Maria Sharapova Quotes

There are always late bloomers [in sport], no matter size, although big men are more often late bloomers.

Training for the Olympics was a lifelong endeavor and took many years.

I'm a running coach and I am going to continue to run, but I would hope that we are better defensively.

I did play two years of high school football and was very short and uncoordinated but the second year I was very tall and skinny and very uncoordinated.

I genuinely hit puberty before everyone.

Some guys get by on natural athletic ability. And then when they reach a certain point, they got to put in the time before and after practice and in the off-season.

Put on about 10 more pounds, that'd be good for me and the development of my game.

I'm training at Phase 1 Sports in Las Vegas, and it's a very high-end training facility for a lot of top-level athletes. I have been able to add a lot of power and the endurance to keep that power going. I've always been powerful, but the muscle conditioning I've been able to add has been a tremendous amount of help.

Frankly, I think it should be no football until you're physically mature.

It was very important for me to play winter ball. It was very important for me, my arm, and my whole body.

I'm someone who has grown physically at a later age, I was always one of the smallest players.

I think I was one of those kids that, at the age of 13, start filling out a little bit: I was the kid that had the chest, the arms, the calves, especially, with these big legs like an adult.

I'm determined to become the best backyard athlete ever.

I was a million miles from being a Premier League player. You see some people, at 18 they are ready. At 21, I wasn't. Physically nowhere near.

A player needs recovery time, and it isn't possible to recover from one race in an hour.

When you ride fast and then rest for a bit, it causes a spike in your heart rate and helps your body deal with lactic acid. But you don't need to make it too complicated. Yorkshire is perfect because the hills work as intervals - you ride up them hard and then recover before the next one. Or you can just sprint to the next tree or lamppost.

It was Osgood-Schlatters. It wasn't good. It's a growing pains thing, and I had to have a lot of treatment on it. I just shot up immediately and didn't have any kind of physique to deal with it physically. I was tall, all arms and legs, and a bit gangly.

It's a 90 minute game for sure. In fact I used to train for a 190 minute game so that when the whistle blew at the end of the match I could have played another 90 minutes.

I prepare myself in the summer to play 48 minutes. It's not a logical goal, but that's the way I prepare.

Energy is connected to physical fitness. One of the reasons I stayed at the top so long is that I was tremendously fit. At 36, I was fitter than most opponents ten years younger.

Fighters are afraid of conditioning, they are afraid of getting tired, but I don't want to have anxiety or be afraid of anything. I can go 100 percent out there and never have to worry about getting tired. Everybody says fighting is 90 percent mental, and it's true. Knowing you can go 15 minutes or 25 minutes without any problem can help you sustain that mental advantage over your opponent.

You can do as many sprints as you want but there's nothing like playing in a 90-minute soccer game. There's no better way to gain your fitness, in my opinion, than playing in consistent games.

I want to continue to expand my game a little more, build my body and work on staying strong so I can play the way I've been playing, and holding my ground the way I've been holding my ground.

Women's tennis is getting faster and the girls are getting more athletic, so I need to push myself to become a better athlete. I think 2013 showed me, like a few other years how important being healthy is and how I must listen to my body. During this off season I have been a little smarter on how I train and how I treat my body.

Throughout my athletic career, the overall goal was always to be a better athlete than I was at the moment – whether next week, next month or next year. The improvement was the goal. The medal was simply the ultimate reward for achieving that goal.