Let’s talk about longevity and return on investment.
In this case, I want to really talk about the return on your investment if you invest in your health. For the sports superstars we are going to look at - Jordan, Lebron, Tiger and Tom Brady - how much more money and fame did they get by investing or not investing in their bodies?
The truth is - the greatest sports stars of our era are usually celebrated for all that they achieved – but rarely for the discipline behind the scenes that got them there. The discipline that we can have and in turn experience the same health and longevity. If you’re not a sports fan, skip down to the actionable details.
I’m a fan of Michael Jordan. I’m a fan of Tom Brady. I’m a fan of Tiger Woods. And recently — for a reason I want to lay out — I’ve become a fan of LeBron James.
The usual version of this debate has so many details that are brought out. Rings against rings. Eras against eras. Whose teammates were better.
So, I want to argue something else. Something I almost never hear said out loud.
The athletes who last the longest don’t necessarily have more talent. What they have is - they made a different kind of investment. They poured money, discipline, and emerging science into their own bodies — and it bought them years. Real, countable, record-setting years.
I don’t just think that belongs in the conversation – that may be the conversation. Here’s why:
And I want to be careful here, because this is not a knock on anyone. It’s the opposite. The fairest way to understand what LeBron and Brady did is to notice when they did it.
On February 7, 2023, LeBron James passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to become the NBA’s all-time leading scorer. He did it at age 38, in his 20th season — a record that had stood for 39 years.
When people argue about that number, they argue about pace and era. LeBron had the three-point line; Kareem barely did. But there’s a subtle detail underneath it. As FOX Sports laid out, LeBron got there averaging about 27 points a game across 20 seasons. That number isn’t only a measure of how good he was on a given night. It’s a measure of how many nights he was healthy enough to be good at all.
You cannot score 38,000 points if your body quits at 33 or if you’re injured all the time. The scoring record is, in large part, a longevity recordwearing a scoring record’s jersey.
And by his 22nd season, at age 40, LeBron was still putting up roughly 25 points, 8 rebounds, and 8 assists a night. Numbers that would headline most players’ prime, not their farewell.
Two timelines, side by side
Hold LeBron’s arc next to Michael Jordan’s. Not to diminish Jordan — to understand him.
Jordan is, for many people, the greatest to ever play. But his timeline tells a specific story. He first walked away from basketball in October 1993 at age 30, in the aftermath of his father James being murdered that summer. He left to play minor-league baseball — a new mountain, a different challenge, I think a way to move through grief and distract himself with something new.
He came back, won three more titles, and retired again in January 1999. Then he returned a third time, with the Washington Wizards, and played his final game on April 16, 2003, at age 40.
Here’s the part that matters: Jordan was still good at the end. In his two Wizards seasons he averaged 21.2 points a game at ages 38 and 39, and even dropped 51 in a single night. The skill never left him. What ran out was something else.
In other words: two of the greatest who ever lived, both still scoring 20-plus a night near 40 — and one of them got to keep playing for another decade. Jordan’s career, spread across three comebacks, covered about 15 NBA seasons. LeBron has crossed his 22nd – and isn’t done yet. Tom Brady played 23.
The distance between 15 and 22 is not a distance in greatness. It’s a distance in how the body was maintained — and, just as much, in what was known about maintaining it.
Let’s be fair to Jordan and Tiger: the playbook didn’t fully exist yet
It would be easy — and wrong — to say LeBron and Brady simply cared more about their bodies. That may not be the full story. What they had was timing. When we know better we do better.
Consider when the science actually arrived. The landmark study that put hard numbers behind recovery came out of Stanford in 2011: researcher Cheri Mah, with whom I recently connected with, had varsity basketball players extend their sleep toward 10 hours a night, and over five to seven weeks their sprint times got faster and their shooting accuracy climbed about 9 percent. You can read the full paper here. Jordan had already retired for good in 2003. His entire prime was over before that research was even written down.
And our boy Tiger – who before researching for this article I thought just abused his body as he chased dopamine – but in reality, Tiger Woods may be the clearest case of all. Look at what his body absorbed before modern recovery culture existed. Surgery to remove benign tumors from his knee as an 18-year-old college freshman. A ruptured ACL in 2007 that he chose not to repair, playing through it and winning five of his next six starts. Then in June 2008 he won the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines on a torn ACL and a double stress fracture in his left tibia.
Just for reference, Tiger turned pro in 1996. He got in 12 good years before his body started to revolt. Jack Nicklaus played for 42 years. I know Tiger came back and continued to win, but imagine if Tiger hadn’t blown up his life with all the bad choices and dopamine chasing to numb pain and trauma?
Tiger battling through his injuries was celebrated as toughness. And it was. But it was also the only model anyone had. The prevailing wisdom of that era rewarded playing hurt. The cost showed up later: multiple back surgeries between 2014 and 2017, and a body and family and career that has carried that bill ever since.
Tiger wasn’t necessarily careless. He was operating with the knowledge available to a champion of the 1990s and 2000s. And that knowledge said grind through it.
So the honest framing isn’t that LeBron invested and Jordan didn’t. It’s that Jordan and Tiger came up in an era when the longevity playbook hadn’t been written. They didn’t have the sleep data, the load-management research, the recovery technology, or the team-of-specialists model — because, for the most part, those things didn’t exist yet, or hadn’t reached the mainstream. LeBron and Brady are the first generation of all-time greats who got to run that playbook from start to finish.
What LeBron actually built
The number that follows LeBron around is that he spends about $1.5 million a year on his body — a figure first floated by his business partner Maverick Carter. LeBron himself has called it a myth on The Pat McAfee Show, saying the point was never the dollar amount. It was the commitment.
Either way, the routine itself is well documented, and it’s less about gadgets than about a philosophy. In the Netflix series Starting 5, his trainer Mike Mancias frames off-days as the actual work — off days are when you work on the body.
Ice baths. A hyperbaric oxygen chamber. Red-light therapy. Cold plunges. Daily soft-tissue work. A precise nutrition plan. The list looks expensive. But the centerpiece is the cheapest thing on it.
Sleep.
LeBron has said plainly that sleep is the best recovery he can get — basically equivalent, in his words, to putting your phone on a charger before bed. He targets eight to ten-plus hours, keeps the room cold and dark, cuts screens before bed, and naps during the day. That isn’t a luxury habit. It is exactly what the Stanford study would tell you to do. LeBron is, in effect, living inside the research.
Brady made it a method
Tom Brady’s story rhymes with LeBron’s, and it has a turning point you can date. Brady has said he nearly retired at 27 because of chronic elbow pain. Around 2004, nudged by a teammate, he overhauled how he treated his body and began building what became the TB12 Method with trainer Alex Guerrero — a system organized not around explosive output but around recovery, hydration, nutrition, and what Brady calls pliability.
He even named the target. Brady said openly that he wanted to play into his mid-forties, and treated 45 as the hypothesis to prove. He retired at 45 after 23 NFL seasons, in a sport where the average quarterback career lasts roughly four years and he was, for seven straight seasons, the oldest starter in the league.
Here’s the line that should stop us. At age 44, in his next-to-last season, Brady threw for 5,316 yards — a career high. Not a respectable late-career number. The best full season of his life, at an age when most quarterbacks have been retired for the better part of a decade.
The investment didn’t just extend his career. It moved his peak.
Why it works — the actual science
None of this is mystical woo woo. The science is well documented, and it’s worth looking at: you do not get stronger during training. Training is the breakdown. You get stronger during recovery — that’s when muscle repairs, the nervous system resets, and the body adapts to the load it just absorbed.
Sleep is where most of that happens, which is why the Stanford finding lands so hard. Eleven players. Mean age 19. Extending sleep toward 10 hours a night produced faster sprints, better shooting, sharper reaction time, and improved mood. As one medical summary of the research puts it, muscles repair and the mind resets during sleep. Rest is not the absence of training. It is part of it.
Compound that over two decades. A small daily edge in recovery means fewer soft-tissue injuries, faster bounce-back, and less of the cumulative wear that ends careers. It is the difference between a body that breaks down at 34 and one that is still an All-Star at 40.
Sleep isn’t the only lever — but it’s the first one
If you only fix one thing after reading this, fix sleep. Most adults need seven to nine hours a night, and most adults don’t come close. We are talking about sleep here, not just time counted lying in your bed – which I’ve learned are two different things. The downstream cost is brutal: even a few nights of short sleep bends your hormones in the direction of weight gain, blood-sugar trouble, and brain fog.
Then comes food. Brady built TB12 around an anti-inflammatory plate. LeBron’s nutrition is famously precise. You don’t need their meal plans. You need their direction. The single best-supported pattern for long life is Mediterranean and mostly plants: vegetables, beans, fruit, whole grains, olive oil, fish if you eat it (for the Omega’s). Heavy ultra-processed food intake moves the dial the other way, fast.
Then comes movement. The WHO and American Heart Association agree on a floor most of us aren’t hitting: 150 minutes a week of moderate movement, plus two days of strength training. Not 90-minute CrossFit sessions. Walks. Stairs. A barbell once or twice a week. Yard work that makes you sweat. The longest-lived people on earth don’t lift heavy. They move all day.
Sleep. Food. Movement. That’s the playbook LeBron and Brady ran. It’s the same playbook available to you and me — the hyperbaric chamber is extra credit.
How to Flourish
• Protect 8 hours. Make your sleep and wake times consistent – 7 days/week. Cold room. No screens 60 minutes before bed. Treat sleep like an appointment with your future self — because that’s exactly what it is.
• Eat like a Blue Zone. Plants first. Plate half-full of vegetables. Beans every day if you can. Olive oil instead of seed oils. The fewer ingredients you can pronounce on the label, the more you should pause.
• Move every day, lift twice a week. Walk after meals. Take the stairs. Find one strength workout you don’t hate and do it. The point is not aesthetics. The point is the kind of body that still works at 80.
• Make recovery the work. Off-days are not lazy days. Sunlight, water, slow movement, a nap if your body needs it. The session isn’t finished until you’ve recovered from it.
• Pick a 20-year horizon. Don’t ask, “Will this make me feel better today?” Ask, “What will I be glad I did in 2046?” That’s the LeBron question. That’s the Brady question. That’s the question that quietly buys you decades – of health and happiness.
A thousand boring mornings
We idolize the highlight — the buzzer-beater, the comeback, the ring. We rarely talk about the eight hours of sleep, the cold plunge nobody filmed, the off-day soft-tissue work, the nutrient dense meal that wasn’t exciting. But that unglamorous, invisible work is what turned a great career into a historic one.
The scoring record didn’t come from a single night. It came from a thousand boring, disciplined mornings.
And the most hopeful part of this story is that you don’t need $1.5 million to live inside it. The expensive equipment is real, but the engine of the whole thing is free. Sleep is free. Consistency is free. Walking is free. Deep Breaths are free. The Sun is free. Treating your body as something you invest in rather than spend down — that’s a decision, not a budget.
We now have the same information they do. The only question is whether we’ll be as disciplined with it.
Jordan chased a feeling that basketball, for a season, couldn’t give him. Tiger chased something too – and it cost him things that money can’t replace. They were extraordinary, and they competed with everything their era knew how to give them. LeBron and Brady got handed a better map — and had the discipline to follow it all the way to the edge of what a human career can be.
That’s the debate I want to have. Not who was the most gifted. But what becomes possible when you finally treat your health as the asset it always was.
For these men, health didn’t just support the wealth. Health was the wealth.
-Jared
P.S. - My wife Baddie Crocker has a beautiful newsletter where she shares her perspectives on tending the land, recipes, women’s health and more.
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I write this newsletter each week because I feel my best when my body, mind and soul are all healthy. I want the same for you. If you feel like you’ve seen something valuable here, please do me a favor and forward this newsletter to a friend or let me know what you think by replying to this email or texting me - (310) 879-8441
P.S. - This newsletter does not provide medical advice. The content, such as graphics, images, text, and all other materials, is provided for reference and educational purposes only. The content is not meant to be complete or exhaustive or to be applicable to any specific individual's medical condition.
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