The TB12 Method Read online

  Over several occasions at the MIT Media Lab, researchers measured the amount of force Alex and I both exerted during a typical pliability session. They found that when Alex uses his hands, he exerts anywhere from fifty to one hundred newtons of pressure—newtons are a unit of force—and when he uses his elbows, it goes up to four times that amount. (Certain muscles may require fifty newtons, others four hundred. It depends on the density of the muscle.) In response, I make two muscle contractions every second. Four hundred newtons is the equivalent of ninety pounds of pressure on one muscle group at a time. That’s pliable.

  When athletes get injured, they shouldn’t blame their sport—or their age. Injuries happen when our bodies are unable to absorb or disperse the amount of force placed on them. If our bodies can handle that force, it doesn’t matter what sport we play or how old we are. That’s why age isn’t my problem!

  TRAINING THE BRAIN

  The brain is composed of tens of billions of cells called neurons, which make connections with other neurons. These connections are called synapses, and our brains contain hundreds of trillions of them. Whenever we learn something new, these synapses thicken, increase, and connect to other neurons to strengthen what we’ve just learned. The stronger those synapses, and the more neurons they call on, the better our brains can store and retrieve information. To create stronger, faster connections in our brains, we need to practice a habit, skill, or behavior again and again. In turn, our brains generate synapses linked to that habit, skill, or behavior, and call on them anytime we do that thing. The more we practice that habit, skill, or behavior, the more automatically our brains recognize it. Thanks to neuroplasticity—that is, the brain’s ability to keep growing, changing, and learning throughout life—pliability retrains the brain by introducing new behavior patterns—in this case, the lengthening and softening of our muscles. Over time, the brain and body realize that this is how we want our muscles to behave as they carry out the jobs we’re asking them to do.

  TRAIN YOUR BRAIN, CHANGE YOUR BODY

  Earlier I wrote that pliability is different from massage. In what way? The key to pliability is stimulating and reeducating the brain by creating new neural pathways. Massage by itself doesn’t do that because it’s passive. There’s no contraction of your muscles through movement, which means the brain doesn’t understand that your muscles need to stay in a long, soft, primed state. Therefore, no muscle pump function takes place. After getting a typical massage, for a few hours or possibly a day most people feel better, thanks to increased blood flow and a big rush of endorphins. Then they go back to doing what they were doing before. Their brains and muscles haven’t learned anything, because no real education has taken place. Static massage doesn’t educate muscles. Only positive-intentional trauma through pliability does that.

  The goal of pliability is to evoke a positive neural response in my body before a workout. This process is called neural priming. When I receive targeted, deep-force work on one of my muscles, I’m forcing my brain to create connections between its neurons and to forge new neuropathways. By doing this again and again, the amount of input my brain neurons need in order to fire up my muscles—whether I do that through working out, running on a treadmill, or using resistance bands—becomes automatic. That’s why Alex likes to quote the axiom Neurons that fire together wire together.

  Thanks to pliability, as the season goes on, I actually begin to feel better, since my brain–body connection gets stronger around the daily functions I’m asking each of them to do. In the off-season, by contrast, with my workouts varying from week to week, it’s harder, and my body is actually more sore than it is during the season. My muscles never get good and truly primed for movement. My guess is that the off-season is when many football players neural-prime their way to getting injured during the season. That’s why I’ve changed my own off-season training to replicate, as best as I possibly can, what I do during the season.

  Whether you’re eighteen or eighty years old, you can attain a higher state of pliability. This means that your muscles are firing at 100 percent, evenly, and that there’s reduced load in your muscles. If a college athlete comes into the TB12 Sports Therapy Center looking for sustained peak performance, in general Alex will tell him it takes about thirty days to notice a difference. After twelve months, that athlete will notice huge leaps. I just turned forty, but I feel like I’m thirty.

  PLIABILITY BASICS

  Most of us are born with adequate amounts of pliability, and some people are born with more pliability than others. As I said earlier, in childhood, adolescence, and into our twenties, our bodies and muscles keep generating plenty of collagen, and this innate pliability accelerates our recovery from exertion and injury. Our blood is oxygen-rich. Our muscles contract and relax evenly, at 100 percent. We’re pliable pretty much all the time.

  But as our bodies undergo one negative traumatic experience after the next—falls, scrapes, and injuries, as well as heavy weight training and overload—our natural pliability begins to deteriorate. We focus on strength and conditioning, not realizing that our pliability is slowly running out. Even if we’ve been active our whole lives, we all notice a decrease in our pliability starting when we’re in our mid-twenties. It becomes harder and harder to work out the way we once did. Our bodies may still be creating and storing collagen, but they’re less able to break down and metabolize the lactic acid that begins to accumulate and calcify in our muscles. By the age of fifty or sixty, we have roughly 50 percent less pliability and muscle function than we did when we were in our twenties. And unless we do pliability training, we won’t ever get 100 percent muscle contraction, which circulates oxygen-rich blood from muscle group to muscle group.

  COLLAGEN

  Collagen is the most abundant protein in the body. Found mostly in our skin, bones, and connective tissue, it gives our bodies strength, structure, and elasticity. When we are young, our bodies create and regenerate collagen easily. But as we age, our collagen production declines, and the proteins that make up collagen become more rigid. The result is less elasticity in the skin, organs, and muscles, longer recovery times, and muscular stiffness and soreness. Thanks in part to our natural collagen levels, we don’t need as much pliability when we’re young as we do when we’re older—which explains why younger athletes naturally focus on building up their strength. But beginning in our mid-twenties, we need to find a balance between strength, conditioning, and pliability to compensate for the collagen that we lose over time.

  Right now, at this point in my career, and speaking structurally, I’m as balanced as I’ve ever been. I feel like my muscles fire evenly and at 100 percent. I’m not overbuilt in any one area, which gives me huge advantages on the field. A lot of the time I’ll be playing against athletes who are structurally imbalanced. They have traded pliability for overstrengthening or overconditioning, and I believe they have a higher probability of getting injured. I’m blessed to have both experience and durability.

  PLIABILITY BY AGE

  Our need for pliability depends not just on our job or function but also on our age and our goals. There are big physical differences between a twenty-two-year-old and a forty-year-old. For example, at age forty, I have eighteen years of strength on the average twenty-two-year-old player. But the twenty-two-year-old has more natural pliability than I do in the form of collagen, which gives his body strength, support, and structure—basically, he has more tread on his tires. Ideally, athletes should begin pliability at the same time they begin strength training. In general, a twenty-two-year-old athlete needs more strength and conditioning than a forty-year-old athlete, and a player my age needs more pliability than he needs strength and conditioning. That’s why today my workouts consist of 25 percent strengthening, 25 percent conditioning—and 50 percent pliability. If I were twenty-two again, I would devote a quarter of my workout to pliability and the rest to strengthening and conditioning.

  One of the advantages I have over younger athletes is that
at age forty, I’m pliable and I have experience. Younger athletes have natural pliability but fewer seasons under their belts than I do. If I can negate their natural advantage, I’m in a great competitive position, both physically and in terms of experience. As long as I remain pliable, they can’t catch me—and that’s why I made the shift to the workouts I do today.

  The good news for athletes who aren’t twenty-two anymore? You’re never too old to get the benefits of pliability: 100 percent contraction in all your muscles, which in turn allows for greater blood oxygen levels. The greater your blood oxygen levels, the more fully your muscles can expand and contract. The better your muscles can expand and contract, the better your lymph system is able to flush toxins from your system. The result will be healthy—and pliable—muscles, along with energy and vitality.

  Reflecting in my office, 2017.

  You’ll also be surprised by the effects pliability can have on everyday injuries and conditions. Thanks to oxygen-rich blood infusing every muscle in your body, optimal pliability allows for ongoing regeneration. Strength training (without pliability), on the other hand, creates tight, dense, stiff muscles, limited muscle expansion and contraction, less oxygen-rich blood, and overall degeneration. Over time, this unhealthy environment leads to injury—which in turn leads to less muscle pump function, less oxygenation, and less rejuvenation. Unfortunately, this is what aging currently looks like for 99.9 percent of the world.

  Some injuries are just part of the job, and beyond the control of any athlete. Take, for example, a hip pointer, when you get a direct blow to your hip bone. That’s a line-of-duty injury, and often difficult to avoid. But some other injuries, like muscle strains, are, in my experience, most likely avoidable if you are committed to pliability and its amplifiers. If you play football or another sport in which you know you’ll get hit every week, before getting into that collision, you’d better start thinking, How am I going to prepare my body before it gets hit? What you do on and off the field in terms of developing and maintaining your pliability is critical to helping prevent injury and lowering the chances of injury when you do get hit.

  INFLAMMATION: A PRIMER

  In the sport I play, I know I’m going to get hit. There is going to be trauma, and my body will naturally create trauma responses to ease the pain and soreness after every game. Even if our thoughts and emotions play no part in generating inflammation—but in fact they do!—if you play any kind of sport at any level, it’s a given that you’ll end up with some degree of inflammation. So let’s take a closer look at what inflammation means.

  There are two kinds—acute inflammation and chronic inflammation. Acute inflammation, which lasts only a few days, is a natural response of our bodies’ immune system. When we get injured, the body sends in small proteins, known as cytokines, that fence off the affected area and clean away the damaged cells while circulating oxygen, nutrients, and antibodies that help our bodies deal with infection and accelerate healing and recovery. Along with helping our blood clot, these natural proteins trigger the pain, swelling, and high temperatures that go along with recovery.

  Chronic inflammation, on the other hand, happens when the body is continually sending out the same white blood cells and cytokines in response to what it perceives as a threat. These white blood cells and cytokines have no idea they’re targeting healthy muscles or their tissues. They’re only doing what they’re supposed to do. The thing is, our bodies aren’t designed to deal with everyday inflammation responses, and over time our white blood cells can begin degrading our organs and our bones. Low-level everyday inflammation is thought to play a part in some long-term diseases and conditions. There’s also the inflammation that takes place in the gut that can interfere with how we absorb nutrients like calcium and vitamin D, which help keep our bones healthy.

  Inflammation is inevitable when you do what I do for a living. Every workout I do causes microscopic damage to my muscle fibers that typically goes away after a period of recovery. At forty, my goal is to reduce inflammation in my body any way I can through pliability, and with the help of other amplifiers I’ll be talking about later in this book. Stacking inflammation in the form of poor nutrition, alcohol, etc., is in my mind not sustainable if your goal is to maximize your potential.

  Alex and I believe pliability can meaningfully help cure a lot of common sports injuries, including tennis elbow, plantar fasciitis, lower back pain, and many others—including breaking down scar tissue or preventing it from building up in the first place—and minimizing inflammation from surgeries.

  TENNIS ELBOW occurs when a player strains the tendon that connects the forearm to the elbow joint. Why has the tendon been strained, generally? Because an accumulation of excess tension has been placed on it. Therefore, the tendon becomes overloaded over a period of time. The solution is pliability, and the lengthening and softening of all the muscle groups in the arm to create balance. Once the muscles are balanced, as well as soft, long, and primed through the daily functional movements the brain asks the elbow to perform, the tension goes away.

  PLANTAR FASCIITIS is the inflammation of the ligament band connecting the heel bone to the toes, which causes a lot of pain and discomfort. (It can result from simply wearing shoes with bad heels.) Doctors often prescribe wearing a boot to stretch out the fascia. At TB12, the problem can usually be solved by the lengthening and softening of the plantar fascia through pliability sessions. We have seen this injury very often, and have been successful in treating it and getting our clients back to full strength after only a few sessions.

  Then there’s LOWER BACK PAIN. Doctors and therapists usually prescribe rest, ice, and back-strengthening exercises. But strengthening tight muscles that cause compression, and that result in lower back pain, is not the solution. What they rarely do is target the psoas muscles, or hip flexors, that correlate to lumbar compression. Again, by lengthening and softening the psoas muscles and the muscles of the back, pliability will usually get rid of back pain entirely.

  In all three of the examples above, the answer to relieving pain is through pliability. Long, soft, primed muscles will not cause elbow pain, foot pain, or back pain. Once the muscles are pliable and balance is restored in those muscle groups, that’s when you strengthen them.

  Doing self-pliability on my right triceps—again in the direction of the heart. As you may realize, I always spend adequate time on my right arm.

  Q & A

  Does Pliability Hurt?

  Some people who try pliability for the first time say that they experience a degree of discomfort during and after their first few sessions. A good analogy is weight lifting. If you’ve never lifted weights, after the first weight training sessions, you’ll probably be sore. But over time, that soreness goes away. (Weight lifting, I know, is a bad example, but it’s a good analogy that most people can relate to.) In general, whether or not you feel discomfort after pliability depends on how healthy your muscles are—or how dense they are. If they’re dry and dehydrated, pliability may take some getting used to, since without adequate hydration, or optimal muscle pump function, the muscles of the body are tight, dense, and stiff. That means it’s harder to lengthen and soften them. But the more you lengthen and soften your muscles through pliability, the easier it gets. You can’t lengthen and soften your muscles in one day. It takes time, and you need to go step-by-step. It’s not about adding yet another time commitment to your day—it’s about dividing up your time more intelligently. The key to pliability is repetition and consistency.

  Are Women More Naturally Pliable than Men?

  No. The idea of pliability is to get the body’s muscles to function and fire at 100 percent so that they can perform as well as possible the acts you’re asking them to do. Whether you run twelve miles every day, play tennis, or do yoga, the inflammation rates for men and women are the same.

  How Long Does It Take to Turn Muscles into Pliable Muscles?

  It depends on the person, their age, and on how dense thei
r muscles are. The denser your muscles, the harder it is to make them pliable. In general, a consistent regimen will take anywhere from a week to a month. At a TB12 Sports Therapy Center, we would expect to see significant change in two treatments.

  Should I Wait Until I Get Injured to Start Pliability?

  No. I understand why some athletes might believe that pliability is a post-injury thing, but you should begin doing it now to prevent injuries—or strains or tears that could lead to injury—in the future. After all, I met with Alex only when the pain in my arm and shoulder was becoming intolerable. Most of us don’t want to spend time preventing things that haven’t happened yet. But the foundation of pliability is that it prevents athletes from getting hurt in the first place. We have learned to strengthen. Now we need to learn to lengthen and soften in order to create balance.

  Starting at the wrist and always stroking upward toward my elbow in the direction of my heart, I’m practicing self-pliability in order to soften the muscles of my forearm to remove any tension on my elbow. This is very important for a right-handed athlete.