Tom Brady's Muscle Pliability

Every month Amazon sells about 500 copies of Tom Brady's book
The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance

TB as you may have guessed stands for "Tom Brady".

Not discussing the content of the book, on the whole, let's move on to one interesting concept which Tom Brady talks about.

It is so-called

Muscle Pliability

On TB12's website, you can read: "Pliable muscles are softer, longer and more resilient: they help insulate the body against injury and accelerate post-injury recovery".

Brady told the Times, "If there's so much pressure, just constant tugging on your tendons and ligaments, you're going to get hurt. Like with a kid, when they fall, they don't get hurt. Their muscles are soft. When you get older, you lose that."

In fact, it's quite an ambiguous term which you will not find in any textbooks or resources devoted to the topics ranging from sports medicine to athletic training. You'll find only few results in internet and all of them will be related to Tom Brady.

However, what seems interesting is Brady's unique massage techniques.

So how does one make a muscle more pliable? Guerrero, Brady's coach, massages the targeted muscle tissues with high levels of force in the direction of the fibers toward the belly of the muscle for about 20 seconds. While he's doing this, Brady quickly contracts and relaxes that muscle. For example, if Guerrero workes on Brady's biceps, Brady quickly bends and straightens his arm. This helps the nervous system learn to keep the muscle in the desired long and "soft" state.

Brady assures it's possible to work on muscle pliability without a coach. His recommendation is working on the important muscle groups with a foam roller or your own hands and fingers if you're on the road.

Eventually, we can come to an understanding of muscle pliability workout. As Brady has put it: "Alex and I define pliability training as targeted, deep-force muscle work that lengthens and softens muscles at the same time those muscles are rhythmically contracted and relaxed."

So, pliability training is a deep tissue massage or self-myofascial release (SMR) combined with rapid muscle contractions.

For that case, one can find more than useful a utilization of Muscle Floss Bands.

And if the techniques in the article by the link above are more related to joint mobility, here are a few tips for making a work more SMR related:

1. Wrap the muscle closer to a muscle belly (you play with band positioning).
2. Slowly move the limb until you feel a stretching feeling inside the muscle, let's call it a 'barrier'.
3. Stop in that postition and wait until a stretching feeling "melts away". For that purpose you have to breathe in full and in a relaxed manner. It usually takes 30-90 seconds for a pain to "melt away".
4. Try to go beyond 'the barrier'. This shouldn't be painful.

SMR Work on Calf Muscle

It's just an example video. Unfortunately, there is no proper demonstration of points 2-4. You are welcomed to try. Play with the extent of compression. It don't necesserily has to be large. Sometimes, the less is more.

Go to this link to buy the bands ►  Muscle Pliability Bands