Just watched some basketball and parkour videos and I was wondering how their bodies can handle it
In: Biology
They don’t! There are entire professions built around rehabilitation from sports injuries, and pre/post game treatments for it.
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They really can’t, that’s why people stop being top athletes by their 30s because the older you get the longer it takes for your body to heal especially joints tendons and what not
Our bodies adapt to how we use them. They are resilient and amazing.
Joints are made up of bone, cartilage, and muscle. As long as we get used to new activities slowly and build up over time, bones get stronger, cartilage gets more resilient to load, and muscles get stronger. All of these protect us.
Joints wear over time due to age; this is normal. Being strong protects us from the negative effects of this.
Few pro athletes stay in the game til their thirties. For most their career, they still have growing bodies. Furthermore, they take vitamins, medications and know how to train to keep their bodies in peak form but even then, it doesn’t last forever.
The average career length of professional athletes are shockingly short. Sure there are exemptions to the rule, but very few manage to stay on top for more than a couple of years and what nobody sees are the pain they have to endure the rest of their lives.
Many have the best training, nutrition, sports medicine docs, PEDs, and they’re still destroyed when they retire.
Surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, steroids.
Most people think of gigantic muscular guys like Barry Bonds when they think of steroids, but tons of athletes use it not necessarily to get huge and gain muscle, but rather to speed up their body’s recovery.
An orthopedic surgeon doctor recently told me that people who are able to remain athletic in late-life aren’t that way because they’ve just maintained healthy habits, it’s because “they won the genetic lottery”. In other words, everyone can abuse their bodies while they’re young, but only some people’s bodies are resilient enough to keep working well afterwards.
A lot of these things. They definitely suffer deterioration and injury. And whereas you or I might tweak a knee and lay up for a week or three, they play through the pain or are given a ton of pain medication to play. (In addition to top-of-the line therapies, no doubt. Sports medicine has some miracles when it comes to a million-dollar athlete that simply aren’t considered when Regular Joe tears a meniscus. But pushing your body through pain might still a part of it, whether it’s accelerating through rehab or putting off the surgery to finish the season.)
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