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. 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.
In 2004, winner Rustam Kasimdzhanov walked away from the six-game world championship having lost 17 pounds. "He looked like death," grandmaster and commentator Maurice Ashley recalls. The 1984 World Chess Championship was called off after five months and 48 games because defending champion Anatoly Karpov had lost 22 pounds. How could two humans - seated for hours, exerting themselves in no greater manner than intermittently extending their arms a foot at a time - face physical demands?
Caruana, left, retreats to a 2,000-acre compound in rural Missouri ahead of major tournaments to prepare his body as well as his mind. And they're doing it all to prepare for the physical demands of. His training partner, Chirila? A Romanian grandmaster. Caruana is, in fact, an American grandmaster in chess, the No. This body he has put together is not an accident. He also has a packed schedule for the day: a 5-mile run, an hour of tennis, half an hour of basketball and at least an hour of swimming.Īs he's jogging, it's easy to mistake him for a soccer player.
They jog up and down the hills around the farmland, whispering during water breaks about openings and effective chess permutations.Īt 5-foot-6, Caruana has a lean frame, his legs angular and toned. At 7:30 the next morning, he pulls on gray Mizzou sweats and matching running shorts, rubs the sleep from his eyes and heads out for his hourlong run with his training partner, Cristian Chirila.