Knight Sweats

“At 5-foot-6, Caruana has a lean frame, his legs angular and toned. He also has a packed schedule for the day: a 5-mile run, an hour of tennis, half an hour of basketball and at least an hour of swimming.” What’s he getting in shape for? A chess tournament. It turns out that competitive chess is a physical challenge and burns a hell of a lot of calories. A company “monitored chess players during a tournament and found that 21-year-old Russian grandmaster Mikhail Antipov had burned 560 calories in two hours of sitting and playing chess — or roughly what Roger Federer would burn in an hour of singles tennis. Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament … ‘Grandmasters sustain elevated blood pressure for hours in the range found in competitive marathon runners.'” ESPN: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving. (I lose a couple pounds every time I write an edition of NextDraft, but I always assumed that was because the news so often makes me throw up.)

Copied to Clipboard