Play on : the new science of elite performance at any age

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Title:

Play on : the new science of elite performance at any age

Author:

Bercovici, Jeff, author.

ISBN:

9780544809987

Physical Description:

xxv, 260 pages ; 24 cm

Subject Term:

Physical fitness for older people.

Sports for older people.

Exercise for older people.

Aging -- Physiological aspects.

Sports sciences.

Summary:

"A lively, deeply reported tour of the latest in fitness science and technology, revealing the strategies of elite and amateur athletes as they stay fit longer than ever before. Age and sports, try talking about one without the other. At their core, sports are about challenging our physical limits. Age is the final and most stubborn of those limits. It's through sports and exercise that many of us first experience the reality of aging. Yet as the American populace ages, our notions about the place of sports and fitness in our lives keep getting more ambitious. In every major American sports league, the number of players over 35 has grown prodigiously over the last couple of decades. Tom Brady, Meb Keflezighi, Kerri Walsh Jennings, Kobe Bryant, David Ortiz, Roger Federer, Kelly Slater--a new breed of top professionals and Olympians are overturning notions about how long a sporting career can last. They're showing an athlete's performance peak is "not a point but a plateau." It's no accident that all of this is happening now. Sports science has advanced light years in its understanding of how athletes age, and surgical and medical techniques have come even farther. A glimpse over the horizon shows technologies that promise not just to slow aging, but reverse it entirely and what that means for weekend warriors. From balance boards to ice tubs to beet-and-cherry cocktails, here are the secrets to extending your peak years like never before."--

"A lively, thoroughly researched tour of the latest in fitness science and technology, and the strategies of elite and amateur athletes who are performing at peak levels for decades longer than before"--

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Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Stillwater Public Library	613.70446 BER	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

A lively, deeply reported tour of the science and strategies helping athletes like Tom Brady, Serena Williams, Carli Lloyd, and LeBron James redefine the notion of "peak age."

Season after season, today's sports superstars seem to defy the limits of physical aging that inevitably sideline their competitors. How much of the difference is genetic destiny and how much can be attributed to better training, medicine and technology? Is athletic longevity a skill that can be taught, or a mental discipline that can be mastered? Can career-ending injuries be predicted and avoided?

Journalist Jeff Bercovici spent extensive time with professional and Olympic athletes, coaches and doctors to find the answers to these questions. His quest led him to training camps, tournaments, hospitals, anti-aging clinics and Silicon Valley startups, where he tried out cutting-edge treatments and technologies firsthand and investigated the realities behind health fads like alkaline diets, high-intensity interval training, and cryotherapy. Through fascinating profiles and first-person anecdotes, Bercovici illuminates the science and strategies extending the careers of elite older athletes, uncovers the latest advances in fields from nutrition to brain science to virtual reality, and offers empowering insights about how the rest of us can find peak performance at any age.

Author Notes

JEFF BERCOVICI is currently the San Francisco bureau chief for Inc ., covering technology and entrepreneurship, and a former senior editor and writer at Forbes. He has been a finalist for the 2013 Mirror Award and has also written for Playboy, GQ, Details, Glamour, and the New York Times.

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Thanks to today's cutting-edge training, professional athletes can continue to improve with age, argues Bercovici in this energetic romp through sports gerontology. The San Francisco bureau chief for Inc. surveys trends in sports medicine and training techniques that are letting NFL quarterbacks like Tom Brady, as well as NHL and NBA stars, soccer and tennis players, runners and even gymnasts persist at championship caliber into their late 30s and even 40s. He spotlights intriguing developments: more restful training programs tailored to individual genetic profiles; pressure bands that build muscle without weight lifting by restricting blood flow; kinesthesiology, the study that teaches players to avoid injury by moving more gracefully; healing by immersions in infrared waves or by drinking red wine; new surgical methods that let athletes get joints rebuilt "like the rest of us get our teeth cleaned." Bercovici smartly separates science from quackery-avoiding GMO foods won't help, he argues, but taking creatine will-while offering colorful reportage on sports trainers, physiologists, and gurus, and using his own achy frame to road test their wares, from -286 °F cryotherapy chamber to an exercise/torture device called the Versaclimber. There are no miracles here (except, maybe, transfusing blood from a younger person to an older one), but Bercovici offers stimulating information and practical insights to health-minded readers. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Review

An exploration of the "elite athleteswho continue to perform and compete at the very highest levels long after the age most of their peers have faded away."It's a strange thing that many of the letter jacket-clad kids you went to high school with dissolve into uncomfortable lumps by the time the 25th reunion comes around. "There's evidence," writes technology and business journalist Bercovici, "that the later an individual matures, the more likely he or she is to achieve athletic greatness." Peaking after 20 is thus not a bad thing at all, particularly with life spans extending as far as they do now. In Plimpton-esque moments, Bercovici tackles various aspects of the fitness-for-elders movement, including an encounter with a VersaClimber machine that threatened to do him in: "After another 30 seconds, I'm not thinking anything because all the glycogen in my body is rushing to my muscles to replace my zonked-out stores of adenosine triphosphate, leaving none left over to power my frontal cortex." The author examines the changes that occur in the older body, which, perhaps amazingly, can be reversed to some extent with exercise so that the production of hormones and circulation of proteins in the bloodstream in a 60-year-old master athlete is more similar to those of a 30-year-old than to those of a sedentary 60-year-old. Along the way, Bercovici considers various exercise regimes and their effects, the technology of exercise and of sports medicine, and ways of hacking the diet for increased performance, such as eating all the chicken gristle, cartilage, and bone that you can stomach: "Have you ever seen a hyena with bad knees?" It's a good question, if perhaps a little unappealing to the food-squeamish.A solid work of sports journalism and encouraging reading for jocks who are late to the game but committed to the win all the same. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Introduction	p. ix
1 Racing Against Time	p. 1
The Physiology of the Aging Athlete
2 Fresh Is the New Fit	p. 24
A Better Way to Think About Conditioning
3 Wrestling with Giants	p. 51
The Surprising Benefits of Cross-Training
4 Trick the Mind, Train the Body	p. 67
How Technology Makes Workouts Smarter
5 Ferraris and Toyotas	p. 88
The Science of Efficient, Injury-Free Movement
6 The Destiny in Your Cells	p. 114
What Genes Have to Say About Finishing Strong
7 Consistency Is a Talent	p. 128
The Psychology of Athletes Who Get Better with Age
8 Slow Is Fast	p. 152
Strategy, Complexity, and the Advantages of Experience
9 Careful What You Swallow	p. 173
The Fads and the Facts of Career-Extending Nutrition
10 The Workout After the Workout	p. 199
Why Older Athletes Are Behind, the Recovery Revolution
11 Repair, Replace, Rejuvenate	p. 213
Sports Surgery and the Outer Limits of Human Longevity
Epilogue	p. 236
Acknowledgments	p. 243
A Note On Sources	p. 247
Index	p. 249

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Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Kirkus Review

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