Shaquille O'Neal Quotes

I understand that when a player reaches his mid-thirties, and has a few injuries, people start to question how long he can last.

In track years... track is not like other sports. You do have track athletes that stay in this sport until, like, 35, 36, but I think when you get to 28, it's really difficult.

What I'm doing with my body and with my golf game, I'm trying to extend the longevity of my career.

Mark Hughes played until he was nearly 40 at a decent level, and I think I can do the same.

You don't see too many attacking flair players continuing until their mid-30s at a high level.

I always think of it in terms of music. You're not always going to be a huge rock star in music, but musicians can play until the day they die. With sports, it's different. You can't always do it until the very end, and that's a hard reality of sports.

Not every time someone gets hit these days with a kick, they don't necessarily take a flat-back. Maybe less flat-backs add time to a career, but if they miss some of it, it just seems like you're done.

Getting past 30 as a sportsman, the end could be just around the corner.

When you play for 20 years - and really, I never had to miss a game due to injury - that's not just good protection. That's good luck.

You're going to hurt, yes. You're going to have tweaks and problems. But you're a football player; you can play through those.

Coping with injuries is always difficult for athletes because all we want to do is, basically, to have our best performances unhindered.

So making the choice to be involved in the pro wrestling industry is always looked at as a short-lived choice, and there are very few and far in between opportunities to continue a career in wrestling if your time is up as a wrestler, as a female.

I want to try to have fun as long as I can and play football at a high level. I do not know how long that will go on.

I want to play at a good level for as long as possible and just stay healthy.

I'm really not an injury-prone player. I just had that one injury that took, like, two years.

It was tough to quit football. But after I was injured, I didn't want people paying money to see only half a John Matuszak.

There's some glory years, where if you play long enough and you've figured the game out, and physically you're still healthy enough, there are some years in there where you can really be productive. And those are fun years.

Of course, I believe injury has stopped me winning more tournaments.

I always said when I was younger that I want to wrestle until I'm 40 or even in the 50s as long as I can still keep doing the same style of wrestling that I do.

As a player, you have to assess how fit you are and look at your performance graph - how long you are delivering. Take Imran Khan's case: he played till 39.

As a running back, when you get the ball year after year - and I would say three years on the short end and seven on the long side - you reach a point where it seems like overnight, your body changes and you can't do what you used to do anymore. We see those drastic declines more at running back than any other position.

I remember being 32 years old and feeling great, better than ever physically. Then at 33, I tore my shoulder and was out for eight months, and it was like I fell off a cliff. I was never the same.

Boxing does not favor boxers over 35 who rely on reflexes.

I've had three injuries, and one took from 2016 to 2017 for me to recover. Three months I was out because I wasn't perfect, and I lost a lot of games for this injury.

I knew my body could take the battle of everyday training and take the battle of falls and bending in ways that bodies really shouldn't bend.