As an athlete, I think physical activity is one of the most underrated tools in all of public health topics.

The World Health Organization calls lack of physical activity one of the leading risk factors for death from noncommunicable diseases and says people who aren’t active enough have a 20% to 30% higher risk of dying than people who are. Being active helps prevent heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, and it also reduces anxiety and depression. The catch? WHO says about 31% of adults and 80% of teenagers don’t get enough activity. That’s just crazy.

That 80% number for teens really got me. It connects straight to the kids I coached at the West Orange Rec Center. For a lot of them, our program wasn’t just fun, it was one of the only chances they had to be active in a safe place. That’s the whole idea behind helping them as a coach: using sports to keep kids moving and healthy early, instead of treating the results of inactivity decades later.

Movement sure doesn’t cure everything, and not everyone has a safe place to be active, which is its own equity problem. But for something with so many benefits and basically no cost, we really don’t talk about it enough.