Listen to what Tom Brady has to say about muscle pliability!

Hi Everyone -

A lot of people are very excited that the Patriots won their 6th Superbowl, and rightly so, it is simply amazing!!!

I wanted to share some more information that Tom Brady has been sharing with his fellow Patriots for a couple of years that you might be interested in. Here's just one article (from May 2016 Business Insider) among many, regarding his focus on muscle pliabilty:

"The biggest issue is muscle pliability," Brady said. "That's what I think the biggest secret to me is."

"As Brady explained, muscle pliability is keeping muscles soft and long. It stands in contrast to lifting heavy weights, which shortens the muscles and makes them denser.

Brady then went into a long, rambling answer about why he views this as such an important part of his routine and his longevity:

We do so many exercises in the gym through all our strength training that make our muscles short and dense. So now you get up and you're doing all these active things where you're running and cutting, and you're asking these muscles to expand and contract. Well, you basically taught your muscles just to stay contracted.

There's a lot of components to every muscle function, to every type of exercise that you do. For me, I focus on dropping and throwing. That's what my job is. For a runner, you're going to need to be incredibly biomechanically efficient and balanced in order to run that 5K, and if something is out of balance, you're going to need to get it back in balance. And the only way traditional physical therapy does it, they think that muscle soreness is muscle weakness. So they take muscle soreness and they go, well, it must be weak. Let's do more strengthening. My point is, it's not weak, it's actually working too hard. We need to lengthen it and soften it, so that the other muscles can work, too.

Brady continued, saying that when an athlete then tries to go out and perform, their muscles are essentially confused and unable to expand and contract as needed. Brady said this tricks an athlete's brain into trying to compensate by "going to recruit fibers" from other parts of the body, thus weakening those parts and throwing the system off-balance.

His longevity and health can't be argued with, so clearly Brady is onto something."

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Yay Tom!

Here is yet another example of why it's so important to relax & lengthen our muscles; see you in class!

-Margi