The Sex Exercise Myth That Won’t Go Away

Every New Year’s Day at 6 a.m., my high-school team had swimming practice. Driving to the pool in the frozen Indiana darkness, I assumed the rationale was simply that the coach was a nonviolent psychopath. Someone had ruined his youth and now he wanted to ruin ours. We weren’t explicitly forbidden from going out and having fun on New Year’s Eve. But once you see one hungover person vomit in the pool, the team gets behind the idea of taking it easy.

Many athletes are explicitly told to avoid things that could truly detract from their performance. Often lumped into that is sex—specifically before a competition. The admonition is “passed down a lot by coaches, when things are intense and they want to get as much as possible out of players,” says Todd Astorino, a professor of kinesiology at California State University.