The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving
The 1984 World Chess Championship was called off after five months and 48 games because defending champion Anatoly Karpov had lost 22 pounds. "He looked like death," grandmaster and commentator Maurice Ashley recalls.
In 2004, winner Rustam Kasimdzhanov walked away from the six-game world championship having lost 17 pounds. In October 2018, Polar, a U.S.-based company that tracks heart rates, 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, three times what an average person consumes in a day.
"Grandmasters sustain elevated blood pressure for hours in the range found in competitive marathon runners," Sapolsky says.
The effect can be off-putting to the players themselves, even if it's expected. Caruana, whose base weight is 135 pounds, drops to 120 to 125 pounds. "Sometimes I've weighed myself after tournaments and I've seen the scale drop below 120," he says, "and that's when I get mildly scared."
The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving
The 1984 World Chess Championship was called off after five months and 48 games because defending champion Anatoly Karpov had lost 22 pounds. "He looked like death," grandmaster ...[text shortened]... nts and I've seen the scale drop below 120," he says, "and that's when I get mildly scared."
The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving
The 1984 World Chess Championship was called off after five months and 48 games because defending champion Anatoly Karpov had lost 22 pounds. "He looked like death," grandmaster ...[text shortened]... nts and I've seen the scale drop below 120," he says, "and that's when I get mildly scared."
I read this about the K-K matches in Moscow years in ago. Stress and intense concentration burn a lot of calories, but it's not a healthy way to lose weight. IMHO a combination of smart food choices, exercise, and fairly intense study and/or play for 1-2 hrs. a day would be a better path to follow.
Losing Weight Through Chess
11 Feb '22 23:411 edit
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