The secrets behind Novak Djokovic’s miraculous 39-year-old physique: ‘I work with my body, not against it’

Novak Djokovic has never been the most muscle-bound tennis player, nor the fastest, nor the most powerful. That being said, he has always been the strongest. “He’s like a Ferrari,” said Ulises Badio, the Argentinian physical therapist who worked with the athlete for five years. Djokovic is, without a doubt, a standout player. At 39 years of age, and despite the inevitable odds at this point in his career, the man known as Nole continues competing against rivals half his age, and shocking the world with his continued ability to rise to the greatest challenge. So it was on Tuesday, when he defeated Canada’s Felix Auger-Aliassime in a fierce battle of five hours and 15 minutes, the longest match ever to be played at Wimbledon.

He played incredibly — like Leo Messi, they told him. To which Djokovic, who was facing Jannik Sinner Friday in the great British tournament’s semifinals on Friday, answered jokingly — although with a hint of a sigh — “It would be nice to play 90 minutes like him!” His appearance in the press room was uncommonly brief at just five minutes, after which he left the club immediately. He’d be playing the world’s best in three days, he explained, and he was in a hurry. But this time, he would have two days to transition between one round and the next. Every second counts for a perfectionist like him, who is always ahead of everyone else, intelligent both on and off the court. Djokovic has always thought one or two hits of the ball ahead, like the best chess players always do.

“You can’t fight age. I try to work with my body, not against it,” he said, aware that his worn-out body is no longer the same — even if it is just as extraordinary. For the last few years, ailments have been a constant for the tennis player from Belgrade who, even so, has managed to keep up his performance — this will be his eighth Grand Slam semifinal since 2024 — and he is once again in a favored position. He’s not letting up. “I have an extra day, which is good,” he said. “Future will tell… I don’t know what tomorrow brings,” he added after his last win. Logically speaking, his body will never be the same as before, but it still allows him to win battles of this magnitude — an impressive feat.

“Impossible!,” Boris Becker, Djokovic’s coach from 2014 to 2016, described the champion. But that was after Djokovic’s nutritional transformation. In 2010, the player from the Balkans met Bosnian nutritionist Igo Cetojevic and completely changed his diet: goodbye to gluten and meat, and hello to a foundation of fresh and dry fruits, vegetables, beans, seeds, whole foods and white fish. Since then, the athlete says, he’s been a different person, one who sees how refined sugar causes one’s energy to fluctuate wildly, who doesn’t count calories but instead, listens to his body. “It’s more than a diet, it’s a lifestyle,” he clarifies. One that features a holistic and multidisciplinary approach based on yoga, meditation, fasting and breathing techniques, among other practices. He also uses red and yellow-lensed glasses, a biohacking technique that lacks scientific backing.

At his side is physiotherapist Milijan Amanovic, one of his most trusted allies, who knows every nook and cranny of his game. Djokovic began working with him in 2007 — one year before he won his first major tournament — and though they continued to collaborate during the Badio era, Amanovic stopped traveling on the circuit with Djokovic in 2017 due to a heart attack. They reunited in 2023. “Novak is a brother to me,” says Amanovic, who got his start in the world of basketball with Serbian team Red Star and later played on the Serbian Olympic squad in 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2021. Today, he’s Djokovic’s shadow, assisting with a training regimen that is light on weights and focuses instead on working functional strength and the core with stability exercises and stretching.

The difference between 7-0 and 0-7

“It’s about being smart when it comes to how you do things. I’ve learned that less is more,” says the semifinalist. At this point, just shy of 40 years old, he has dialed down the weights and improved the quality of his workouts. Rest is key. “Recovery is more important than training,” adds Nole, who two years ago tore his medial meniscus at Wimbledon — only to win an improbable gold just one month later in Paris. “I slept most of the day and did a lot of work on the massage table and in the water,” he says.

Prevention has been Djokovic’s main focus ever since he began suffering muscle and joint injuries, including an abdominal tear and more recently, a right shoulder injury that prevented him from getting into top form during the clay court season. But at Wimbledon, he arrived “fresher”, a fact that was never more evident than in his quarterfinal match. The most logical outcome would have been a collapse similar to the one in January when Carlos Alcaraz defeated him in the Melbourne final. But against Canada’s 25-year-old Auger-Aliassime, Djokovic kept fighting until the fifth set was decided, and managed to string together some very long rallies, going back and forth across the court, throughout the match.

“Throughout my career, I always try to look to what can give me an edge, what’s the best recovery, wellness technology — from hyperbaric chambers, to cryo chambers, to cold immersions, to red-light therapy to pulse electromagnetic therapies. There’s a lot of things that I’ve used and I’ve been using and am still using,” he explains. Sinner would do well to remember that Djokovic holds the record for most wins in five sets.

That total currently stands at 50 — one against Stan Wawrinka — and it signals a warning to the number one seed. At the end of the day, one player’s strength is the other’s weakness.