Are you aware of this?

On Daily Routines, we profile successful leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, executives and athletes to explore their routines, schedules, habits and day in the life.

You wouldn’t know it at a first glance, but playing chess can be an extremely gruelling sport. An ESPN article revealed that chess players sitting down all day playing in a tournament can burn up 6,000 calories a day, “three times what an average person consumes in a day.”

Neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky believes that “grandmasters sustain elevated blood pressure for hours in the range found in competitive marathon runners.” This can lead to some chess players losing 10-12 pounds over the course of a tournament.

For Norwegian chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, who also spends a lot of time on the road, travelling close to 200 days to play in tournaments hosted around the world, this means his health and fitness is an absolute priority if he wants to win back his World Chess Championship.

Carlsen has been playing chess his whole life. When he was five, his father brought home a chessboard and taught his older sister, Ellen, and him how to play. But it wasn’t until a few years later when Carlsen found a passion for the game, and by the time he was 15, he was practically a full-time player with school in the rear-view mirror.

But it wasn’t until 2017 when Carlsen, who had been playing chess for close to 20 years, felt that he needed a change in his life. While he was still winning tournaments and retaining titles, the victories felt draining and his stamina was dropping.

A visit to the performance specialist suggested that Carlsen replace the orange juice he routinely drinks during tournaments with a mixture of chocolate milk and plain milk. “It kept his blood sugar at a reasonable level without too big a variation, and he felt less tired during key moments in tournaments that followed the change,” Carlsen’s father, Henrik told ESPN.

That was just the beginning of the makeover. Since then, Carlsen has approached training for his chess career like an elite athlete. He prepares his body for the rigorous demands of chess tournaments with running intervals on the treadmill to increase his endurance, yoga and soccer games. “Much of my core work comes from yoga,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “I’m not the type to go to the gym and run through reps and sets of exercise. I need something more fluid and fun.”