Dr. Bob Arnot's Guide to Turning Back the Clock by Dr. Bob Arnot

Author:Dr. Bob Arnot [ARNOT, ROBERT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316092241
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2009-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

How to Recover Fast

WHEN JIMMY CONNORS PLAYED AT THE U.S. OPEN IN 1991, FANS STARED wide-eyed each time he lunged for the net, as if they were watching a fossilized dinosaur come to life. Connors amazed his fans. More often than not he made volley at net and the mad sprint back to the baseline for the ensuing lob. His performance wasn’t any mystery to physiologists who study aging. Of course you can run and sprint and hit at thirty-nine just like the kids. What you can’t do is recover quickly. The real experts waited for the big match against Jim Courier to see if Connors would hold up. He didn’t. Courier murdered him. If he had had two days more to recover, would Connors have done better? “Let’s put it this way,” says Dr. William McMaster, attending physician to the U.S. swim team and a clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of California, Irvine, “it’s no accident that Connors is a spokesperson for Nuprin. That’s the kind of thing we see all the time. He has the desire. But he simply has a tough time competing against the young guys. He can’t repeat it day after day. He goes pretty far and then when it gets to the end, he drops out. The younger guys who are winning are up for the next round and they’re not nearly as sore as Jimmy.

“The best way to determine how aging has affected athletes is recovery time. Swimmers train twice a day. At twenty years old they recover in six hours. At forty they take two days to recover!” The ugly fact is this: the speed of recovery can slow to a crawl as you age. It is the single most vexing problem of the aging athlete and the one that accounts for the biggest erosion of performance. “Bouncing back day after day without breaking down and withstanding the wear and tear of training is the most important problem any athlete over thirty faces,” says Dr. John Wilkinson of the University of Wyoming in Laramie.

Conventional Wisdom:

Just do it.

New Paradigm:

The greatest advances in speed, endurance, and fitness come only when you learn how to recover.

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