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
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.
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