Tom Brady skips a common football workout on the day after a game to help his body recover
Tom Brady offers a lot of insight into his thoughts on nutrition, recovery, and the importance of pliability inn his new book "The TB12 Method."
Throughout the book, Brady stresses how these principles have kept him healthy during the his long and historic career.
One method that Brady believes has helped him is his practice of taking it easy on Mondays after games. Since he's going to take a few hits on Sunday, he likes to keep his workout relatively low impact the next day, with inflammation and trauma being his main concerns.
During the season, I know I'll be hit hard every Sunday-and I will be dealing with negative unintentional traumas that lead to inflammation responses in my body. I also know my body will generate trauma responses to deal with the line-of-duty soreness and pain I feel. On and off the field, my goal is to avoid additional inflammation on top of the inflammation I get from playing football.
This might seem like an obvious bit of insight, but it differs a bit from the rest of his team's practice routine. Brady's concern is about exponentially increasing the damage his body is dealing with from one day to the next, and the very act of lifting weights tears muscles down in order to build them up stronger.
But as Brady writes, other players like to get right back into the weight room.
Every Monday after a game for example, the whole team comes into the weight room to bench-press, squat, and do other weight-bearing activities. The way I see it, they are creating more trauma in addition to the "car crash" our bodies were experiencing less than twenty-four hours earlier. Knowing my body needs to recover after a game, I'm careful about how I train on Mondays. I do enough to keep my strength optimal and my muscles firing at 100 percent, but I stop short of generating additional inflammation.
The thought of knowing the precise point of when you body will start "generating additional inflammation" seems a bit tough to pin down, but for an athlete as tested as Brady, maybe it comes naturally at this point.
Additionally, Brady's book also takes readers through many of the star quarterback's other thoughts and beliefs on his health and development, including his impressive hydration habits.
However, despite its insights and status as a best-seller on Amazon, there's one man who still won't be buying Brady's book: Bill Belichick.