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.

This unique text focuses exclusively on the ever-growing population of aging and masters athletes, both professional and amateur, presenting both operative and nonoperative management strategies for the range of sports-related injuries. The book is thematically divided into three sections. Part I describes the science of musculoskeletal aging and the benefits of remaining active as we age, including proper nutrition, supplements and medical therapies and adjuvants. Injuries common to the masters athlete are presented in part II, from the upper and lower extremities to the hips and spine, with special considerations for these injuries and treatments noted. Recommendations for how to thrive as a masters athlete comprise the final section, including return to sport, injury prevention and exercise as medicine. An ideal resource for clinicians who treat active adults who won't slow down, Masterful Care of the Aging Athlete is a compilation of clinical, technical and research approaches aimed at keeping active people moving, returning them to sport rapidly and durably and protecting them from a sedentary lifestyle.

Sports Nutrition, which focuses on the importance of proper nutritional preparation for athletes, provides a practical supplement to Nutrition in Sport. It provides an essential reference on all aspects of sports nutrition for the team coach, athletic trainer, physical therapist and allied health-related professional working with athletes and sports teams, and the knowledgeable athlete.

Regular physical activity is proven to help prevent and treat noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) such as heart disease stroke diabetes and breast and colon cancer. It also helps to prevent hypertension overweight and obesity and can improve mental health quality of life and well-being. In addition to the multiple health benefits of physical activity societies that are more active can generate additional returns on investment including a reduced use of fossil fuels cleaner air and less congested safer roads. These outcomes are interconnected with achieving the shared goals political priorities and ambition of the Sustainable Development Agenda 2030. The new WHO global action plan to promote physical activity responds to the requests by countries for updated guidance and a framework of effective and feasible policy actions to increase physical activity at all levels. It also responds to requests for global leadership and stronger regional and national coordination and the need for a whole-of-society response to achieve a paradigm shift in both supporting and valuing all people being regularly active according to ability and across the life course. The action plan was developed through a worldwide consultation process involving governments and key stakeholders across multiple sectors including health sports transport urban design civil society academia and the private sector.

"This text is written explicitly for readers with an interest in the aging process and the effects that exercise has on the quality of life and various diseases and maladies of the aging population. It is expected that the readers using this book as a course textbook or as auxiliary reading for a course, will have taken at least an introductory course in human physiology. The text refers throughout to the three groups in the aging and health spectrum, average aging individuals, the frail elderly and Masters Athletes"--

"This book discusses the physical benefits of exercise and physical activity when aging without major diseases, making this book unique in the sense of its primary prevention focus"--

What can we learn from former top athletes that is especially relevant for our health and lifestyles? Even though most athletes are essentially performance minded rather than maintenance and wellness minded, it's still a compelling revelation why 90 percent of them don't continue a program to try and retain some of their skills and conditioning. Learning from the 10 percent who do stay fit and healthy is where we can all benefit. The Aging Athlete chronicles the fitness and mindset of a group of retired and semi-retired athletes, of what's worked for them over the years since they stopped competing or serving in the armed forces. Some of the top athletes include Billy Mills - 1964 10,000m race gold medalist once considered the most famous living Native American; Ken Shamrock - former UFC heavyweight champion who was named the World's Most Dangerous Man; Sam "Bam" Cunningham who starred in the famous 1970 Civil Rights Football Game; and Allen Winder - a blue-eyed basketball player who was called upon by Meadowlark Lemon to break the color barrier ... in reverse. WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS BOOK1. Why? Why all of the attention on athletics and aging athletes? What might it be like to be the caregiver/spouse of a 28-year-old athlete who was until recently one of the most physically powerful athletes on the planet? How old is an aging athlete? Hockey great Bobby Orr was injured, and partially hobbled, at the end of his first year as a pro--age 18. His kids have never participated in competitive skating or hockey. Why did kids used to play different sports year round, all seasons, and today it's common for young people to only take up one sport and train for it the entire year?2. Why isn't wellness emphasized more for all and especially for performance oriented athletes? What are the payoffs of recreation vs. performance oriented sports?3. Why don't we learn to coach ourselves? Why do high numbers of performance athletes (inc. ex military and ex ballet performers) stop maintaining fitness soon after leaving their performance time?4. The importance of downtime.5. How to pursue self-mastery.