TRAIN SMARTER NOT HARDER LIKE CHRIS PAUL
Chris Paul isn’t sure he wants you to know his secrets. The way he sees it, the less anyone knows about his eating plan, the better. He’s not sure he wants to talk about the deadlift tweak that helped him end years of hamstring woes or his personal telltale sign that his body needs more water. ‘Sometimes I almost wish I didn’t tell anyone,’ Paul says. ‘I don’t need everyone to feel this way.’
But Paul understands why you would want to know. After all, the once-brittle point guard has suddenly emerged as one of the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) most reliable players, and he’s coming off a dominant season, a year that saw him lead the Phoenix Suns to within two games of the championship.
Somehow, at age 36 and after 16 gruelling years as a pro, Paul has actually become faster, stronger and more durable. Three years ago, after he had a rough season with the
Houston Rockets, some wondered whether Paul might be done. Today? ‘I probably feel better now than I did some years ago,’ he says. ‘I’m at a point now where I can’t imagine not playing.’
Not that he is the lone old-timer saying that. Yes, stars such as Zion Williamson (21 years old), Luka Dončić (22), and Rockets rookie Jalen Green
(all of 19) might lead you to believe that basketball is a young man’s game. But this season, a host of players are about to change that, representing for all men aged 35 and over.
In Miami, the Heat will hand their offence to point man Kyle Lowry, who’s 35, with sharpshooting from PJ Tucker, 36, and in Milwaukee, the Bucks are counting on steely defence from George Hill, 35. The Brooklyn Nets expect big things from big men LaMarcus Aldridge, 36, and Paul Millsap, also 36. Out west, in Los Angeles, LeBron James, 37, is hoping that a quartet of over-35 role players (Carmelo Anthony, 37; Trevor
Ariza, 36; Dwight Howard, 36; and Rajon Rondo, 35) can help him return the Lakers to glory.
A decade ago, these guys would have been labelled over-the-hill. After all, just twice in the league’s 75-year history has the NBA’s Most Valuable Player been 35 or older – Michael Jordan in 1998 and Karl Malone in 1999. But a recent wellness revolution has transformed all sports and kept marquee stars winning titles long after their ‘primes’ were over (see: Ronaldo, Cristiano; and Williams, Serena). That revolution will reach a crescendo in this NBA season, which may just be defined by its oldsters.
It helps that front offices have embraced the concept of load management, cutting player minutes to enhance on-court productivity. And NBA players, like many athletes, increasingly build their lives around wellness, taking their diets and recovery into their own hands, hiring private trainers and purchasing hi-tech recovery gear (think Normatec compression boots, which are revered around the league) to use at home. ‘They invest in all the different recovery modalities,’ says Jim Scholler, head athletic trainer for the Pistons, who has been in the league since 2008. ‘They have dedicated healthcare professionals that work with them in the off-season. And they have strong routines.’
Paul’s transformation is proof. In seven of his first 14 seasons, a Spriteguzzling, gym-rat version of Paul failed to play 70 regular season games. But over the past two years, he has turned his body into a 24/7 lifestyle, hiring a chef, a deep-tissue specialist and a biomechanics trainer. Since then, he has played 70-plus games in back-toback seasons. (He’s aiming for three straight 70-game campaigns for the first time in his career this season.) And in July 2021, he played in his first career NBA finals. Just three days after that, following a season that saw him play in 90 games, he was FaceTiming trainer Donnie Raimon to beg for a workout.
Paul no longer views his training and diet as a chore. ‘I dove deeper into it,’ he says. ‘And it became about more than just athletics. It’s a way of life.’
THE WAKE-UP CALL
The fitness awakening first began in December 2018. Paul was already midway through a disastrous season
with Houston, a campaign in which he would log a career low in points per game (15.6) while playing just 58 games. And he had just suffered the fifth hamstring strain of his career.
That led him to fly to Miami and visit DBC Fitness and Raimon. Paul wasn’t new to training, having consistently lifted under the guidance of team strength coaches. But Raimon offered him something different. He had worked with James and Dwyane Wade during the Miami Heat’s championship heyday, and DBC, which he co-owns, had developed a reputation for a detail-orientated approach to training. ‘When we start working with someone,’ Raimon says, ‘our goal is to make them the bestfunctioning human being they can be.’
And Paul’s hamstrings weren’t functioning correctly. When he attempted a deadlift, a key move for building hamstring and glute power, he started the movement by squatting down instead of pushing his bum backwards.
Once Raimon corrected that, Paul was hooked. They continued working together that off-season. By last season, Raimon was programming all of Paul’s workouts, even sending instructions to the staff at the Suns. He attended every Phoenix play-off game, taking Paul through a 15-minute warm-up. ‘It’s just attention to detail as far as weight training, the way my body moves,’ Paul says of Raimon’s approach. ‘I think my body moves a lot more efficiently than it used to.’ He adds that there’s no such thing as off-season now. Sure, he might not play basketball for two months, but he’s always training and ‘making sure my body is right’.
Paul blended his newly detailed fitness approach with a nuanced food strategy. He had spent the early part of his career downing fizzy drinks after every game. Then he served as an executive producer on The Game Changers, the Netflix doc on plant-based eating. ‘When I learned that food should be fuel for your body,’ he says, ‘that is when it changed for me.’
By year’s end, he had hired a personal chef, Aaron Clayton, and he was viewing his body as a finely tuned machine. ‘Everything that you do is an investment,’ Paul says. ‘One of the first things I tell young guys is that they should invest in a chef.
I say that because the one thing you do every day is you eat.’ Paul can’t remember the last time he had a fizzy drink; he stopped drinking them in part because he is now obsessed with quality hydration. Instead, he drinks plant-based protein shakes and smoothies from Koia (he’s an investor in the company) and regularly chugs coconut water. And when he wakes up in the morning and heads to the bathroom, he always checks the colour of his urine; deep yellow sends him straight to his fridge. ‘If I wake up [and] my urine ain’t the right colour, I go guzzle a bottle of water,’ he says. ‘You gotta know your body.’
Clayton, meanwhile, does his best to keep Paul’s diet full of flavour. He has become creative, too, delivering plant-based, gluten-free fried Oreos (‘fun’, the chef says) and a vegan, gluten-free brownie and cookie bar that several Suns players are now hooked on. ‘At first, my teammates were like, “You’re eating grass, eating that bird food”, and I laugh and it’s cool,’ Paul says. ‘But they see what I’m doing.’
Paul believes that going plantbased helped reduce whole-body inflammation, eliminating the aches he used to battle. Years ago, he would sit in the cold tub or ice his knees after every single game. He hasn’t done that in years. He’s rarely sore the day after he lifts weights. So he can train with Raimon more often – and dominate NBA up-and-comers on the court on back-to-back nights, when needed. ‘A ton of guys can be really good on Monday night and drop 35, but how good can you be on Tuesday?’ Paul says. ‘And now you gotta play on Thursday? Can you be good on Friday?’
Paul’s body has proved over the past two years that it can handle that challenge. And that leaves him unprepared for just one thing: retirement. He says that he’ll know when it’s time to go. But for now, why not relish morphing into the
NBA’s fittest player? ‘That’s where
I’m so grateful,’ he says. ‘A lot of guys who were my teammates are coaches now. I feel so blessed to still get the opportunity to play.’