by Tom Brady
I undergo many of the exact same treatments every time. The process of lengthening and softening my muscles is predictable and repetitive. The only time the routine varies is if I’ve been traveling or doing things that have made my muscles tighten, stiffen, and grow dense, or if I’m focusing on a muscle that’s been damaged from impact (say, my shoulder) or a body part such as my leg. Otherwise, the process of pliability is very routine. If I’m overbuilt, or dense, in one area, that’s when I know I need to lengthen and soften the muscles in question. If I’ve done a lot of chest workouts with bands, that will make my muscles dense. When I start to throw, I can tell that I’m not as fluid as I should be, which means that I’ve overbuilt those muscles. The solution is to rebalance those muscles by lengthening and softening them.
As I said, I do pliability both before and after a full workout, but each session is slightly different in its purpose. In the before part of pliability, I’m training my muscles to stay long, soft, and primed during the workout I’m about to put them through. If you think about it, a runner doesn’t just show up on a track and run a 100-yard sprint. First he primes his muscles—and the before part of pliability does the same thing for me.
Next comes the point where I stop doing pliability and begin my actual workout. I may work on drop-backs or throwing mechanics. I may run or swim or do strength training. If I’m at the TB12 Sports Therapy Center, I’ll do a full-body workout using resistance bands, trying to activate 100 percent muscle pump function in every part of my body—feet, ankles, shins, quads, glutes, core, shoulders, arms, neck, and so on—maintaining full muscle pump function through full range of motion.
Right at the point in the workout when my arm or leg muscles start to tire, I’ll stop working out and finish with another pliability session—but there’s a small difference. During the after session of pliability, I’m focused mostly on flushing out lactic acid to facilitate lymph movement, allowing more oxygenated blood to rejuvenate my muscles. The strokes are similar, but there’s less force and less speed as I contract and relax my muscles. Again, I’m training my brain to store what my muscles have just learned. What have they learned? They’ve learned to be long, soft, and primed through intense training movements—the same movements I use in games. That’s what ideal training looks like to me.
At TB12, we look at things through four different lenses.
1) Am I increasing oxygenation?
2) Am I reducing inflammation?
3) Am I optimizing pliability?
4) Are my goals aligned with my training regimen?
I go through this process again and again. In this way, my brain learns new habits and responses, and by remaining in a lengthened, softened, primed state, my muscles are much less likely to get hurt. Why? Because when my body comes up against force—say, two defenders trying to tackle me—my muscles can more easily absorb and disperse that force. Imagine the alternative, where, say, three of my muscles are responsible for absorbing force, but two of them are so dense that they can’t contract and relax fully, and therefore can’t evenly absorb and disperse the impact. That means the remaining muscle, the weakest in the chain, so to speak, takes the full brunt of the impact. This muscle becomes overloaded with force—and that overload often results in an acute injury.
As I’ve stated repeatedly, pliability is the game changer and should be incorporated by all athletes at all ages if they want to try to avoid injury and sustain their own peak performance. In the end, doing pliability is about training smarter. Over the years, I’ve made a proactive choice to reallocate the time I used to spend doing wind sprints, running up hills, and lifting weights to getting daily pliability instead. I credit the pliability I’ve done with the fact that, except for my 2008 ACL injury, I’ve played the past seventeen seasons without significant injury.
Now I’ll explain pliability step-by-step, beginning with what our brains and our bodies store, and why.
HOW A BRAIN LEARNS
Our brains are the central processing centers for what our bodies do and how we live. That includes how our muscles move, respond, and behave. Our brains communicate with our muscles via nerve cells called neurons. Neurons connect to a specific muscle—the glute, the hamstring, the biceps, and so on. When I pick a football up off the ground, it may look straightforward, but the act of picking up a ball is the result of a lot of brain–body coordination. Before I reach down, a neuron in my brain fires, causing a neuron in my spinal cord to fire. My spinal cord relays a series of impulses that travel down one side of that neuron to my shoulder, arm, and hand muscles. My muscle fibers shorten and grow dense. Once I pick up the ball, they go back to their relaxed position. The whole operation—impulse to pick up the ball, neuron firing, chemical impulses, short, dense muscles—takes place in an instant.
Human behavior is either innate, or instinctual—like smiling, laughing, or crying—or else it’s learned, meaning it comes from our personal experience. In both cases, our brains and bodies memorize and store that behavior or those patterns.
When we’re young, and in our teens and early twenties, we’re at the peak of good health. Our bodies are extremely pliable. They have plenty of collagen, which helps our muscles contract and relax fully and evenly. We also recover quickly. As time goes on, our brains and bodies begin accumulating both negative and positive habits, experiences, and traumas, which our brains store in their neural pathways. Imagine that you fell off your bike when you were a kid, or you injured a muscle playing a sport in high school. Your brain stores that traumatic event in its neural pathways, and the memory of that event, conscious or unconscious, determines how your body responds to any future movement related to that muscle or bone or tendon. It doesn’t matter whether the event took place one year ago or ten years ago. It’s now a muscle memory.
That’s why if you start running up hills and doing wind sprints and lifting heavy weights in high school, as most athletes do, over time the brain locks in these habits and movements, and they become learned behaviors that teach your body how you want your muscles to function—reinforced by the fact that every other athlete is doing the same thing. You won’t change those behaviors until the negative trauma is replaced by the positive traumas of pliability training. Say that you ask your body to lift heavy weights. Then you ask it to run and cut. Then throw. Then rest. By training your body to do a lot of different things, it can get confused. That’s why the more we train our bodies to do the tasks specific to the sports we play, or to our daily acts of living, the less our brains have to learn, and the less our bodies have to adjust.
LYMPHATIC SYSTEM
The lymphatic system is a network of tissues, vessels, and organs that serves as a kind of vacuum cleaner inside our bodies. The lymph system cleanses and helps eliminate toxins, wastes, and other unwanted substances by draining a colorless, clear fluid, known as lymph, from our tissues and funneling it back into the bloodstream, always in the direction of the heart. It also helps our bodies maintain fluid balance and absorb fats and nutrients. Pliability—as well as optimal muscle pump function—facilitates the expulsion of lymph from our body’s tissues, leading to healthier, stronger muscles.
BODY IMBALANCES
Many of the clients who come into the TB12 Sports Therapy Center for the first time have no idea their bodies are imbalanced, and that their muscles aren’t contracting evenly, at 100 percent. Often the underlying issue is an imbalance.
Body imbalances, which can come from the acts of everyday life—walking, running, working out, wearing the wrong shoes, and so forth—are extremely common. Bear in mind that the muscles in our body are designed to support our structures. Muscles aren’t for strength, and they’re not for show. Their function is to protect our bones and to contract, which gives us the strength to move. Imagine you get a charley horse, in which your muscles go into spasm for several seconds, accompanied by severe pain. Or, in my case, imagine that during a game an opponent runs at full speed and smashes his helmet into my thigh (it happe
ns!), injuring my quad muscle. Aware that something is wrong, my brain sends a message to the muscles surrounding my quad muscle. It tells them to contract and become tight, dense, and stiff. In effect, my brain is telling those muscles to create a natural splint to support and protect my injured quad, and to keep it from hyperextending even more, at least until the bruise in my quad goes away.
There are certain players who just love being in the weight room. Picture a guy who’s getting ready to do his last squat. The music is blaring. The whole team is huddled around him. When he gets underneath the bar and does that squat, the whole weight room is cheering. By lifting that weight, basically that player is saying to his teammates, “I’m going to get the job done, whatever it takes.” That’s great for everyone’s mental toughness, and it’s also great for team camaraderie. It’s almost embedded in who we are as athletes. But if a player really loves doing those kinds of exercises because they make him feel good and he gets rewarded for them, he’d better work just as hard on pliability.
The problem is, with my quad muscle no longer firing, and the other muscles in my body stepping in to compensate for that injured quad, my body becomes imbalanced. With my quad muscle no longer firing, it goes flat. It won’t contract and relax at 100 percent. As a result, that nonfunctioning quad muscle—and the coordination of my right leg—can end up impairing my hip, my knee, my ankle, and my foot. Basically, all the other muscles in my body, with the exception of my quad, have to work harder to accomplish what my brain is asking my body to do.
Many of the workouts I do are specific to the things I want to really excel at. The key is doing pliability before and after any workout, sport, or activity. If you skip pre- and post-pliability, you increase your chances of getting hurt. Doing pliability is like creating a built-in immune system for sports injuries.
As with the example I gave earlier of a child falling off his bike, imbalances are often the result of unhealed injuries. Imagine a time when you hurt your back lifting a heavy box. You are told to rest by not lifting anything for the next few days and applying ice until your back starts to feel better. You probably will feel better—but the question is, do you ever actually get better? No, because you haven’t changed your brain’s response in relation to how you hurt your back in the first place. You hurt your back lifting that heavy box because your back muscles became overloaded by the excess amount of force you were exerting on them. Unless you retrain your brain and your muscles through pliability to understand that your back muscles should respond to lifting the box in an optimal, more efficient way, your back will still be overloaded—and you’ll have a greater chance of reinjury. To try to avoid reinjuring your back while lifting the same heavy box, you need to balance all the muscle groups that are supposed to work through that particular movement. The point is, the only way to create a change in your brain is by creating a positive and intentional traumatic experience through pliability sessions. Bottom line: no real healing will ever take place in your body unless the brain and the body work together.
Working with a medicine ball to improve strength and conditioning.
Working with Alex to absorb forces and stresses that can be unpredictable.
It’s important to engage your core in all aspects of life at all times. In this exercise, I’m strengthening my core by adding band resistance through rotation.
Most people with imbalances have gotten good at doing things badly, whether it’s walking, running, or playing football. Some daily acts of living are unconscious. We walk, run, and sit with imbalances. Multiply that by thousands, or millions, and that’s a lot of compensation and overload, often resulting in injury. For example, before I met Alex, the muscles in my throwing arm had lost their natural pliability. They’d lost optimal muscle pump function. They were contracting and relaxing at, say, 50 percent. It was a vicious cycle: My arm muscles were so tight that they could no longer fully contract and relax. Deprived of sufficient blood and oxygenation, they couldn’t heal. Why weren’t they getting sufficient blood and oxygenation? Because they couldn’t contract and relax. The only solution was pliability, the lengthening and softening of my arm muscles, which gave that arm the ability to fully contract and relax, with 100 percent muscle pump function, and allowed for great recovery.
LACTIC ACID
Whenever we exercise, our muscles require greater amounts of oxygen. Sometimes we exercise so hard that our circulatory system can’t keep up with our body’s demands. In order to maintain the oxygen that our muscles need, a switch takes place. The body transitions from what’s known as aerobic metabolism to another state, known as anaerobic metabolism. That’s when our bodies begin breaking down our stored glucose and converting it to lactic acid, otherwise known as lactate. This lactate is then used to replenish muscular energy. Even after intense exercise, lactate normally leaves our bodies over time, naturally or through perspiration—but pliability expedites the elimination of that lactate and helps restore the body to a less acidic, more naturally alkaline condition.
Over the years, a lot of quarterbacks have told me they want to change their technique. The thing is, their brains may want to change, but until they make a brain–body connection with pliability, their muscles won’t allow it. A big part of my ongoing improvement with throwing mechanics comes from the daily pliability work I do. Because I’m making those connections between my brain and my body, my muscles can make the mechanical changes that help me throw the ball better and move more efficiently in the pocket. The bottom line? Whatever changes I want to make in my throwing mechanics, I can. I train my brain to ask my muscles to work differently. This can only be achieved through pliability treatments—positive, intentional trauma that causes new learned behaviors.
MUSCLE MEMORY
Aerobic activity, or sprinting, followed by weight lifting, is the core of the traditional strength and conditioning model. In strength training, when you bench press two hundred pounds, what exactly are you training your muscles to do? The answer: to contract hard, to remain tight, dense, and stiff, and to brace the heavy weight that your body is up against. Not only are you training your body but you’re also teaching your brain that tight, dense, and stiff is the optimal condition of your muscles, based on the function of lifting weights. The problem is, if you are playing in a game a few days later and a lineman tackles you, it’s possible that those same tight, dense, stiff muscles will lead to a torn muscle or a broken bone, because your body couldn’t absorb the forces in a balanced way. Those two hundred pounds that you’ve been bench pressing have come at the expense of lengthened, softened, primed muscles that could have dispersed that hit. As it stands in the weight lifting example above, an arm or a leg in a constant state of contraction, which won’t bend easily, has very little function on the field—except for, say, certain positions that brace against a lot of incoming weight. That’s not to say we don’t need strength—we need optimal strength to remain balanced—but more than that, we need pliability to complement that strength, in order to increase our durability.
Bottom line: Whatever messages our brains send to our muscles, and that our muscles send to our brains, will be stored in the brain’s neural pathways. Negative traumas are stored there until they are challenged and replaced by the positive traumas we experience through pliability treatments.
NEGATIVE VERSUS POSITIVE TRAUMA
Trauma is a loaded word, and I want to explain what I mean by it. I don’t believe the body differentiates between kinds of trauma. All it knows is that it has experienced an external force that’s causing a response in the body and the brain. Most players will say there’s a difference between positive and negative trauma. One happens in practice, or in the weight room, when you incur excessive amounts of force from running, cutting, or lifting. This can also happen in a game. Still, the only thing your muscles know is that they’re contracting to absorb forces—and contracting hard.
The body may not discriminate between kinds of trauma, but for the purposes of pliability
, I do.
Of the two kinds of traumas, the one I describe above is called negative-unintentional. It’s usually the result of an injury that is sometimes beyond a player’s control—slipping and falling, a bike crash, etc. The second kind of trauma, which creates pliable muscles, is called positive-intentional. During both negative-unintentional and positive-intentional cases, the brain and the body experience forces that are unfamiliar. And the brain stores these forces as muscle memory in order to protect its structure.
However, the positive-intentional trauma exerted on me through targeted, deep-force muscle work during pliability trains my body and brain to deal with the negative-unintentional traumas that I face in games, practice, or any other environment that’s beyond my control. Through positive-intentional trauma, I create neural pathways that improve my body’s ability to deal with the stresses of the sport I play.
As a result of the positive-intentional trauma I get from doing pliability, my muscles learn to stay long, soft, and primed, and are able to handle whatever comes my way on or off the field. Why? Because they’re in a balanced state, which absorbs and disperses the force any one of my muscles takes at any one time. As I said earlier, when I stand in the pocket, I never know when I’m going to be hit. The moment an opposing player’s helmet makes contact with my body, my body is able to absorb that hit thanks to daily pliability. Throughout the movement my muscles remain long, soft, and primed. Whatever impact I experience is absorbed and dispersed evenly throughout many muscle groups, and not just the specific area where I got hit.
