Emma Raducanu had to overcome a wrist injury early on in her career, and she revealed how rice helped her do that.
The British player missed much of last year due to triple surgery, which addressed a couple of issues that had been bothering her for a while. One of those was a wrist injury, which, unfortunately, has become a very common injury in tennis.
Many tennis players have spoken about the heaviness of the tennis balls, which have been directly contributing to that, but so far, the Tours haven't done anything to address it directly.
Raducanu's wrist injury was so bad that she had to address it surgically, which she did in April last year. The recovery was long, and she had to do various exercises to help the surgery recovery.
One of the things she did for her recovery was rice therapy. Yes, she was using rice to help her recover and explained how it worked in a recent interview with Tennis Magazin.
"When someone comes into the rehab room with a bucket of rice, you don't really think that it's for wrist recovery. I put my hand in the bucket of rice at least twice a day, up to 75 minutes, and I moved my hands, twisted them, squeezed them, and pressed them."
"It actually helps. You feel a burning sensation in your forearm. It strengthens the muscles in your hand, wrist and upper arm. Every little muscle in your hand is used."
Methods like this have been around for many years as medicine progresses and new techniques are developed. This has also been a blessing for athletes because some of the injuries that are relatively comfortable to overcome today would have been career-ending injuries two or three decades ago.
Just look at what Novak Djokovic was able to do recently. He overcame a meniscus tear to find himself on the court not even a full three weeks later. That's an amazing recovery, and it shows how far medicine has come.
As for Raducanu, she returned to tennis this year and has been largely healthy, which is excellent news. The Brit also admitted that she grew tired of the rice therapy rather quickly because the sessions were very lon.
Still, when it comes to her relationship with rice as a food, she loves to eat it. As openly admitted before, Raducanu is a big foodie, so this shouldn't come as a surprise.
"No, not really. You see the bucket of rice and think: Not again, because the rehab session took up a lot of time. But I still love eating rice. I'm sticking to that."
Hopefully, her good health will continue this year without any setbacks as she prepares to play in the United States, where she had the biggest moment of her career so far. Her return will take place at the Citi Open in Washington, which begins on July 29th, during the Olympic Games in Paris, which she will not play.
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