Sport is a very important thing is one’s life. It can protect our health, our body, refresh the mind, strengthen us inside and outside, not to talk about the reduction of the daily stress. As we are different, we can’t all be in just one specific sport, so during the centuries and millenniums, people invented several kinds of sports with different moves, rules, equipment and requirements. Some are dangerous, some are not, your choice may depend on your physical abilities and the fact that how adventurous you are. There are extreme sports for the adrenaline lovers, like hiking, windsurfing, scuba diving or parachuting, slow sports which need more concentration and more use of your brain, like chess and golf, there are the martial arts and their branches, and the list could go on for long pages.

 For me, I tried lots of sports as a hobby and/or a form to keep fit, like rhythmic gymnastics, acrobatic rock’n’roll, folkdance, dragon boat, etc., until I ended up with kyokushin karate. This is a true passion of mine, and I’ve been doing it exactly for three years now, in my current group. I found it out later that my father had been doing it, too, when he was at my age, under the same couch. It was all a coincidence that it happened this way, but it became a passion, almost an obsession from a hobby in no time.

 People usually wonder why I’m doing this, instead of dancing, but that is simply not my cup of tea. I enjoy practicing different katas, or  the motion practices, the different techniques to hit, kick and defend with my friends. It can be very useful when I have to protect myself, as I’m a kind of kids who is always in search of any sign of trouble. Also, it helps a lot in self-control and has a lot more advantages, like it develops my back muscles which I really need, due to my spine problems.

 As I see it, women might like doing sport more than men, as we are considered to be more worried about our health and shape, so small wonder that we have at least the same number of girls as boys on each training. Men are said to be lazier and I would say we can see less men running on the streets alone.

 Health problems can be a cause why people are taking up different sports, like jogging against obesity and heart problems. Sports can do wonders for our health, by strengthening our muscles, bones, heart and lungs. An other cause why we choose them as our free time activities is that the fact that it reduces the daily stress and the chance of getting a heart attack.

 In Hungary soccer is definitely one of the most popular sports, besides handball, which shows increasing statistics. I would say that a very big percentage, about 80% of the young boys play soccer regularly, and if we ask a little boy what would he like to become, he would answer: soccer player. A lot of boys practice it as their favorite activity during their scholar years, but when they finish their schools, they give it up and find a suitable job.

 Some boys still keep running after their dreams and they become soccer players until they can. As a player, you won’t be able to be on the pitch until the end of your life, because as a forty –year-old man, you are considered to be a veteran, a very old player. When you get too old, you quit the team and have to find another job, which is a very unlucky situation, unless you would make a good leader and teacher, and a team would need your help as a couch.

 For women, it’s usually not the same, though we really do like sports. There are many exceptions that show, we can be even better than the males. Just for an example, the first Hungarian world champion in karate was a female, not a male. Even, there are the very famous chess-player girls, the three Polgár sisters. Their father taught them how to play chess at a very young age and they become so great professionals that they and their father had to invent other, more difficult ways to play this black and white, but not at all boring game.

 And once if we talk about chess, we should also mention some idiot sports, like chess boxing. I’ve first heard about it a few years ago. It is made up of several turns, one game of chess, and a box match. The player who wants to win has to be very fit both in body and mind.

 Also, there is the so famous wife-carrying competition, which was invented in Finland as has the basic idea that the husbands have to carry their wives on their back at the fastest speed they can, through several obstacles. Who is the fastest and doesn’t hurt, drop or leave his wife wins.

 An other idiot sport which spreads around the world with the speed of light is the cell phone throwing. You just have to toss it in the air, the goal is that it has to fly a long distance up so high, and land at the furthest point. Sometimes I can’t see a clever point in a game or its rules, but it still can be very enjoyable for someone.