In tournament scenarios, you’ll easily burn 5,000+ calories playing chess. Completely ignoring the 10,000+ step days traversing hotels where 100 other players are all on a similar schedule for using the elevators, focused thought for 4 and 5 hour games twice a day will make your brain absolutely burn up the calories. Call of Duty produces a similar effect. Watch someone take it seriously, even if they’ve never held a controller before, and within 1 tense lobby they’re sweating.

I’ve played through hits as early as middle school that I should have checked out on. Culturally, it’s all, “Rub some dirt on it and walk it off.” Slide tackles and headers are still a thing at the local high schools for soccer. The LaCrosse culture is almost as bad as Rugby and Soccer. I’m biased to love basketball as much as I did football as a kid, but it’s got its own smaller specter of, “Play through the pain,” that only slowed down after we all watched Derrick Rose and Brandon Roy’s knees fall apart. I give their professional league a lot more credit for leadership from the top down, but so many more of these situations happen for small town kids listening to small town doctors who go to the same church as the coach.

I’m all for physical exertion, and to this day I’m a long distance hiker and kayaker for my personal exercise, but I wouldn’t want my kids following me down river, or god forbid taking up rock climbing or any of the other dumb shit I did when I was young and invincible. Some sports should be much more elective/extracurricular and restricted until brains are fully formed, or as you’ve stated had the contact lowered. It shouldn’t be pricy stadiums devoted to watching midwestern teenagers the size of refrigerators slam into each other at full speed. We shouldn’t be glorifying kids who cut their finger off to play in the playoffs because the recovery for a broken bone was too long, or putting them in situations where those kind of choices are even an option.

The concussions in football was the turning point for me on a lot of these views, but I’m a little bit ready for some of these cultures to change, even if they’re not in a hurry to change themselves. I’m sure football/hockey/etc will be way more boring with less contact, but to a large extent it is needed. All of it just starts to feel disgusting when you take two steps back from nostalgia and passion for these respective sports, especially if your kid is good enough to make AAU leagues and start summoning the beast that is repetitive stress for-profit.