Quote:
Originally Posted by friendly fred
Any NBA player using that stupid diet will see his performance suffer significantly.
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you'd be surprised at the result this athlete, Detroit Pistons center Andre Drummond, did. he was skeptical too.
this article is from the wall street journal.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/andre-d...et-11575386052
An NBA Player Wanted to Lose Weight. He Drank Beer.
Detroit Pistons center Andre Drummond embraced an unusual summer diet: one beer a day
By Ben Cohen
Updated Dec. 3, 2019 10:32 am ET
He did yoga. He experimented with intermittent fasting. He tweaked his diet and began sleeping much better. By the time Andre Drummond came back to work for this NBA season, the 6-foot-10, 279-pound center for the Detroit Pistons was proud of the work he’d put into his summer body.
There was also one more part of his vacation that he couldn’t wait to share with his teammates. And it was something they were not expecting to hear from somebody in such fantastic shape.
“I’ve never drunk this much beer in my life,” Drummond said.
The strange thing is that he was actually just doing his job.
Drummond went into the summer knowing he needed to lose weight because every NBA center needs to lose weight these days. For the largest players in the league, diets are the new orthotics. Drummond listened to his personal chef when he warned him to stop eating meat, but he still needed sustenance for his grueling workouts, which is why Drummond also heeded the advice of his personal chef when he demanded that he start drinking beer.
“Who doesn’t like having a beer as part of your diet?” he said.
There is almost no diet that NBA players haven’t tried. They are vegans. They grow their own vegetables. They eat waffles on the bench, halal kebabs in the locker room and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches everywhere in between. They drink expensive wine like water. Now they drink beer, too.
Drummond, who went to college for one year, was not in the habit of drinking a Corona or Miller Lite every day. He makes drinking beer at lunch sound like going paleo.
“It was something I had to get used to,” he said. “I wasn’t much of a beer drinker.”
The reason he
had to be on a beer diet was that Drummond entered the NBA at the worst possible time for someone of his size. The league used to discriminate against players for being too short. Now they’re disadvantaged for being too big.
There are few players bigger than Drummond, and that meant there were few players with a stronger incentive to get smaller.
But he was already in a pretty good place to begin with. When he visited the Peak Performance Project in Santa Barbara, Calif., a biomechanics laboratory, he learned that he had outlier qualities that even he didn’t know about. P3 has become a mecca for NBA players in recent years. It’s the place that discovered that James Harden and Luka Doncic have freakish deceleration systems. It also uncovered the secret to Drummond’s game.
“His movement patterns were closer to an NBA perimeter player than an NBA big,” said P3 founder Marcus Elliott. “He’s one of the models of how you can have a guy who’s approaching 7 feet who doesn’t move like a guy who’s 7 feet.”
He distinguished himself on a test that measures how quickly athletes jump to 10 feet, 6 inches—the space above the basket where rebounding wars are fought. P3 has put thousands of athletes through this test. Drummond ranked in the top 1%.
It isn’t a coincidence that he’s the best rebounder in the NBA. It’s simply physics.
“It turns out that jumping fast is maybe more important than jumping high,” Elliott said. “We have athletes who jump higher. But we don’t have athletes who jump high faster.”
Whatever he did last summer to improve on those impressive biomechanical numbers is working so far this season. Drummond is averaging 17.1 points and rebounds per game. To put those numbers in context, nobody has averaged 17 points and 17 rebounds since Moses Malone in the 1970s.
The dominant centers back then drank beer, too. It was not because drinking beer was recommended to them by their personal chefs. It was simply because they liked to drink beer.
Drummond’s reasons for drinking beer were more scientific.
He says that he subjected himself to physical tests to reveal the granular particulars of his body and determine the most effective methods of feeding himself. That process led him to eliminate red meat from his diet.
As he slimmed down last summer, he says he would feel himself shaking after workouts, although that may have been because he skipped breakfast and went straight into his basketball workouts. By the time he was ready for lunch, Drummond found that he was ravenous. Since he wasn’t eating meat, he went ham on fish. He now loves fish. (Except tilapia. He hates tilapia.)
Then came the weird part. He washed down lunch every day with one cold beer. It had to be one, and it had to be cold.
“I don’t want to drink warm beer,” he said.
Drummond himself says that nobody should consider him to be the next Atkins. There have been some attempts to study the performance recovery effects of drinking beer, but many more beers have to be drunk for researchers to reach intellectual consensus, and there are certainly less addictive and more efficient ways to feed yourself calories. “This is not something I suggest to everyone,” he says.
But then again everyone did not sign a $127 million contract because they’re one of the most enormous human beings on earth. Even a placebo effect might have been worth it for Drummond. “This is what works for my body type,” he said. “For my mass, it’s what works best.”
It was also necessary. Never have basketball players of Drummond’s size been such an endangered species.
For almost the entire history of the league, people like Drummond had to be able to throw their weight around in the post. But he was drafted in 2012, when that was beginning to change. Now they barely play in the post, and their weight is a liability on the perimeter.
As the tallest men on the planet have effectively shrunk, there are different existential questions for NBA centers these days: “Can you handle the basketball? How fast can you run? How long can you run for?” he said.
But it turns out that Drummond has a peculiar reaction to this stage of NBA evolution. He uses the word “fun” to describe it—which is a bit like a pterodactyl saying extinction is amazing. “It’s fun because I’m still dominant,” he says.
At the end of his meatless, beer-soaked summer, a leaner Drummond came back to some curious teammates. They’d heard about his diet and wanted to know: You were kidding, right?
“No, I really did it. That was really my diet,” he said. “I cut out red meats and just ate fish and veggies—and had my beer.”
Share Your Thoughts
What do you think about the beer diet? Would it work for you? Join the discussion.
Write to Ben Cohen at
ben.cohen@wsj.com
