Maxime Vachier-Lagrave shared his opinion on health in elite sports. MVL gives the example of professional tennis players, and notes that in chess the brain is the most used muscle.

Maxime Vachier-Lagrave

Maxime Vachier-Lagrave

France's No. 2

“High-level sport is not very good for your health.

But if you look at the tennis players whose career is over, you can feel that physically their body is damaged. Players go to the very end of themselves, and it’s admirable. Even more than to the end.

So, very high-level sport will have consequences on your body. And for chess, the muscle we use the most is the brain. So that’s an additional danger.”

The claim by Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky is known on social media. In 2009 he stated that elite chess players burn up to 6,000 calories a day during tournaments. This claim has been debunked by researchers and data analysts.

Burnout from the game is a common problem among elite chess players. Players such as 17th World Champion Ding Liren, Hikaru Nakamura, and Vidit Gujrathi took breaks from professional Classical chess for more than a year.

Credit: Lennart Ootes