Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro, born 5 February 1985, is a Portuguese professional footballer who plays as a forward for Premier League club Manchester United and captains the Portugal national team. He is often considered the best player in the world and widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time[/caption]
The biggest difference between the good and the great athletes of any sport is the fact that they are able to replicate success over a sustained period of time.
Good players will do well in one or two tournaments and then fade away. But the great players, from any sport, will keep winning and keep performing at the highest level for long periods of time.
Think about Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Cristiano Ronaldo, Robert Lewandowski, Kobe Bryant, and James Anderson - to name a few champion athletes from a host of sports.
Therefore, it is important to learn the longevity secrets of these champion athletes and see how the young players can adopt and adapt to these habits of their routines so that they too can taste a measure of the same success.
Cristiano Ronaldo
Probably the best example of an athlete’s longevity in the world of sports today is Cristiano Ronaldo. Roger Federer is certainly one of them. But in recent times, he has had to suffer from some unfortunate spate of injuries which has kept him out of the game for extended period of time.
For the moment, the one athlete who seems to be performing at an admirable level, day in day out, is Ronaldo, who is belying his age of 36 years with his weekly performances for his club, Manchester United.
This ability to perform at this level has not been reached by accident according to most of his team-mates. There is a very funny story about his dedication to his sport told by his former team-mate Patrice Evra, who is himself a well respected champion on his own right.
Evra said of Ronaldo: “I recommend anyone to say no if Cristiano invites you to his house, because that boy is a machine and he never stops training. I went there and I was really tired after training, but on the table, there was some salad and chicken breast and only water, no drinks. This was an avocado salad, plain white chicken, and, as I said before, no juice, just water,” recalls Evra.
After that he said, “Let’s go in the garden and play two-touch. After that, let’s go for a swim. After that, sauna and Jacuzzi.” I said, “Cristiano, why didn’t we just stay at the training ground?” It is this dedication that makes him such a role-model for the younger players of all sports.
Ankle weights
Another of Ronaldo’s tricks has been to use ankle weights to strengthen himself in his younger days. Fans of his sculptured body now forget that he was quite skinny as a young player.
Early on, a teenager so skinny that he was nicknamed Noodle in Portugal, and challenged the United’s Power and Development Coach Simon Clegg to help him become the supreme athlete we see today.
The boy who used to wear weights around his ankles when running in the streets of Quinta do Falcao, the neighbourhood where he grew up on the island of Madeira, did the same in training at United.
“Doing fast feet with ankle weights, he took training to another level,” says Darren Fletcher, another former team-mate of his, now employed at Manchester United.
“The lads were laughing but he didn’t care. They saw it as a bit of banter but deep down they respected that work-rate and desire, and the sheer determination to be the best player in the world.”
Ronaldo used resistance bands to strengthen his ankle ligaments knowing that a player with fancy feet and a penchant for step-overs in the early days was bound to be on the wrong end of brutal tackles, even from his team-mates.
“He used to get snapped in training. People would kick the hell out of him,” admits Rio Ferdinand, another former team-mate and now a respected pundit on television.
“We didn’t bully him. We all saw the huge potential he had. He came over and his first thought was to entertain but we wanted to win. We kicked it out of him, the entertainment factor, to get the goals and assists. I don’t know a stronger, more determined, obsessed player that I’ve shared a dressing room with. I was very fortunate to sit there and see him go from a boy to a man. He came as a kid and left as the best player in the world.”
Dedication and commitment
Ronaldo had also consulted a sleep guru who told him to take five 90-minute naps a day on fresh sheets. He had a cryotherapy chamber in his house for recovery sessions, a bike in his pool for resistance training and a gym where he would work out for up to four hours a day.
All fuelled by a high-protein diet of six daily meals and a preference for still mineral water over sugary drinks, as anyone who witnessed him disdainfully removing two bottles of Coke from the podium before a Portugal press conference this summer will know.
All this requires absolute dedication and commitment on his part. And now in his second stint at United, Ronaldo is a role-model to the younger players there.
As his present team-mate Lee Grant told Talksport, “To give you one instance of the impact he is having on the group: This was Friday night in the hotel. So, as you guys will be aware, you finish your dinner and usually on a Friday night, you’ve got some cheat stuff out.
“You’ve got some apple crumble and custard or you’ve got a bit of brownie and cream or whatnot. I tell you now, not one player touched the apple crumble and custard, not one player went up for that brownie because everybody was sat down.
“And it just cracked me up how not one single player dared get up and have that junk food that was laid out.”
Conclusion
It is certainly not possible to adopt all of the habits of this great athlete for our players with the demands on their time.
But if our players, from any sport, is to achieve a world-class level, most of these habits will have to be added to their routine to succeed at that level.