Page 2 - Basketball

If the strength of the health and fitness sector is anything to go by, many of us want to improve our health and overall level of fitness. With all of the positive health benefits that modern medicine associates with regular exercise ? not the least of which is a longer life ? it's natural to want to become more active. Unfortunately, as we all know, that's much easier said than done.

Motivating yourself to make a change in our often sedentary lifestyles can be a real challenge. How many New Year's resolutions have slipped into the past unfulfilled? Instead of struggling to stick to regular exercise on its own, what if you motivated yourself with the "fun and games" that are sports? As a main component of your exercise, sports, and especially team sports, can have huge benefits.

Of all your options, basketball is the ideal choice. From its humble beginnings to its now globe-spanning popularity, it remains at its core an extremely athletic, active, and demanding sport. Not

The bright lights, the roar of the crowd, the rapid squeaking of sneakers and the thud of the ball on a gleaming court ? there's no doubt that basketball is an incredibly exciting game. That's true whether it's a game in a professional NBA arena in front of tens of thousands or a match between friends in a neighbourhood park. The sport's global popularity is evident everywhere you look.

A recent estimate put the number of global players at nearly half a billion. Although members of over two hundred countries tune in to watch major NBA games, American basketball

In 2015, the Forbes list of the world's highest-paid athletes saw two boxers (Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao) occupying the top two spots. Third and fourth place were occupied, respectively, by football's biggest stars: Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. Surprisingly, though, the most well-represented sport on the Forbes top 10 list wasn't boxing or football. It wasn't golf, either, though both Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson landed on the list, and it wasn't tennis, though Roger Federer ended up fifth and had the highest endorsement earnings of any athlete. Rather, three of the top 10 slots went to another sport: basketball. United States NBA stars LeBron James (who plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers), Kevin Durant (of the Oklahoma City Thunder), and Kobe Bryant (of the Los Angeles Lakers) ranked in at sixth, seventh, and 10^th, respectively. The