with becoming the most well-rounded individuals we can to suit the specific demands of our lifestyles and the interests we want to pursue.

Remember, there’s an awful lot more to sports performance than just ‘getting swole’. Almost everyone can benefit from adding one or two sports to their regular training, ideally at a club but even if it’s just doing some shadow boxing at home.

Combining a sport with a full gym routine will offer far greater benefits than either one of them could on their own. So, don’t just train your body: actually use it.