Just watched some basketball and parkour videos and I was wondering how their bodies can handle it
In: Biology
They don’t. And they often suffer later in life. That’s the toll of professional sports.
Gymnasts and ballet dancers often end up with severe problems, sometimes crippled, because of it. They can literally give themselves joint hypermobility syndrome (which is usually genetic but can also occur through deterioration of the joints from, mostly, professional sports). That can put you in a wheelchair. You might still be able to put your leg behind your head, but your knee won’t support your weight without extreme chronic pain. My ex- suffered with it (3rd Dan karate black-belt, registered disabled).
Athletes rarely are athletes later in life for a reason, not just that they can’t compete on the same level but they often have severe repercussions of their professional careers. Footballers with knees that never work properly again, ballet dancers unable to walk, rugby players with severe head trauma, weightlifters with terrible back problems, etc. Youth soccer (football) players have just had laws introduced to stop them heading balls as a lifetime of doing that can give you severe brain damage, same as American footballers have suffered similar problems with body impacts.
Even just runners are destroying their knees. At the top levels they are choosing to sacrifice their long term health for short term extreme gain, and they know that. The successes will make enough money to pay for expensive treatments, and many will do it for the love of their sport, but it’s often at a cost in their later years. Health insurance is almost compulsory in those careers and is seen as a huge necessity.
They can’t stop it, they can only manage it, and they won’t become professional without knowing the risk of their future lives, even if they never suffer a direct debilitating injury in an incident (which is also far more likely for an athlete, e.g. a runner to break an ankle, etc.).
There will come a time where they will probably wish they hadn’t done it, and their consolation will be the money and lifestyle that it’s given them, but for every professional athlete living a celebrity life, there are thousands of “ex-professional” sports people who can never play the sport again and suffer in their daily lives for their earlier career.
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