Base­ball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine play­ers. The aim is to score runs by hit­ting a thrown ball with a bat and touch­ing a series of four bases arranged at the cor­ners of a ninety-foot diamond.

Play­ers on the bat­ting team take turns hit­ting against the pitcher of the field­ing team, which tries to stop them from scor­ing runs by get­ting hit­ters out in any of sev­eral ways.

A player on the bat­ting team can stop at any of the bases and later advance via a teammate’s hit or other means. The teams switch between bat­ting and field­ing when­ever the field­ing team records three outs. One turn at bat for each team con­sti­tutes an inning and nine innings make up a pro­fes­sional game. The team with the most runs at the end of the game wins.

Bas­ket­ball is a team sport, the objec­tive being to shoot a ball through a bas­ket hor­i­zon­tally posi­tioned to score points while fol­low­ing a set of rules. Usu­ally, two teams of five play­ers play on a marked rec­tan­gu­lar court with a bas­ket at each width end. Bas­ket­ball is one of the world’s most pop­u­lar and widely viewed sports.

Cycling, also called bicy­cling or bik­ing, is the use of bicy­cles for trans­port, recre­ation, or for sport. Per­sons engaged in cycling are cyclists or bicy­clists. Apart from ordi­nary two-wheeled bicy­cles, cycling also includes rid­ing uni­cy­cles, tri­cy­cles, quadra­cy­cles, and other sim­i­lar human-powered vehi­cles (HPVs). Bicy­cles were intro­duced in the 19th cen­tury and now num­ber about one bil­lion world­wide. They are the prin­ci­pal means of trans­porta­tion in many regions.

Gen­eral fit­ness train­ing works towards broad goals of over­all health and well-being, rather than nar­row goals of sport com­pe­ti­tion, larger mus­cles or con­cerns over appearance.

A reg­u­lar mod­er­ate work­out reg­i­men and healthy diet can improve gen­eral appear­ance mark­ers of good health such as mus­cle tone, healthy skin, hair and nails, while pre­vent­ing age or lifestyle-related reduc­tions in health and the series of heart and organ fail­ures that accom­pany inac­tiv­ity and poor diet.

Diet itself helps to increase calo­rie burn­ing by boost­ing metab­o­lism, a process fur­ther enhanced while gain­ing more lean mus­cle. An aer­o­bic exer­cise pro­gram can burn fat and increase the meta­bolic rate.

Golf is a pre­ci­sion club and ball sport, in which com­pet­ing play­ers (or golfers) use many types of clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a golf course using the fewest num­ber of strokes. Golf is defined, in the rules of golf, as “play­ing a ball with a club from the tee­ing ground into the hole by a stroke or suc­ces­sive strokes in accor­dance with the Rules.”

Hockey is a fam­ily of sports in which two teams play against each other by try­ing to maneu­ver a ball or a puck into the opponent’s goal using a hockey stick. In many areas, one sport (typ­i­cally field hockey or ice hockey is gen­er­ally referred to sim­ply as hockey.

Kick­ball (or Soccer-Baseball) is a play­ground game and league game, sim­i­lar to base­ball, invented in the United States in the first half of the 20th Cen­tury. Kick­ball may also be known as kick base­ball, base soc­cer, foot-base, soccer-base, or soccer-baseball. It is sim­i­lar to base­ball where play­ers kick the ball to bat it instead of using bats, mak­ing it more acces­si­ble to young chil­dren. As in base­ball, teams alter­nate innings with one team on the infield attempt­ing to score by hav­ing its play­ers cir­cle the bases and the other team it the out­field work­ing to stop runs from being scored. Play­ers in the infield kick an inflated rub­ber ball in order to advance play­ers around the bases and thus score runs. The team with the most runs after a pre­de­fined num­ber of innings (usu­ally nine) wins.

Lacrosse is a team sport of Native Amer­i­can ori­gin played using a small rub­ber ball and a long-handled stick called a crosse or lacrosse stick, mainly played in the United States and Canada. It is a con­tact sport which requires padding. The head of the lacrosse stick is strung with loose mesh designed to catch and hold the lacrosse ball. Offen­sively, the objec­tive of the game is to score by shoot­ing the ball into an opponent’s goal, using the lacrosse stick to catch, carry, and pass the ball to do so. Defen­sively, the objec­tive is to keep the oppos­ing team from scor­ing and to dis­pos­sess them of the ball through the use of stick check­ing and body con­tact or posi­tion­ing. The sport has four major types: men’s field lacrosse, women’s lacrosse, box lacrosse and intercrosse.

The mar­tial arts are cod­i­fied sys­tems and tra­di­tions of com­bat prac­tices. They are prac­ticed for a vari­ety of rea­sons, includ­ing self-defense, com­pe­ti­tion, phys­i­cal health and fit­ness, as well as men­tal, phys­i­cal, and spir­i­tual devel­op­ment. The term mar­tial art has become heav­ily asso­ci­ated with the fight­ing arts of east­ern Asia, but was orig­i­nally used in regard to the com­bat sys­tems of Europe as early as the 1550s. An Eng­lish fenc­ing man­ual of 1639 used the term in ref­er­ence specif­i­cally to the “Sci­ence and Art” of sword­play. The term is ulti­mately derived from Latin, and means “Arts of Mars,” where Mars is the Roman god of war. Some mar­tial arts are con­sid­ered ‘tra­di­tional’ and are tied to an eth­nic, cul­tural or reli­gious back­ground, while oth­ers are mod­ern sys­tems devel­oped either by a founder or an association.

Run­ning is a means of ter­res­trial loco­mo­tion allow­ing humans and other ani­mals to move rapidly on foot. It is sim­ply defined in ath­let­ics terms as a gait in which at reg­u­lar points dur­ing the run­ning cycle both feet are off the ground. This is in con­trast to walk­ing, where one foot is always in con­tact with the ground, the legs are kept mostly straight and the cen­ter of grav­ity vaults over the legs in an inverted pen­du­lum fash­ion. A char­ac­ter­is­tic fea­ture of a run­ning body from the view­point of spring-mass mechan­ics is that changes in kinetic and poten­tial energy within a stride occur simul­ta­ne­ously, with energy stor­age accom­plished by springy ten­dons and pas­sive mus­cle elas­tic­ity] The term run­ning can refer to any of a vari­ety of speeds rang­ing from jog­ging to sprinting.

Asso­ci­a­tion foot­ball, more com­monly known as foot­ball or soc­cer, is a sport played between two teams of eleven play­ers with a spher­i­cal ball. At the turn of the 21st cen­tury, the game was played by over 250 mil­lion play­ers in over 200 coun­tries, mak­ing it the world’s most pop­u­lar sport. The game is played on a rec­tan­gu­lar field of grass or green arti­fi­cial turf, with a goal in the mid­dle of each of the short ends. The object of the game is to score by dri­ving the ball into the oppos­ing goal.

Soft­ball is a bat-and-ball sport. It is a direct descen­dant of base­ball although there are some key dif­fer­ences: soft­balls are big­ger than base­balls, and the pitches are thrown under­hand rather than over­hand. Soft­ball is played on a smaller dia­mond than in base­ball; a soft­ball field’s aver­age dis­tances from home plate to the cen­ter, left and right field fences are 220 feet (67 meters) for women and 250 feet (75 meters) for men. The cor­re­spond­ing base­ball field aver­age dis­tances are 410 for cen­ter field and 325 feet for left & right field 125 and 99 meters. In col­lege and pro­fes­sional soft­ball, the pitch­ing dis­tance is 43 feet. Col­lege and pro­fes­sional base­ball play­ers pitch from 60.5 feet.

Human swim­ming is the self propul­sion of a per­son through water or other liq­uid, for sur­vival, recre­ation, sport, excer­cise or other rea­son. Loco­mo­tion is achieved through co-ordinated move­ment of the limbs, the body, or both. Humans are able to hold their breath under­wa­ter and under­take rudi­men­tary loco­mo­tive swim­ming within weeks of birth, as an evo­lu­tion­ary response. Swim­ming is con­sis­tently found to be amongst the top recre­ational activ­i­ties under­taken by the pub­lic, and in some coun­tries, swim­ming lessons are a com­pul­sory part of the edu­ca­tional cur­ricu­lum. As a for­malised sport, swim­ming fea­tures in a range of local, national and inter­na­tional com­pe­ti­tions, includ­ing fea­tur­ing in every mod­ern sum­mer Olympics.

Table ten­nis, also known as ping-pong, is a sport in which two or four play­ers hit a light­weight, hol­low ball back and forth using table ten­nis rack­ets. The game takes place on a hard table divided by a net. Except for the ini­tial serve, play­ers must allow a ball played toward them only one bounce on their side of the table and must return it so that it bounces on the oppo­site side. Points are scored when a player fails to return the ball within the rules. Play is fast and demands quick reac­tions. A skilled player can impart sev­eral vari­eties of spin to the ball, alter­ing its tra­jec­tory and lim­it­ing an opponent’s options to great advantage.

Ten­nis is a sport usu­ally played between two play­ers (sin­gles) or between two teams of two play­ers each (dou­bles). Each player uses a racket that is strung to strike a hol­low rub­ber ball cov­ered with felt over a net into the opponent’s court. The object of the game is to play the ball in such a way that the oppo­nent is not able to play a good return. Ten­nis is an Olympic sport and is played at all lev­els of soci­ety at all ages. The sport can be played by any­one who can hold a racket, includ­ing peo­ple in wheelchairs.

Ulti­mate is a team sport played with a fly­ing disc. The object of the game is to score points by pass­ing the disc to a player in the oppos­ing end zone, sim­i­lar to an end zone in Amer­i­can foot­ball or the in-goal area in rugby] Play­ers may not run with the disc, and may only move one foot (pivot) while hold­ing the disc. While orig­i­nally called Ulti­mate Fris­bee, it is now offi­cially called Ulti­mate in many areas because Fris­bee is reg­is­tered in some areas as a trade­mark, albeit gener­i­cized, for the line of discs made by the Wham-O toy com­pany. In 2008, there were 4.9 mil­lion Ulti­mate play­ers in the US.

Vol­ley­ball is a team sport in which two teams of six play­ers are sep­a­rated by a net. Each team tries to score points by ground­ing a ball on the other team’s court under orga­nized rules. It has been a part of the offi­cial pro­gram of the Sum­mer Olympic Games since 1964.