Hyper Fit

• • • advances in performance technology are fundamentally changing how the game’s best players train and recover. Even without an unlimited budget, there are lessons for the rest of us.

- Matthew Rudy

Phil Mickelson’s naked, middle-age calves probably aren’t the bellwether of a new era in golf, but they make for a pretty good avatar. Mickelson, now 49, almost broke Twitter in February when he took advantage of the PGA Tour’s relaxed new rule allowing shorts during practice rounds. Flashing the sculpted calves he built with an ambitious home-gym routine, Mickelson fully embraced his unlikely new role as the poster boy for golfers as athletes. But beyond all the chuckles, tongue-in-cheek workout videos and memes, Mickelson’s late-career quest to hold onto his trademark power game is one more piece of evidence that seems to prove what looks like an unassailable truth.

In sports, speed wins—and the business of getting more of it (or, like Mickelson, trying to keep it) is big business.

Whether you’re a 44-time PGA Tour winner, aspiring pro or weekend player, the quest for speed comes in two components: training and recovery. Sam Snead might have produced the game’s best golf physique in the 1950s by hiking up and down the hills on his Virginia farm, but athletes now have the information and technology to train (and eat) like space-age Olympians. Whereas Snead-era players were mostly limited to hitting the showers after a day of work, the modern player can use everything from a $30 wrist dongle to a $24,000 home hyperbaric chamber to optimise rest and recovery to avoid injuries and stay competitive deeper into a lucrative career.