The TB12 Method Page 4
It was the second game of the season—the first after the September 11 terrorist attacks. A hot, humid night in New England. The Patriots were playing the New York Jets, and the Jets were up 10–3. I wasn’t expecting to play that day; we had a great leader in Drew Bledsoe, our starting QB for the previous nine seasons. But five minutes before the game ended, on third and ten, Drew was chased out of the pocket by Jets defensive end Shaun Ellis and collided on the sidelines with their linebacker Mo Lewis. It was one of the loudest hits I can ever remember hearing. When Drew left the field, Coach Belichick called me into the game. Everything was happening fast, and the only thing I could do was react to the moment. Despite the fact that I had played only minimal minutes the prior season, it just felt like football—like something I’d done many times before. Although I was sad to see Drew hurt, I didn’t want to let down the team by playing poorly.
During my rookie season, and even during the 2001 season, I never could have imagined the injury to Drew and how that would affect my opportunity to play. All I knew for sure was that if I got a chance, that was all I was going to need—even though the only reason I got that chance was that one of my teammates got hurt. It wasn’t until a few days later that we all learned Drew had suffered a very serious injury and would be sidelined for most of the season. We lost that game against the Jets, but it turned out to be a Cinderella season for the Patriots organization, and for me as well. For the next fourteen games, I was the quarterback, and we went 11-3. During the playoffs that year, our placekicker, Adam Vinatieri, made a few unbelievable field goals—two during a game we played in a blizzard against Oakland, and a third, game-winning one when, as underdogs, we beat the defending Super Bowl champions, the St. Louis Rams—aka the Greatest Show on Turf—in Super Bowl XXXVI.
Celebrating our comeback at the 2017 Super Bowl. I was pretty fired up!
That part was good, and even amazing. But as time went on, three or four years into my Patriots career, I’d gotten more conditioned than ever to the fact that no matter what I did, my arm and shoulder were going to be hurting. By 2004, at age twenty-seven, I was pretty much constantly aware of the wear and tear on my body. Twenty-seven may sound young, but by their late twenties, most athletes who’ve played contact sports their whole lives come up against injuries and imbalances in their bodies among strength, conditioning, and pliability.
We’re all born naturally pliable, which is why we focus on strength building and conditioning in our teens and twenties. But as our natural pliability diminishes with age, we become more aware of the toll that maximum—versus optimal—strength training takes on our bodies. In my case, that meant more pain. More soreness. More stiffness. Longer and longer recovery times. Why? I was plenty strong, but my pliability was running out—and running out to the point where the pain I was experiencing wouldn’t allow me to play the sport I loved to play.
Sometime during the 2004 training season, one of my teammates, Willie McGinest, saw me taking time off practice and took me aside. Like me, Willie was from California, and he’d played college ball at USC. He was a linebacker, one of the most talented players on the team, and a major contributor to our Super Bowl wins in 2001, 2003, and 2004. Willie had a certain aura and charisma about him—he was “the Godfather” of the locker room—and he’d always been like an older brother to me. Seeing what was happening, Willie suggested I meet with his body coach, who at the time was Alex Guerrero. Without that meeting, the TB12 Method would never have come to exist.
When Willie recommended that you do something, you did it. Still, to be honest, I didn’t expect much of anything. Alex may have come highly recommended, but what could any trainer or coach do that was different from what I’d been doing since high school, which is to say use ice and rest, then play and do everything I could to avoid injury and rehab, all while keeping up my strength and conditioning, while getting the same unsatisfactory results every time? I had nothing to lose, but still, it took a lot of nudging. I thought I had all the answers already. A sore throwing arm didn’t necessarily mean the end of my career, but I was beginning to wonder whether I could continue to play in pain until the day my body just gave out. But was that any kind of real solution? Looking back, I wasn’t in enough pain to realize I needed to change what I was doing. Finally, when Willie said to me, “Dude, you can’t practice; you can’t even move your elbow,” I said okay and booked a session with Alex the next time he was in town.
Alex grew up in California and studied traditional Chinese medicine in college. Since 1996, he’d been working at his rehabilitation facility in Los Angeles, where he worked with a wide range of athletes across all sports. He came east for six days every month to work with Willie and other players, and on one of those trips the two of us met up at Willie’s house. In those days, nobody was doing anything close to what Alex was doing. Sports medicine and athletic performance went hand in hand but were segmented, with a strength trainer doing one thing, a position coach doing another thing, and a massage therapist doing something else entirely. Alex, on the other hand, had spent his life and career studying and combining Eastern and Western perspectives and creating a holistic, mind-body approach to sports performance and well-being. His commitment to his clients was obvious. If I got hurt, it hurt Alex to see me hurt. The recovery he and I later engineered following my ACL injury really cemented our relationship, and over time we developed a set of principles that have become the foundation of my performance training.
When we met, Alex immediately began zeroing in on my tendonitis by using targeted, deep-force muscle work in a way no one ever had before. Mind you, I had been getting massage, cold treatments, hot treatments, ultrasound, electrostimulation treatments, ART, chiropractic work, stretching, and everything else in between for more than fifteen years from various athletic training staffs. The first treatment with Alex began my understanding of what pliability was. Explaining that my elbow tendon was inflamed, Alex spent the next hour lengthening and softening the muscles surrounding my elbow joint, as well as icing only my inflamed elbow tendon, using a mixture of instinct, know-how, and experience. As he continued lengthening and softening my muscles, the pain and tension in my elbow slowly dissipated. Why? Because by lengthening and softening my biceps, my triceps, and the muscles of my forearm that were tugging on my tendon, Alex was removing the tension from that tendon. My tendon no longer had to work so hard to stabilize my elbow joint. My muscles could now work in a more relaxed, optimal state. If I kept on with this form of treatment during the upcoming season, Alex promised that my tendonitis would continue to improve. It made so much sense to me. I began to wonder why this wouldn’t be true for all the muscles in my body. By removing tension from all of my joints, by lengthening and softening all of my muscles, my whole body would function in a more optimal way, and would be better able to disperse the forces I faced on and off the field.
Twenty-four hours later, after another treatment, I could feel the difference in my elbow. Forty-eight hours later, after two more treatments, the improvement in my elbow was even more noticeable. Over the next two weeks, as I kept working with Alex in a methodical way that soon became a routine, the pain and soreness in my elbow and shoulder was better by half. Anybody who was in tune with his or her body and had experienced the intensity of pain I had in my elbow and shoulder year after year, and felt the pain go from a 10 (max) down to a 5 (moderate) after only a few treatments, would have told you the same thing. 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 of playing sports. Playing football for a living was like getting into a car crash every Sunday—a scheduled car crash—and I began developing a whole new understanding of what I was putting my body through every week, and the amounts of trauma my body was experiencing. I also started seeing Alex less as a body coach and more as a body engineer, someone who’s able
to determine the optimal balance between the stresses and loads placed on my body. 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.
Me and Alex at the TB12 Sports Therapy Center, 2017.
Adding resistance bands to my rotational movement improves my strength and maintains my pliability.
CHAPTER 2
WHAT I NOW BELIEVE
I SPENT THE 2004 AND 2005 seasons working with Alex. That is to say, we worked infrequently, two days every other week, as Alex was continuing to treat his other clients. That schedule worked for me back then, since I had more natural pliability and could get through a couple of weeks without seeing him, versus today, when he and I do pliability training four days a week. Together we created the strongest foundation of what we had started calling pliability—the daily lengthening and softening of the muscles in my shoulder and elbow, and, as time went on, all the other muscles in my body, too, through targeted, deep-force muscle work. Think of a deep, rigorous massage, but much more focused, and in my case using complex techniques based on an understanding of the biomechanics of what it takes for me to throw a football and function at peak levels as an athlete who accelerates, decelerates, runs, cuts, and more, as well as the daily acts of living that complement my off-field life.
The concept of pliability treatment as a key component of my training regimen didn’t arrive in one day, or one week; it has been an ongoing evolution. In effect, I had replaced injury and rehab with pliability and prehab. I began to take preventative measures against being in pain, or getting hurt, rather than waiting to get hurt before I did something about it. Pliability treatment, as I later saw it, wasn’t just a way of reeducating my body to understand that it could sustain impact while my muscles remained long, soft, and primed. Most important, it was a primary defense system against the cycle of injury and rehab that every athlete fears or experiences personally. I also knew that when the 2005 NFL season got under way, my shoulder and my elbow stayed pain-free; the more I threw, the better I felt; and I was absorbing hits a lot better as well. Why were Alex and I the only people who knew about this and were using it? I knew I had never seen it used in any locker room or training room I’d ever been in.
Until 2005, I never questioned the age-old strengthening-and-conditioning model—basically, lifting weights and sprinting. I never asked why coaches prescribed one shoulder exercise over another, or why I had to rest my arm for twenty-four or forty-eight hours after a game, or why weight training improved my on-field performance. Most athletic programs are built on that model—so why should I challenge it? For all I knew, the coaches and trainers were the experts. It didn’t occur to me, either, that something might be missing from that model.
Strengthening and conditioning work—I’m not saying they don’t—but if you asked coaches or trainers to explain why they work, few of them could give you a consistent answer, though they would all probably agree that it increased performance. It is just what athletes have always done. It wasn’t until I started working with Alex that I began thinking about the subject in a new way. Over the course of the following few seasons, everything changed for me, including a lot of my own entrenched belief systems. This is where discipline is important. As I say, I still believed in the importance of muscle strengthening and conditioning. We all need to focus on that daily or weekly. Athletes especially need it. But as I thought about creating a regimen that would lower the incidence and risk of injury over the long term and ensure sustained peak performance, I knew pliability treatment was the missing leg of the traditional model of strengthening and conditioning, and that it needed to be incorporated at every level. 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.
“Why doesn’t everyone know about this?” I kept asking Alex. The answer was that there was no education around it. Years and years of conversations with Alex ultimately led to the creation of our TB12 Sports Therapy Center in Foxborough, Massachusetts, in September 2013—our first location—and the focused, holistic regimen known as the TB12 Method, which for the past dozen years has transformed the way I train, work out, play football, eat, hydrate, supplement, recover, rest, manage my health, and live my life. The TB12 Method, which is geared toward a single purpose—achieving sustained peak performance—is my life, and I’m so happy to be sharing it with you.
Let me take you back a few years, though. I had an MVP-type year in 2007—the Patriots went 16-0, and we won the AFC Championship, though we lost the Super Bowl to the New York Giants—but in September 2008 I injured my knee. Players do whatever they can to steer clear of contact injuries, but that one I couldn’t have avoided. It happened during the Patriots’ season opener against the Kansas City Chiefs, on the second drive, fourteen plays into the game. On the fifteenth play, I dropped back, intending to throw the ball deep. I took a stride into my throw, and a defensive back on the ground lunged to tackle me. His helmet made contact with my left knee. My knee met with more force than it could absorb and disperse. The collision ended up shredding my ACL and MCL, and causing multiple bruises and a lot of swelling.
An ACL tear is a common football injury, and a tough injury for any athlete. Mine was a direct hit. My surgeon, Neal ElAttrache, who gave me the best possible care, told me I needed surgery, followed by anywhere from nine to twelve months of rehab and recovery in order for me to feel “back to normal.” On top of that, after the surgery I developed an infection in my knee that made my rehab even more of an uphill battle. It was a tough, challenging point of my career. Based on my injury and infection, I faced long odds of getting back to being the player that I was.
My ACL surgery and staph infection made it a challenging October, but Alex oversaw my rehab and recovery as well as my routine check-ins with Dr. ElAttrache and the Patriots’ training staff. Many hospitals, surgeons, and physical therapists have protocols they believe anyone recovering from ACL surgery should follow. No matter how old you are, how much you weigh, or what your level of athletic ability is, the procedures are really pretty similar: This is what we want you to do during Week 1. This is what we want you to do during Week 2, and so on. But Alex and I decided to complement what the doctors and trainers were telling us with our own methodology. Before long we were doing more than was recommended, plugging suggestions from, say, Week 6 into Week 4, and seeing how well my body felt and responded. More important, we resumed practicing the movements I make on the football field, those things I was rehabbing for—dropping back, handing the ball off, play-action passing, and throwing on the run. Mentally, it felt good to be back and preparing. Physically, it felt good to begin practicing what I would need to work on once the season started.
Working out at the TB12 Sports Therapy Center, 2017.
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.
To illustrate what happens during an injury, let’s look at what happened to me with my ACL. When I took a helmet to the knee, tearing my ACL and MCL, blood and lymph rushed to my injured knee. The muscles surrounding my knee contracted and tightened, creating a kind of natural splint as they tried to stabilize my knee and protect it from pain when I moved it. But they couldn’t, as it was already beyond natural repair. At that point, the damage was done. Over the next seven months, Alex and I focused on pliability to help reduce the discomfort I was feeling. We wanted to get back full muscle pump function—100 percent contraction and relaxation—in order to have my muscles suppo
rt all the actions I was asking them to make as part of my rehab process, which helped reduce the swelling and, in turn, the pain. 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. I should add that during my recovery I checked in regularly with Dr. ElAttrache, who told me my knee was coming along great. That’s one of the many things I’ve learned, and which is now a big part of the TB12 Method: we tailor our program to the individual. 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.
Since my ACL recovery—nine years ago—my knee hasn’t bothered or limited me a single day. In fact, two years ago I took a hit on my knee during a practice, requiring an MRI. The doctors who read the MRI joked afterward that my knee looked so healthy, they seriously doubted I played professional football. At that point, I’d been playing for almost twenty-five years. 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.