We are the home of the brave, the land of the free…and we’re more afraid than ever.

Bruises and scrapes are no longer an acceptable part of life. They are something to be avoided at all costs. We are paralyzed by fear-more now than ever in our history.

We often hear warnings: You might get hurt playing football. You’ll wreck your knees playing basketball. Lifting weights will stunt your growth. Gymnastics wrecks your body. Running will destroy your joints. You could drown if you swim, get kidnapped playing at the park, or get hit by a car riding your bike. Tag, perhaps the oldest game in the world, even played by animals, has been outlawed in schools across the country for fear that children may get injured.

Let’s look at numbers and triage our risk. What is the most dangerous thing you can do? Surely, we’ll want to avoid it at all costs.

Published back in 2002, a comprehensive study of sports injuries in the United States gives us an overview of sports related injuries. Basketball tops the list of highest total injuries, followed by running; these sports also have the greatest number of participants.

Football has the highest injury rate per participant followed by ice hockey and soccer. Recreational swimming was one of the safest sports–safer than walking and on par with bowling. Those gymnasts who defy death and fly through the air get injured less frequently than those skateboarding and almost half as often as runners.

It turns out that you are more likely to be injured golfing than riding your bike.

Compared to other popular forms of recreation, shooting sports (hunting, archery, paintball) have some of the lowest occurrences of injury.

Even when extreme sports such as motor sports, skydiving, bull riding and mixed martial arts are added, sports injuries are a still a drop in the bucket compared to the most dangerous thing you can do.

So what is the most dangerous thing you can do?

Nothing. That’s right, doing nothing is a more perilous, increases risk and is a much faster way to death and suffering than any and all of these sports. In the big picture, inactivity and poor nutrition makes sports injuries look like a mosquito bite.

A landmark study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention compiled the causes of death in the United States in 2000. The results were staggering. The second leading cause of death–slightly behind tobacco–was poor diet and physical inactivity. The study found that doing nothing and eating poorly led to 365,000 deaths in 2000. Nearly one out of six deaths were linked directly to diet and exercise. The associated injury and sickness statistics eclipse sports and recreation injuries.

To put the magnitude of this finding in perspective, being inactive and eating poorly kills more people every year than alcohol, infectious diseases, poisonings, motor vehicle crashes, firearms accidents, sexual behaviors, and illicit drug use combined.

What is the most dangerous thing you can do? Without a doubt, the most dangerous thing you can do is sit on your butt, drink pop, eat chips and talk about how you don’t participate in sports because you don’t want to hurt yourself.

Editor’s note:?Micah Stipech has a MA in Counseling Psychology, is a school counselor at Houghton Elementary, a Coaching Education Instructor for USA Hockey and owner of CrossFit Hakkapeliitta.