Take Rodger Federer for example. He was into 40s still playing tennis at the top level. Tennis in particular seems absolutely brutal to body. Not only does it require you to hit the ball million times a day over and over again the same movement.
But it requires extremely fast change of speed and direction of your movement. I mean chasing the ball to the left and sliding or sliding to the left and suddenly realizing the ball is going to the right, aborting the slide and sliding to the right.
How do athletes like these keep their ankles, knees and hips healthy. I’m 24 and feel like my knees were done almost 5 years ago.
I wanna know what they do, how do they excercise and what drugs and shots they take.
In: Biology
They stay strong and healthy BY being athletes. Being an athlete in a sport which is hard on your body does not degrade your body, it is actually the opposite.
Take powerlifters for example: people 50+ years old who have been lifting weights for most of their life are very strong and healthy, Mike Burch, for example, is 72 years old and deadlifts over 500lbs.
Studies have shown that people who lift weights have bone density up to 10x the average.
A few different factors.
1 – luck.
2 – they tend to be less disposed to injuries over others through genetics.
3 – a lot of unseen work in the gym pre-habbing & recovering.
When it’s your full-time job you can dedicate a lot of time to getting the right nutrition and exercising/training.
Apart from that, most of them can’t outright take steroids or HGH or that sort of thing but there are definitely guys taking all kinds of supplements. Creatine, B vitamins, etc.
But if you’re looking for some sort of magic “make you fit” drug, there isn’t one. Even if you take full on steroids you’ll still need to lift and eat protein/calories to build muscle mass, you’ll just do it faster.
Roger Federer is a professional Tennis athlete. One of the best to ever do it. When he goes to work, he goes to play or study tennis. Now you can train 10 hours a day every day, so he hired a massage therapist and physio to monitor his body’s durability and maintain it.
When he needs to eat, he will have a nutritionist and/or private chef preparing all the correct food and snacks needed to fuel a high level tennis athlete.
He probably has PA of some sort or management rhatchandle his very busy schedule and arrange all his transport, accommodation and food.
In essence, all he does is focus on tennis and doing it for as long as possible. He has time in his day to have preventative massage and physiotherapy to prevent injuries and maintain a high level of performance.
Unless you can dedicate your entire life to the sport or physical exercise, you won’t achieve the same results.
Being a healthy and fit adult takes alot of work and discipline if your work life allows you the time to focus on it
1. Genetics. These guys are, quite literally, built differently. They are in the top percentile of strength, explosiveness, recovery, speed, flexibility, etc.
2. They work their ass at it. Federer probably averages 6-8 hours of various training a day. This is his whole job and he has an insane work ethic. Every athlete and sport has their own customized routine but they work on muscle strength and pliability, which drastically help with avoiding injuries. They also do a lot of recovery work post-exercises (stretching, rolling, ice, etc.)
3. Supplements. Every athlete in the world is on a supplement routine, almost always involving some kind of hormone or steroid. Nutritionists and athletes are basically always in an arms race about using supplements that either aren’t classified as a PED (yet) or won’t show up on a PED test.
There’s a misconception that only athletes that are super muscly and bulked up use steroids, when the truth is what steroids really do is help your muscles recover much faster. If you want to put on muscle, you can use this increased recovery time to work out twice as hard, or you can use the recovery benefits to get better from minor muscle injuries that would perhaps sideline you with a normal biological recovery timeline. This is another way to avoid injury that would cause you to not be able to compete.
Drugs and genetics.
He’s just a much better human than you. More handsome, stronger, fitter. You’re trash, he’s gold. You’re a genetic peasant, he’s genetic royalty.
Also because he is those things, he can afford to have doctors inject him with growth hormone, blood platelet injections and various anabolic steroids.
In addition to what others have said, there’s a lot of survivorship bias here. For every top athlete who has stayed healthy for a long time, there’s probably thousands of unknown athletes whose careers were cut short due to injury.
>But it requires extremely fast change of speed and direction of your movement.
This is true, and those requirements will demand a certain toll on the body.
But these same requirements also reward athletes who are the right build to do these tasks. If you asked asked Shaquille O’Neal or Terunofuji to play tennis, they might well accumulate injuries quickly as they were forced to change direction side-to-side rapidly.
Instead, you get lighter athletes with strong legs who can do these motions quickly and efficiently; this is both an advantage in the sport in that you can respond quicker and return more balls, and an advantage to longevity because they are putting less stress on their joints.
And some outliers may be eliminated before you “count” them – a kind of survivorship bias. Like, maybe the ideal tennis player is 6’11 – but those players never rise to stardom because they get injured young and don’t succeed on a broader stage.
Good diet, good excersize, good genetics, and for all but those in the public spotlight fairly low stress.
weight lifting, conditioning and stretching to prevent injuries, not body building or ego lifting.
Perfect diet and sleeping habits.
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