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
>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.
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