The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance

by Tom Brady

There’s a big difference between playing college football and playing football in the NFL. I didn’t know it at the time, but at Michigan I was doing half the workload the NFL demands, and at half the intensity, too. When you play college football, the season is only twelve or thirteen games long, and you practice and work out no more than four hours a day. Also, there are probably only four or five games during the college season that are truly intense, in which the two teams are of the same caliber and are evenly matched. The NFL is different. The job begins at 7:00 a.m. every day and goes until 6:00 p.m. Every game is a heavyweight brawl, and the intensity never lets up. An NFL season has four preseason and sixteen regular-season games, and the Patriots have made the playoffs almost every year since I’ve been the starting quarterback, which adds up to between twenty and twenty-four games per season. In short, when I began playing for the Patriots, it was double the practice and double the intensity. Until 2011, NFL teams had what they called two-a-days—twice-daily practices with very intense throwing.