Play On: The New Science of Elite Performance at Any Age

by Jeff Bercovici

Overview

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, antiaging clinics, and Silicon Valley startups, where he tried 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.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781328595966
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/07/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	451,008
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

JEFF BERCOVICI is a journalist, sports fan, and athlete, very much in that order. He is currently the San Francisco bureau chief for Inc., covering tech and entrepreneurship, and a former senior editor and writer at Forbes, where he reported from the Green Bay Packers’ training camp. He has also written for Playboy, GQ, Details, Glamour, and the New York Times.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

1 Racing Against Time 1

The Physiology of the Aging Athlete

2 Fresh Is the New Fit 24

A Better Way to Think About Conditioning

3 Wrestling with Giants 51

The Surprising Benefits of Cross-Training

4 Trick the Mind, Train the Body 67

How Technology Makes Workouts Smarter

5 Ferraris and Toyotas 88

The Science of Efficient, Injury-Free Movement

6 The Destiny in Your Cells 114

What Genes Have to Say About Finishing Strong

7 Consistency Is a Talent 128

The Psychology of Athletes Who Get Better with Age

8 Slow Is Fast 152

Strategy, Complexity, and the Advantages of Experience

9 Careful What You Swallow 173

The Fads and the Facts of Career-Extending Nutrition

10 The Workout After the Workout 199

Why Older Athletes Are Behind, the Recovery Revolution

11 Repair, Replace, Rejuvenate 213

Sports Surgery and the Outer Limits of Human Longevity

Epilogue 236

Acknowledgments 243

A Note On Sources 247

Index 249

Editorial Reviews

03/12/2018
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)

Publishers Weekly

When it comes to aging, athletes are like canaries in the coal mine—they feel its effects decades before the rest of us. In Play On, Jeff Bercovici gives us a fascinating look at how older elite athletes use science, strategy, and wisdom to keep up with (and often beat) the youngsters. Playing keeps us young, and this is must read for anyone who believes age is no reason to quit.” –Bill Gifford, New York Times bestselling author of Spring Chicken and Ledyard "As an athlete who is competing past my so-called “prime,” Play On goes to the heart of some of the biggest questions around longevity and performance that I’ve been pondering these past few years. It’s an utterly fascinating and entertaining blend of science and storytelling that anyone interested in staying fit as they age, should read. (And, if you're like me, underline obsessively)." –Shalane Flanagan, four-time Olympian, winner of the 2017 New York City Marathon, and NY Times best-selling author of Run Fast. Eat Slow “From the surprising science of why Olympic cyclists try to think like kids in competition to the strategy behind Carli Lloyd's rise from benchwarmer to soccer phenom, Play On illuminates a dimension of high-performance sports seldom seen on primetime. Told through an engaging cast of characters, Bercovici's book is a must-read not only for the athlete trying to gain an edge, but for the rest of us interested in living longer, healthier lives. In richly-engaging prose, the mysteries of long and strong careers of today's sports stars are revealed — along with fascinating lessons that could change how all of us view health and fitness.” –Mary Pilon, best-selling author of The Kevin Show and The Monopolists "[An] energetic romp through sports gerontology . . . Bercovici smartly separates science from quackery . . .while offering colorful reportage . . . [and] stimulating information and practical insights to health-minded readers."–Publishers Weekly "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."–Kirkus Reviews —

From the Publisher

2018-03-05
An exploration of the "elite athletes…who 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.

Kirkus Reviews