The TB12 Method

by Tom Brady

  You don’t strain or tear a muscle because it’s too weak. You strain or tear a muscle because it’s overloaded. Don’t mistake muscle soreness, or a muscle tear, for muscle weakness. You need to lengthen and soften that muscle in order to restore balance and efficiency.

  In short, our ideas about how to train to become a great athlete are out of balance. A coach may work a player hard at one thing, and a player may work harder than anyone else at that thing, but in the end, that player is getting better at only one or two things. And all too often his improvement comes at the expense of pliability, if he doesn’t commit to that as well.

  The most/longest model has been in place since I was in high school, and before. Again, that model may seem logical. Sometimes it even yields benefits in the short term—but it won’t work if you want to sustain your peak performance. Why? Because most sports don’t require those extremes of effort or exertion, or those skills. In my job—throwing a football—there’s no need for me to bench-press three hundred pounds. It’s not even about diminishing returns—it’s actually detrimental to my performance. The same is true for long-distance running. Why would I ever train to the point where I could run a marathon? That requires a different physical makeup and configuration than I need for my job, and one that would put a lot of unnecessary strain on my feet, ankles, and knees. That’s why one of our twelve TB12 principles is creating a balanced, optimized training program for the sport or activity you need to do or the daily acts of living you’re asking your body to perform.

  To use an analogy, just because you’re standing at a buffet, that doesn’t mean you’re supposed to eat everything. You should eat just enough so that you feel full, and no more. Sports training is no different. If you’re an athlete, instead of focusing on the most or the longest, you should be training your muscles to work appropriately for the actions you ask them to do. If you do daily squats with a four-hundred-pound load on your back, the only thing you’ll get better at is squatting with a four-hundred-pound load on your back. Outside professional weight lifting, when is anyone asked to do that? The answer: rarely, and then it’s probably sports-position specific. Again, that may be gratifying personally, but without the right amount of pliability, I believe it comes at the expense of your long-term health. To repeat, most of what you train for should be focused on making your muscles work appropriately for the actions you’re asking them to do. Put another way, your strength workouts should follow the function of your sport or activity. We focus too much on maximum strength—and not enough on optimal strength.

  Most athletes don’t know this. As I said, if they play a coached sport, they do what they’re told. Now, in defense of the age-old strength and conditioning model, throughout professional sports history, no one has given much thought to what it means to “play for a long time.” The focus has always been on “playing.” Athletes just want to make the team. If they get injured a few years later, instead of pointing fingers at the training they’ve done their whole lives, they blame the sport.

  Lengthened and softened muscles aren’t the same as relaxed muscles. When your muscles are long and soft, it just means that they’re not tight, dense, and stiff. Instead of being contracted, they’re primed, poised, and ready to fire.

  But being a professional means taking responsibility for your body, your health, and your career. If you don’t, who will? It means you ask why you’re doing what you’re doing. If elevating your heart rate and lifting weights works so well, then why are the statistics around them so bad?

  Consider that every year in the United States, two million high school athletes are injured, which leads to more than 500,000 doctor’s visits, which lead to way too many surgeries. College players are just as prone to injury, and so are adult amateur athletes. Seventy percent of all college athletes say that they’ve played through an injury at least once, and more than a million adult amateur athletes get a sports-related injury every year. A good pro football career lasts around 10 years, but the average NFL career today is 3.3 years, with most of those careers cut short by injury. Younger players are leaving the game earlier, too. In 2014, nineteen players age thirty or younger retired from the NFL, versus five players back in 2005. Players say the biggest reason is their fear of the long-term effects of playing while injured. I don’t have that fear. Bottom line: Playing sports increases the likelihood of injuries because you more regularly confront excessive loads and forces. That’s why, as an athlete, if I want to live a healthier life on and off the field, I have to make great choices that are aligned with my goals.

  But first, let’s go back to high school, where most athletes are introduced to strength training. In order to get better at their sport, they’re urged to lift weights, and to increase the amount of weight they lift as time goes on. Without incorporating pliability, their muscles become tight, dense, and stiff. They lose their muscle pump function—which leads to imbalances in their bodies. Imbalances lead to muscle compensation. Muscle compensation leads to muscle overload—and muscle overload leads to injury. Here a balance of strength, conditioning, and pliability needs to take place—but all too often doesn’t. Once you determine how much strength you need, that’s when you should determine how much pliability you need as well.

  This same cycle (and training system) follows athletes into college, which is where a lot of athletes keep getting injured without understanding why. It continues into professional sports. If a player is already lifting, say, 225 pounds for fifteen reps on a bench press—for whatever reason, bench presses and squats are the most common criteria for strength—he feels he should lift even more. Every day I see players bench-pressing 300 or 400 pounds, and when they tear a muscle, they tell themselves it’s because they didn’t stretch enough beforehand. They don’t realize that nine times out of ten, their muscle tear had nothing to do with stretching—tears happen because muscles are not absorbing and dispersing the amount of force placed on them. How do you change that? By putting an emphasis on pliability in order to create a balance that can help absorb those extreme forces.

  It isn’t only healthy players who feel the pressure to lift more, and harder, and longer. Even injured players gravitate toward a set of corrective exercises that involve improving strength. As I said, there’s a widespread belief that injury is the direct result of muscle weakness—that an injured muscle needs to be restrengthened. But muscle soreness or pain is mostly the result of muscles that are overloaded. The last thing athletes should do is strengthen an injured muscle more than they already have without first bringing it into balance through pliability training. Once balance is restored, that’s when restrengthening should occur. In addition, a lot of athletes still believe that the only thing they need to do to keep themselves fit is to stay strong and conditioned while maintaining low body fat. They don’t want to hear that all the work, energy, and sweat they’ve put into their workouts could be damaging. They’ve spent years doing things one way. And until they discover pliability, they have no idea they can have a body or a career free of the pain that athletes of the past have endured.

  In this book I often say that during a pliability session you should contract and relax your muscles rhythmically. But how fast is rhythmically? The answer depends on the sport you play or the activities you engage in in your daily life. The movements you make should ideally mimic the speed of your sport or activity. If you practice yoga, your muscle contractions should be at the speed of yoga—or faster. A road-biker doing pliability treatment on his calves should mimic the muscle movements that he makes on his bike—or, again, slightly faster. I train fast, because in the sport I play, I think fast and move fast, which is why during pliability sessions, I try to make two muscle contractions every second—and I’m still trying to improve on that.

  The movements of everyday life—standing, sitting, walking—can cause our muscles to become tight, dense, and stiff. Pliability in any form helps lengthen and soften them. In this picture I’m doing self-pliability on my right triceps.
Again, the forceful stroke I’m making is in the direction of the heart.

  Working on my right forearm, targeting all sides of the muscle. The brain and body won’t learn new behaviors unless it’s through positive and intentional trauma. As I do self-pliability, I’m targeting the front, middle, and back of my forearm while rhythmically contracting and relaxing it.

  What most athletes don’t ask and should be asking is: How can I train to not get hurt? Why is strength important, but only up to a point? What are the things I need to do, and the decisions I need to make, to keep myself from getting hurt, or from injuring myself without meaning to, in the future?

  From high school through college and today in the pros, I’ve seen over and over again the impact that injuries have on players and teammates. I’ve also seen more athletes than I can count navigating a system that emphasizes short-term solutions that target symptoms, not causes. Hurt your hamstring? Then let’s just focus on the hamstring. Why don’t we instead ask why you hurt your hamstring—and what you can do to keep it from getting hurt again? If an injury is the result of excessive force, why don’t we figure out ways the body can absorb that force? But we don’t. When something breaks, we try to fix it and then we move on, without addressing the root causes. But surgery for durability is an oxymoron. Having surgery doesn’t lengthen your career—it shortens it. The result is more injuries and more broken athletes, not just across pro football but in all sports, and at all ages and levels.

  Another problem created by the traditional strength and conditioning model? The one-size-fits-all philosophy. Let’s look at football. A pro football team has around seventy players, and trainers typically track player data over the course of the season. Again, most athletes grew up believing that the stronger they get, the better their overall performance will be. That’s just not true. Strength matters, but only as it relates to the function of the job an athlete is being asked to do, or the position he or she is playing. In my case, my friends all know that I’m not going around carrying heavy dumbbells. During my workouts, I’m focused instead on doing the things that can help me to do my job better. What is my job? As an NFL quarterback, my job is to stand in the pocket, cut, run, throw, and generally withstand the tough nature of the sport I’ve played for more than two decades. How strong do I need to be? How much weight do I need to lift? The answers are based on a variety of factors, including my weight, my body fat percentage, and the stability of my core.

  What’s the job of an offensive lineman? Well, an offensive lineman needs to be strong, and to develop dense muscles, and to push and brace against a lot of incoming weight. How about a wide receiver, whose job it is to run and catch the ball? How much strength does he need, and how much weight should he lift? Certainly not as much as the offensive lineman. In the end, a wide receiver needs to get his muscles to work appropriately for the actions he’s asking them to do. Once you determine how much strength you need, that’s when to determine how much pliability you need to do.

  We’re all born with natural pliability—and strength. When we’re in our teens, we begin strengthening and conditioning to balance our natural scale. By our mid-twenties, we’ve begun to lose our natural pliability. But believing that strength is what helped us achieve our goals, we strengthen even more. In fact, what we need to help restore our natural balance is pliability.

  Day after day I see players working extremely hard at doing the wrong thing. I’m talking about some of my own teammates, too. They’re committed to greater strength and conditioning, but often they’re doing it at levels that won’t ever pay off for them. It’s a system of diminishing returns. So why do they keep doing it—and why do trainers keep teaching it? Because it’s all they were ever taught. If you’re doing the wrong thing, and working hard at it, you’re just getting a lot better at getting worse—and at a faster rate, too. Imagine you have a faulty golf swing. If you keep practicing the same way you always have, you’ll only end up reinforcing your own bad form. Why not focus instead on what will get you to where you want to go? We’ve all heard the definition of insanity—doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Well, sports training is the apotheosis of that. Way too often, we get trapped in the same old routines.

  Doing sprints, lifting weights, and the pain, rehab, and recovery that follow make up a vicious cycle that injures and spits out athletes year after year. It’s not only institutionalized but it’s also extremely profitable for a lot of people. There’s not a lot of money to be made from healthy athletes, or, for that matter, from healthy people. The sports training system today is also linked to a mind-set that’s focused on short-term gains. Coaches, trainers, and athletes all want big wins now. Most of them don’t have the patience to develop the mind-set it takes to achieve consistent, continuous results. Still, if I’ve learned one thing as I go into my eighteenth NFL season, it’s how important it is to devote yourself to an attitude of sustained peak performance that never wavers in its longer-term perspective. Playing sports, especially professionally, is a multiyear commitment and endeavor. Would I want to play sports for only a few years, or would I want to play at the highest levels for a decade, two decades, or longer? The answer is obvious.

  As I said in the introduction, it can be hard for younger athletes to wrap their heads around the concept of pliability. Few of them are thinking long-term—and the same goes for most of us. It’s a human bias to focus on short-term gains without factoring in their longer-term consequences. When you’re younger, you feel invincible. You haven’t experienced years and years of muscle contractions, overloads, and injuries. You also don’t feel the impact of poor lifestyle choices or habits as much as you do when you’re older. I tell younger athletes they have all the tread on their tires right now—but what do they want, and how do they see themselves, in the future? Still, their motivation may not be there. Given a choice between spending hours per week doing pliability or being with their friends, most of them will choose their friends. Then there are those athletes who’ve been working out one way for a long time and don’t want to change their routine, out of fear they won’t achieve the same results.

  What does it mean to not get hurt? It means I’ve given myself the opportunity to be the best I can be, year after year, mentally and physically. And once you incorporate pliability into your strength and conditioning regimen, along with the other amplifiers this book goes into, I know it will take you where you want to go.

  Nine years ago, I strained my right groin tendon (a very common football injury). One of the doctors I consulted recommended surgery, saying there was a 99 percent chance the strain would bother me during the entire season. He also warned me that my left groin muscle would probably need the same surgery sometime within the next twenty-four months. After weighing my options, I decided on a more holistic approach. Alex and I decided to work on it differently—through pliability training over the next three weeks. After lengthening and softening my right groin muscle, along with the other muscle groups in my leg that correlated to my movements, the tension was removed from my tendon, and I felt zero pain. In the eleven years since, I’ve never had another right groin problem. It’s understandable that a doctor would recommend surgery, based on his own experience and training—without understanding the benefits of pliability.

  Achieving sustained peak performance doesn’t happen through pliability alone. The amplifiers you’ll be reading about in the pages ahead—hydration, nutrition, and brain training, rest, and recovery—accelerate pliability and ensure that your inner environment is just as healthy and balanced as your outer environment.

  WHAT IS PLIABILITY?

  Pliability is the name Alex and I give to the training regimen he and I do every day. Using his hands and elbows, Alex performs targeted, deep-force muscle work to lengthen and soften every muscle of my body as I rhythmically contract and relax that muscle. We almost always focus on my entire body, unless one area takes up more of our time. He and I do this twice—once b
efore a full workout and again after—for reasons I’ll explain in a moment.

  Pliability is different from massage. But for the sake of visuals, imagine that I’m lying on a table. Instead of lying there passively, I’m rhythmically contracting and expanding my muscles as Alex works on them one at a time. My calf, my hamstring, my quad, my triceps, my biceps—up to twenty muscle groups in all. As I contract and relax each muscle, Alex, using optimal pressure and forces similar to those I experience playing, training, or carrying out the daily acts of living, strokes through that muscle, in isolation and always toward the heart, for twenty seconds on average. Rather than working all the muscles of my body simultaneously, he focuses on each part of each muscle—the outside (lateral), the inside (medial), and the middle. The pressure he applies is intense—again, trying to mimic what I experience in my life. Once, when a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tested us, the researchers found that Alex was applying anywhere from fifty to one hundred newtons (a unit of force) of pressure using just his finger. When he uses the point of his elbow, the pressure can approach four hundred newtons or more. That’s almost ninety pounds of force. That means Alex is applying ninety pounds of force to individual areas of my muscles. The sheer amount of pressure he exerts trains my brain to create neuropathways—and neural-primes my muscles for the extreme amounts of impact I face over the course of a practice, a game, or my life in general. Alex is educating my brain and my muscles to stay lengthened, softened, and primed, which is a big reason why I’m able to absorb and disperse hits well.

  As Alex and I do pliability training, a number of critical benefits are taking place in my body and brain.

  As he forcefully strokes through each muscle, always toward the heart, while I contract and relax it, Alex is educating that muscle to fire at 100 percent capacity—or, as we say at TB12, with 100 percent muscle pump function. He’s educating my muscles to stay lengthened and softened, as well as primed, while doing their functions. By giving each of my muscles a positive and intentional “traumatic” experience as he lengthens and softens it, Alex is helping forge the connection between my brain and body. He’s teaching my brain and body that long, soft, and primed is how I want my muscles to respond to the movement my brain is asking of them. Together, our goal is to help my muscles reach the same lengthened, softened, primed state I need them to be in while carrying out the acts of daily living, which for me include training and playing.