Cold therapy, orange spectacles, special nutrition, brain training, multiple naps, piano lessons – global football stars are using innovative methods to make themselves quicker, fitter, and pursue a longer professional career
BIOHACKED PRO FOOTBALLERS
THE ULTIMATE KICK Words: Stefan Wagner Illustration: Stuart Patience
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ccording to metrics, Poland and Bayern Munich striker Robert Lewandowski is the best footballer on the planet. Using the same criteria, Cristiano Ronaldo is the world's secondbest, which, in view of the Portugal and Juventus player’s consistently stellar performances, he would surely consider debatable. Zlatan Ibrahimović, meanwhile, is the saviour of the Swedish national team and also mixes things up in Italy's Serie A for AC Milan. Lewandowski's age is 32, Ronaldo is 36, and Ibrahimović 39. So, what is going on in the world of football? Are good players getting older? Are older players just getting better? Is it all just a coincidence? Or is this the start of a trend that will change football for ever? It almost certainly isn’t all just a coincidence. Footballers – even those at the very pinnacle of the game – will, in future, enjoy careers that last much longer than in the past. And this very definitely has something to do with one word we hear increasingly often: biohacking. Broadly speaking, biohacking covers anything people do to optimise their health, performance, quality of life, and life expectancy. They sweat in infrared saunas, they meditate, they measure their heart-rate variations and the length of their deep sleep. They pop nutritional supplement pills by the dozen, and some 40
even book mysterious self-discovery retreats in the Amazon Delta. Celebrity biohackers on this fast-growing global circuit include Americans Dave Asprey, Ben Greenfield and Tim Ferriss. Andreas Breitfeld is the best-known biohacker in Germany. In his Munich lab, Breitfeld makes some of the most exciting gadgets and tools accessible to the layman – from a hyperbaric oxygen chamber and headband that measures brainwaves while you meditate, to redlight therapy panels (they help the body’s cells heal) and an inhalation device for exclusion-zone water (structured H2O in our cells that, advocates argue, optimises energy delivery). Now, the success of these biohacking stars justifies their means: the first professional footballer biohackers have emerged. Alongside Lewandowski, Ronaldo and Ibrahimović, Norway and Borussia Dortmund striker Erling Haaland, 20, and Germany and Bayern Munich midfielder Serge Gnabry, 25, are the most prominent proponents of newfangled methods for self-improvement. In Gnabry’s case, his agent Hannes Winzer is somewhat of an influence. The co-founder of ROOF, one of the world’s top-five
Robert Lewandowski Dessert comes first Anna Lewandowska – a medal-winning karate expert, fitness trainer, and the wife of Polish striker Robert Lewandowski – has turned her husband’s diet upside down: no cow’s milk, no wheat, and almost no sugar. “And as it aids digestion, I eat the pudding first, then the starter, then the main course,” the winner of the 2020 Best FIFA Men’s Player award explains. First the cake, then the soup? “Yes, because you digest carbohydrates quicker than protein.” What can an amateur learn from Robert Lewandowski? Andreas Breitfeld: “Cake before soup? There could be something to it, providing two other conditions are met. First, you burn calories like a world-class athlete. Secondly, you’ve just been training, because that’s when the glycogen stores in your liver and muscles are empty. They’ll soak up any sort of carbohydrate, even short-chain ones like sugar, so you could even wolf down some junk dessert, too. After that, you can happily eat high-grade protein and good fat.” THE RED BULLETIN
