AT OPEN Us Open for this year, when Venus Williams, 45 -year -old, rose to the stadium to play in the spouses, he was alongside his teammate even when Williams won gold in the individual in the Sydney Olympics.
Given that the peak performance era of the tennis player is traditional in the mid -twenties of the last century, it was an unusual achievement to compete in a specialty, but Williams’s exceptional extension of her sporting life is increasingly common.
Basketball star Libon James made history this year by being the first player in the American Professional League, who played in the league from the teenager to his forties, while Australian basketball player Lauren Jackson challenged the difficulties by competing in her fifth Olympic, 43 years old.
The 50 -year -old gymnast It aims to its ninth OlympicsAnd in Japan, Kazuiuchi Miura The records were broken by continuing to play elite football – at the age of 58.
These achievements are amazing because in an era most ordinary humans began to feel the effects of decreased muscle mass, reaction times, perception and endurance, these elite athletes still perform unusual physical exploits that put incredible pressure and tension on their bodies in aging. Moreover, they do this in a mathematical environment that has continued to push the limits of what the non -augmented body can achieve, beyond belief, or even safe, just a few decades ago.
So what is it required to be able to continue jumping around a stadium or imposing fees on a field in an era called many other elite athletes per day, and when most non -athletes are happy if they do not slip into the bathroom?
The length of the extraordinary life of these athletes is due to a mixture of genetics, environment and lifestyle, according to a associate professor Christina IkegrinPhysiotherapist and researcher at Monash University in Melbourne.
The sisters of Williams, for example, have no doubt that they have great genes, but they have benefited from the most of them. “The thing around Venus and Sirina is that they are training at a very high level since his childhood, so they started at the level of a very high base of fitness and strength,” says Eaggren. My sisters retired at the age of forty after his decades’ excellent career, but her older sister Venus is still strong, becoming the oldest competitor who plays an individual in the United States Open this year.
“What distinguishes some athletes who are talking about is that they are very smart in their approach to healthy aging as athlete,” says Grand Slam.
One of the normal processes of aging is sarcopinia, or the loss of gradual muscle mass. This occurs as a result of changes in hormones, in activity levels, in nutrition and in the structure of the muscles themselves. But this is not necessarily inevitable, and Hurdi says there is an increasing focus on force training for older athletes, specifically to combat this decline. He says: “If you compare it to a person who does not train in exchange for training, it is clear that increasing muscle mass will not only grant increased strength and function, but will compensate for loads that pass through cartilage, bones and even nerve structures.”
Like most things related to age, it is a state of “using or losing it,” says Hurd. The older athletes can continue to do what they do because they do not stop and leave themselves back.
Athletes who compete for decades also adapt to their changing bodies. They may be more selective about the competitions they enter, or play a different position in this field that exposes them to less harm or requires less physically. “If you look at it like football in the Australian rules, you may be a truly dynamic midfielder, and then when they become older, they will put themselves in the front line where there is the lowest round,” says Hurdi.
But the older athletes do not oppress. Despite their carefully preserved strength, lightness, body condition and skills, they inevitably face a greater risk of infection as they age, and like us, these injuries take longer to recover. Professor says that part of the elite level is longer to allow the appropriate healing of normal injury and training. Jeremia LarsProfessor of exercise science at Murdoch University in Perth.
“A lot of this age in sport is that people are able to give the time to recover,” says Bever. “The more time you can heal it, the greater the time you do not wander in doing other things, the more likely to adapt your body to your body.” For example, Cristiano Ronaldo, a football star, who is still playing in 40 years, specifically recovery sessions as a lifetime key and achievement, According to the health of men.
While the older athletes in the elite do all the things that the rest of us heard regularly from our doctors and physics – eating well, and remains active – they pay a price to take this health advice to the extreme.
“The paradox about this is that there are a number of things that come with long -size training can be somewhat harmful,” says Bever. Elite athletes, especially those who participate in endurance sports, have a much higher risk Irregular rhythms In the middle of life. There is an increase in the risk of structural muscle cases such as OsteoporosisEspecially in athletes who have suffered from knee injuries.
Despite the risks and challenges, Ekegren says, it is important to see the elderly still excel in the sporting field, and inspire us to make more effort to maintain our physical activity.
“We have a stigma in society that we cannot achieve as much as we are old,” she says. “But I think this is really incorrect, and I think it is all really about the amount you do in your daily life.”