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Alex’s goal was to eliminate the pain completely. Until that point, I hadn’t really realized how accustomed I’d gotten to my body hurting as much as it did, or how I’d just accepted pain and soreness as part of the job
In my case, Alex was in the business of designing, building, and maintaining my sustained peak performance in the most holistic way possible.
The following year, once I modified my training program to incorporate more of the targeted, deep-force work of lengthening and softening my muscles, Alex told me I’d gotten to a point where I might never have any elbow or shoulder problems again. And I haven’t to this day.
pliability—the daily lengthening and softening of the muscles
In effect, I had replaced injury and rehab with pliability and prehab.
In fact, the more I committed to what I’m now calling the TB12 Method, the better my on-field and off-field results have been.
Based on my injury and infection, I faced long odds of getting back to being the player that I was.
When you get injured, who is ultimately responsible for your return to full strength? The doctor? The trainer? The sport? The answer is none of the above. No—in the end, it’s your body, and your life. How you take care of yourself and maintain your health and avoid injury is up to you.
Over the next seven months, Alex and I focused on pliability to help reduce the discomfort I was feeling.
Through pliability sessions, my brain and body were able to relearn how the muscles surrounding my knee are supposed to work.
Eight weeks into my recovery, I was running in the sand, and six months later—not twelve months—the discomfort in my knee was gone.
Yes, there are core principles, like balancing strength and conditioning with pliability, but the ratio, intensity, and types of exercises are customized to the person, depending on his or her age, strength, and fitness, the sports they play, the lifestyle they lead, and other factors, including what their goals are.
The doctors who read the MRI joked afterward that my knee looked so healthy, they seriously doubted I played professional football.
Why was my knee in such good shape? In my view, it was because my muscles—and not my tendons, ligaments, or joints—were handling the forces and stresses placed on my body, just as God intended them to. If muscles are not balanced, loads and stresses go to unintended places, like joints, tendons, or ligaments—and over time, that’s not sustainable.
The ACL tear was the most intense injury I’d suffered, and is still the only one that’s k...
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For the first time in my life, I found out I could g...
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But through that process, I began to ask questions, like What can I do to prevent something lik...
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realizing I wasn’t a victim of my injuries and that I was a very active participant in my own health and wellness, I understood there were some injuries I couldn’t avoid. I also understood that the choices I made off the field would help determine whether or not I got ...
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Pliability and hydration go hand in hand, and one can’t really exist without the other.
Hydration and nutrition are the foundation of healthy muscles, and if your muscles aren’t healthy, it’s that much harder to attain optimal pliability.
with the goal of continuing to reduce inflammation in my body,
But I’ve come to believe that strength and conditioning at the expense of pliability is a sure recipe for injury.
Sometimes I like to think about how amazing the quality of NFL football would be if players managed to avoid injury and stay healthy not just for two years or five years but for twelve years, fifteen years, or, in my case, seventeen years and counting.
In pro football, health equals productivity equals durability.
As a quarterback, my ability to adapt to change is crucial. The game never stops evolving, so why should I?
The ability to couple experience with a healthy body creates better players, better performances, and a much better game.
Even if you take away only four or five things from this book, whether it’s how to improve your diet, or work out smarter, or the half dozen supplements everyone should take, I guarantee you’ll start to see huge differences in your life.
Too much of a bad thing is bad for you, but too much of a good thing isn’t a good thing, either.
I’ve always been motivated to target and improve on my deficiencies, and I still am.
“The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.”
We don’t view the body as an assortment of parts. It’s a connected system that functions as a whole, and you should treat it that way.
PLIABILITY IS THE MISSING LEG OF PERFORMANCE TRAINING—AND THE MOST UNDERUTILIZED AND LEAST UNDERSTOOD.
Nothing works in isolation. Everything we do at TB12 is interdependent, and we believe that a holistic approach works better than a divided one. The body is one system. Treat it well. It is the only one you have.
BALANCE AND MODERATION IN ALL THINGS. We subscribe to the precept of balance and moderation in all things. Too much of a good thing isn’t a good thing. Too many bad things are just plain bad.
Conditioning is about having the energy, endurance, and vitality to perform the activities you love in a healthy, pain-free way. Good health is about how you feel. We’ve been educated around how we look. But feeling better—that’s the key.
PROMOTE ANTI-INFLAMMATORY RESPONSES IN THE BODY. Anything that reduces inflammation in our bodies, including hydration and nutrition, maximizes pliability and accelerates recovery. Try to avoid self-inflammation—whether it’s in your mind, body, or spirit.
PROMOTE OXYGEN-RICH BLOOD FLOW.
Healthy nutrition is amplified by the right vitamins, nutrients, and minerals, based on your current diet, age, and activity levels.
BRAIN EXERCISES. Neuroplasticity is all about generating and regenerating neural connections—which happens only when we train our brains the same way we do our muscles.
BRAIN REST, RECENTERING, AND RECOVERY. The body and the brain need recentering, rest, and recovery via sleep, meditation (or other balancing techniques that encourage the right mind-set), and recovery innovations such as tech-enabled sleepwear.
Of course, you’ll still get older, but with pliability you’re less likely to age poorly, or in a compromised state.
period of time, but you won’t be able to sustain it. Ask yourself what it might mean to not get hurt, or not be in pain, or at least to begin creating a stronger, more effective “body immune system” to counteract pain and injury.
By rhythmically contracting and relaxing your muscles in a lengthened, softened state through pliability sessions, you make connections between the brain and the body, which is known as neural priming. Why is that important? Because the body begins to associate muscle function and movement with long, soft, primed muscle contractions.
One of the critical keys is doing pliability treatments both before and after your full workout or physical activity. (Think of pliability as the new “warm-up” and “cool-down.”) This is the essence of the brain–muscle connection—creating the right neural priming, muscle memory, and conditioning that enable yo...
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Unfortunately, tight, dense, and stiff is the enemy of pliability and will increase his risk of injury even more.
My brain is thinking only Lengthen and soften and disperse before my body absorbs and disperses the impact evenly and I hit the ground. In this way, it is difficult for any one part of my body to get overloaded, as many muscles are acting to support the forces placed on it. That’s the key.
The goal of pliability is to reeducate your brain–body connection, which continually sends messages to your muscles to stay long, soft, and primed, no matter what you’re asking your body to do. One of the critical keys is doing pliability both before and after your full workout or physical activity. (Think of pliability as the new “warm-up” and “cool-down.”)
The older you are, the more you need to incorporate pliability—and commit to it, too, as younger athletes have a hefty supply of pliability that starts to dissipate with age.
I believe that at a minimum, most younger people should dedicate 20 percent of their workouts to pliability. As you get older, and depending on what sport you engage in (for example, contact versus noncontact), you’ll need to increase the percentage of pliability in your workout. Why do golfers today experience more back pain than they did in past decades? Why do baseball pitchers today need Tommy John surgery on a regular basis? Too much overload, and not enough muscle pliability!
Each of us needs to figure out the meaning of balance in our lives, based on our innate strengths and weaknesses, and on external factors,
