Professional athletes view their bodies differently to the rest of us. They see them more like we might see our car or some other complex piece of machinery that we are especially fond of. They monitor different areas of performance to a degree of precision that even the most exacting engineer would approve of. They take the utmost care to ensure that every single variable is calculated, calibrated and fine-tuned for maximum performance.
But this logic should not be merely the province of professional athletes. We are, all of us, reliant on our physical well-being. The effects of how we treat that biological machinery may be slower to show themselves than the short-term cut and thrust of competitive sport suggests.
But the effects are the same. Diet and exercise may be key elements in determining the margin and shaping the odds that divide Andy Murray’s and Novak Djokovic’s career winnings in professional tennis, but they are every bit as critical to our more general level of health and well-being.
The difference between those obsessively competitive professionals and the rest of us is that they pay attention to their bodies and their diet in a way that the rest of us can all-too easily fail to match. However, the lesson from those tennis pros should not go unreported. Eating well and living healthily is what winners do. The alternative is for losers.
