Last Updated on September 17, 2025
Badminton might be the secret ingredient to a longer, happier life. It demands strategy, footwork, hand-eye coordination, strength, speed, conditioning and mental fortitude, and can be played by people of all ages.
Nowhere is the game’s benefits more on display than at the National Senior Games, where more than 12,500 athletes over the age of 50 congregate to compete in more than 25 sports. Among the many badminton competitors who traveled to Des Moines, Iowa for the 2025 Games is Dr. Rajeev Trehan, who many consider to be the game’s greatest ambassador.
Dr. Trehan was born in India, the country that gave birth to badminton, where he began playing at age 10. He came to the U.S. in 1981 and it’s been his passion and his purpose ever since. He not only competes in the National Senior Games, but also Officiates the Olympic Games, introduced badminton at the National Veterans Golden Age Games, and serves as the medical lead and head physician for USA Badminton. Dr. Trehan is smitten with badminton.
“The game needs focus,” Trehan said. “If you have been a student of happiness, research has shown that anything that makes you lose the sense of time, anything that provides focus as a source of happiness, is incredibly healthy.”
A kid at heart with a degrees in both neurology and psychiatry, Dr. Trehan knows the value of play and calls badminton the perfect gamified workout. 
“If you break down the recipes that are provided for typical exercise, that you should do so many stretches, so many lunges, so many sideward movements, so many twists, it is a great way to do it, but it’s a little bit isolated. It’s a little bit recipe-like,” Trehan explained.
“However, when your exercise is incorporated into a sport, like badminton, it becomes easier. Badminton has all these components: you’ve got to reach the birdie, you’ve got to twist, turn, anticipate, track the birdie. This is all happening in the course of one rally,” Trehan says. “You’re not counting your twists and turns. You don’t have a timer. You’re not saying, ‘Okay, I’ve done my 10. Okay, big sigh, it’s over now, thank God.’ I think that all these constructive suggestions that are already present in the form of a sport activity, it’s a gift.”
As a physician and athlete, Dr. Trehan actively promotes the mental, physical, and social benefits of not just badminton, but competitive sports in general, for all older adults, something that athletes of every sport from age 50 to over 100 receive at the National Senior Games.
“It’s just about the joy of meeting up with people you’ve seen before and people you’ve never met. They’re converging here because of the very well organized nature of sports. People come from across the planet, and the richness that it brings, it’s instantaneous travel and reconnection and connection for the first time,” Trehan says.
Dr. Trehan’s fascination with and appreciation for the sport only grows with each year. He believes it’s a key to not just lengthening his life but more importantly, delaying and shortening its decline.
“The beauty of life is that we can be active, we can be leading pleasurable pursuits until the very end of our days,” Trehan says. “Life doesn’t necessarily have to be a decline. Let’s view it as falling off the edge of a table, so that you actually sustain, enjoy, improve, perhaps get even better, happier, and more active until the biological factors decide that the time has come. That decline can be very brief. I call that falling off the end of a table.”
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