Henry Abbott is a pioneer of sports media. Henry is an award-winning journalist and founder of TrueHoop, where he and his team cover basketball with depth and curiosity. Henry previously led ESPN’s 60-person NBA digital and print team, which published several groundbreaking articles and won a National Magazine Award. He is the author of a new book, Ballistic: The New Science of Injury-Free Athletic Performance, available wherever books are sold.
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Henry Abbott On Founding TrueHoop, His ESPN Career, And How To Train To Prevent Injury
Our quote for this episode is from Joseph Pilates. “Physical fitness is the first requisite of happiness.” Our guest, Henry Abbott, is a pioneer of sports media. Henry is an award-winning journalist and the Founder of TrueHoop, where he and his team cover basketball with depth and curiosity. Henry previously led ESPN’s 60-person NBA digital and print team, where he published several groundbreaking articles and won a national magazine award. He’s the author of a new book, Ballistic: The New Science of Injury-Free Athletic Performance, available wherever books are sold.
Henry, welcome. I’m excited to have you join the show.
Thank you. Good to be here.
Henry Abbott Of TrueHoop
I always find it helpful to start with the early years. Can you talk about your relationship to sports and maybe sports media growing up?
Yeah. I was a kid who loved athletics so much that I would dribble on the gravel alone, shooting in the driveway at my dad’s house in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t that little fine gravel. It was the big, bumpy gravel where the dribble would go in crazy directions. I did three sports in high school. I love moving. It always seemed natural to me to keep moving.
I studied journalism at NYU, and there were some kids there who were like, “I’m going to do sports journalism.” I don’t know why I had this feeling. I was like, “That’s not a real job. That’s too fun. You can’t do that.” I studied journalism, worked at CBS News, and did serious things. I had an opportunity to write for a basketball magazine. It was a favor for a friend. She was like, “We need a freelancer to do this one story. We’re going to ask the Nets’ power forward a few questions. We’ll write for you and we’ll give you $100. Will you do that?”
It’s like, “You’re going to pay me for this?”
I know. I was like, “I don’t need $100.” It was an amazing interview. It was so long ago that one of the questions was, “Do you use email?” This guy, Jayson Williams, was a wonderful character. He was like, “Heck yeah. Every time I get in the hot tub, I have my staff print them all out and bring them to me.” I don’t even think that was true. I think he was saying that to be provocative. I was hooked. I thought sports journalism was pretty fun. I’ve been covering the NBA ever since that day.
Your big break in basketball media came with TrueHoop, which was ahead of the curve as a purely digital blogging-oriented platform. What did you see in basketball media at the time that made you say, “I’ve got to build something different here.”
On Christmas 2004, this British friend of mine at a Christmas party in Brooklyn made me start a blog. He logged into Blogger and started it for me. I started screwing around on Blogger and quickly found that when I wrote basketball stuff there, and this was no marketing, nothing, it got more meaningful response from the NBA front offices and stuff than the stuff I was writing in magazines.
In the whole time I wrote for magazines, which was years and hundreds of articles, I got one letter in response from a retired player who was pissed off. I was writing about what the Pacers are doing on this dumb Blogger, and it immediately became a conversation. It was a lively back-and-forth. I was like, “This is a better medium.” I then started going to geek dinners. Do you know anything about this? Does this ring any bells?
No. I’ve been to dinner with geeks, but I don’t know if that’s the same thing.
At the time blogging was emerging, there was this little cohort of thought leaders. Robert Scoble, who went to Microsoft, was one of them. There are various others. They had these big dinners where they would talk about the future of media and technology. I went to one and I started reading all these books, like The Cluetrain Manifesto. Rebecca Blood had the seven rules of blogging. I read all about how this thing works.
A little crazy, but I convinced my friend and my wife to invest and that this was a good plan, even though we had one baby and another one on the way. I was like, “Let’s go all in on blogging.” It was the twelfth basketball blog in the world. Once it became TrueHoop and I hired someone to make the design nice, it was a few weeks old, and some guy called. He said, “You won the Forbes Best of the Web award.” I was like, “We’ve had fourteen posts or something. What are you judging this on?” Then, Google called. The phone called, and it said Google.
I didn’t know Google called. That’s interesting. What did they say?
They called from sales. They were like, “TrueHoop had moved into the top 100,000 websites in record time,” and they wanted to understand my approach. Usually, it would be a team of people doing that. I wanted to have lunch in the Google cafeteria. That was my goal for that meeting. I failed. There were all these weird things. Eventually, ESPN called, and then they acquired TrueHoop. A bunch of weird stuff happened with that blog.
You went from an independent blogger to leading a 60-person digital team at ESPN. I’d assume you have some leadership lessons that you learned from that experience, trying to scale.Give me a highlight and a low light.
I got to drive a Formula One car. By the end, we had it dialed in pretty well. We were shattering all these traffic records. As a manager, I got to manage people who were my biggest managerial point. I had to lean on people mostly to work less. They were so driven, these people. By the time you get to ESPN in this sports media business, you have ascended the mountain. I was managing Jackie McMullan, Baxter Holmes, and Pablo Torre. Those dudes are all workaholics.
Jackie’s Boston, right?
Yeah. She’s Boston through and through.
Innovation is often difficult to pull off in an industry so used in doing things the old way.
A die-hard. She’s always on the news here.
She’s great. What a treat. When you’re talking about Formula One, you can do no better than have meaningful conversations with Jack McMullan about, “What’s the most interesting thing we know in sports today? Let’s write about that.” The lowlight was that there is such a profound, tired groupthink that is in the way of innovation in every industry, but the media may be more than most because people have made so much money doing things the old way.
I was at an AI seminar. The guy was like, “The person who’s going to disrupt you needs to come from outside your organization. It’s very hard for the people who created the current system to break it. It is almost impossible.”
I was hired to make a change. I was promoted to make a change. When I got the job, I was negotiating the terms of the deal. A smart Silicon Valley buddy of mine was like, “This is a big organization that’s saying they want change. You want to set up a recurring meeting with the tip-top people to make sure they still want that change.” They didn’t in the end want that change.
How To Navigate The Risks
“Everyone loves progress, but no one loves change.” I like that quote. That happens a lot. One of the things that you did was you helped break a lot of major stories that the NBA teams wanted to keep hidden. I’m curious. What was one of the stories that you fought to tell but that felt a little bit risky at the time?
There are so many. I did a story about the World Anti-Doping Authority declaring that the NBA has its testing as a joke. One of the little throwaway lines in that story is that when the NBA was first called to testify before Congress about their testing program, the medical director told Congress that of the first 26 failed tests they had in the NBA, he used his discretion to wipe aside 23.
There haven’t been a lot of NBA scandals around this stuff. It doesn’t sound like it’s not because it’s not happening.
David Stern told Congress that it wouldn’t help in basketball in 2005. Wrong.
The people are like, “It doesn’t make you hit the baseball better eye-back contact.” When you make contact, it certainly goes further. Someone pointed out a stat that the Red Sox have been mired in mediocrity for the last couple of years. On the radio station, they were reading off Alex Cora’s record on teams where he wasn’t stealing signs. It’s pretty bad. It’s hard to ignore facts like that, that if you take out the years where the teams were stealing the other team’s signs, he’s got a pretty losing record at this point.
I’m not some puritan namby-pamby, like, “It’s unfair.” Sports are ultimately nothing but a set of rules. Everyone should know the start line and what the rules are. We should agree on that. If you’re busted, you’re busted. Sorry, you cheated. I’m a runner. I’m aware that if I run my local 5K, probably someone is taking testosterone, and I’m going to do a little worse than that person. I don’t lose any sleep over that. To me, the big red flag in basketball is that nobody brags about being clean. Do you know how strange that is? In track, they do because they’ve been through their crap. Do you know how scared you have to be?
In cycling, they don’t because it’s endemic in cycling.
EF Education First is bragging about being a clean team. That’s a formative part of the team. In basketball, you can’t find a single athlete because they’re scared. They’re scared of the regime that would be mad at them. That’s a bad sign.
That’s interesting.
Even though a lot of them are clean.
Going Back To Blogging
It’s not a point of differentiation. I get it. You’ve come a little bit full circle. Substack marks your return to independent roots. It’s a different media climate, though. I’m curious. How have you adjusted to the change? What’s similar and what’s different from the blogging days?
What’s similar is the freedom. A lot of the lessons of blogging apply. For instance, I don’t think you should publish because it’s Tuesday at 11:00. You should publish me if you have something magnificent to say. That was true on a blog. That was true in Substack. The difference is discovery. Google drove people to a good blog post. Other bloggers had the habit of inbound linking, which signaled to Google that this is a special thing.
It was all search-driven.
Heavily. It made a big difference. There was collegiality. We loved each other, all of us basketball bloggers. We met up in person. We drank and did stuff. We played basketball. That’s all over, for me anyway. I don’t feel that that’s happening. Substack has a giant crisis of discoverability. It might be that someone writes the greatest thing of all time, and a very small percentage of it gets uplifted or gets updrafted.
The app is starting to drive some traffic, which is great, but we don’t have this method of driving people to the good content. I don’t know if we ever will. It’s a little worrisome about how we’re all a little siloed in our habits in the, “I subscribe to these 12 and read these 12. I don’t ever read the thirteenth.” It feels like that’s going to have to change.
Sports is ultimately nothing but a set of rules.
What is interesting, though, is that it has given people that the writer is more important than the paper. That’s the huge structural change. It’s like removing your columnist from the paper that you didn’t need to buy, and you can buy the columnist that you like. Eventually, they’ll need to bundle it or package it. It’s an interesting change.
The bundle’s coming, and then where are we?
It’s like cabling. Everyone’s bundling. The Boston sports guys were on the radio complaining about this. They were like, “I need five subscription packages in there to watch the Red Sox games, or I’m going to undo it. I cut cable, but now it’s cheaper with cable. It’s maddening trying to keep up with it.”
They’re using machine learning to gamify our wallets to get the most out of us for this content. We’re probably not going to beat them with, like, “Let me log into Comcast to see if I can figure it out.” You’re not. They’re going to win. They’re pretty good at this.
Challenging The Traditional Training Orthodoxy
Let’s dive into your new book, Ballistic: The Science of Injury-Free Athletic Performance, and a little bit of life performance, too. It opens with a bold idea that everything we think about in injury prevention is wrong. I’m curious. What led you to challenge the traditional training orthodoxy? What is that training orthodoxy?
It hasn’t been studied. Even at P3, the place where the book is about, they don’t have evidence on the training effects. There is this knees-over-toes guy. He is big on the internet. He had bad knees. I’m blanking on his actual name, but everyone knows this knees-over-toes guy. He trains a bunch of NBA players. Every time you go to the gym, every trainer is going to tell you not to lunge past your knees going forward. That’s a thing everybody says, but there’s no evidence. There’s no evidence that this is where the line is.
He trained differently and had great results. That is not to say this is some miracle cure everyone should follow. It’s much more complicated than that. That’s one. There are 100 more. Training is impossible to study because anyone you assign this homework to is also moving all day, doing all the other things they’re doing. It’s very hard to isolate the cause and effect.
I remember it was to always stretch cold before soccer warmup, and then it seemed after twenty years of doing that, everyone was like, “That doesn’t work at all.”
There’s a whole chapter in the book about the P3 warmup, how to warm up, and all the science of hips, ankles, rotation, and all this stuff. Late in it, I had to ask Marcus, the founder, “Why do we warm up again? Is that a real thing? Is there research for this?” He was like, “There is research.”
Dynamic warmup, though. I remember in soccer practice, the first thing you do is you sit on the field and stretch out cold. That is probably after you had your two boxes of SnackWells. Most of the stuff in the ‘90s was horrible advice.
The muscle that you’ve warmed up is 2 to 6 times less likely to be injured right then. I was like, “That’s real. That sounds good.” Mostly, our human body is super well-designed to move. It’s not well designed to be still. It works brilliantly, but now and again, the screws get a little loose, and you need to fix something up.
My gym teachers were the simplest thinkers in the building. We had this idea like, “That’s your knee. For knees, you’ve got to do ice and Advil or whatever.” The answer is not simple. It’s 600 muscles moving symphonically. It takes a very special brain to assess where the little tweak is. The tweaks that they’re finding in this giant evidence-based approach are all pretty different from what everybody was saying before.
We don’t have a lot of elite athletes tuning in to this show, but we probably have a lot of 40-year-olds. I know that as I get into my late 40s, I have noticed constant injury. The other thing you notice from your overall performance is that when that one thing is bothering you, it’s the only thing you can think of. I never thought of my elbow until I had horrible tennis elbow, and then I was like, “I can’t lift up the bag,” or, “I can’t do this,” or, “I can’t ride the bus.” You never notice it when it’s working.
I’m excited to dig into some of this. I was joking with my kids. They’re all teenagers. I sent them something someone had shared with me. It was called Only Dads. A channel you subscribe to watch my injury of the week and learn about my injury of the week.” I know there are a lot of people tuning in who don’t want to be hurt. They want to continue to work out and perform at a high level. I know you talked about how elite athletes are injured all the time. I get that. They’re doing a lot more aggressive stuff. What’s the root cause? What are some of the key things you learned about reducing the injury cycle in your research?
This guy, Marcus Elliot, tore his ACL in high school and then went to Harvard Medical School. He then worked for the Patriots, the Mariners, and all these places. He is 40 years into trying to figure out what is upstream from an injury, like we treat heart attacks ten years before you get the heart attack, because we know what an echocardiogram says.
I thought Tom Brady figured this all out.
The infrared pajamas?
The pliability or all that stuff.
They have this massive data set. When an NBA player tears their ACL, they can go back and look over the years before their assessments. What are the trends in how they move? They have thousands of lead athletes on their servers. They have 1,000 NBA players. They can start to make data-based cause-and-effect.
They go look at the upstream data.
We’re learning anew.
What are the data points there? Where are they getting the data from?
The assessment, I’ve been through it myself. It takes about an hour. They put 22 reflective points all over your body, and you step up a box and jump as explosively as you can. You do a one-off skater where you move sideways. It’s an hour of this. Also, they will put you on the physical therapy table and measure how far you move your knee to the outside and inside.
Is this before you get hurt or after you get hurt?
Whenever you’re in there, they’ll assess you.
If I blow up my ACL, how do I get the upstream data?
You’ve got to finish your PT first.
That’s the answer.
Mostly, they want to see the baseline of your health because the goal of the training is to get you back to how you move, not the right way to move. As you’re jumping around with all these points, there are a million data points from your hour of moving around. They get to be agnostic about what matters. Q angles and valgus collapse, your knees diving in towards each other, has been the most studied thing in biomechanics for 50 years. It turns out it’s not a big deal. It doesn’t predict much. It was the one that we could see with our naked eye.
With the 22 points every second you’re moving, there are something like 280 angles. They all matter. This Q angle one is not especially important in injury prediction. If you land on the outside of your foot and have your weight roll to the inside, that’s something that 100% of NBA players who tore their ACLs do. It didn’t even have a name. No one studied it.
The second most important one is that as you go into a squat, some people’s femurs roll to the inside. Your femur rotates. You can barely see it with the naked eye, but the computer can see it well. It twists your ACL like you’re taking the drumstick off the Turkey. That is a major injury red flag. A huge percentage of NBA ACL tears have this. No one’s even looking for it. Your doctor doesn’t know about it. Your trainer doesn’t know about it.
Let’s say you find it. How do you fix it before the ACL tear?
The femur is the longest bone in the body, and it has trochanters on it. These are little notches to hold it in place. There are muscles that are attached to those trochanters that aren’t strong enough to hold them in place, so you strengthen them. They’ll figure out exactly what’s going on with you in particular, and then you’re going to step a yard over there and start your workouts. You’re going to train it so it doesn’t do that. They’ve done it 1,000 times.
With the lower leg one, it’s the same deal. There are muscles of the lower leg that will keep your foot from doing this sloppy movement as you land. They’re going to teach you to land in a different way. There’s great research even separate from P3. There are decades of studies that if you teach female soccer players how to land, they reduce ACL tears by 68% to 70%. Same principle. They didn’t know the cause, but now we do. They would land in this sloppy way. You can train that.
Different Methods In Reducing Injuries
In the story you share, there are some basketball players who dramatically reduced injuries with simple shifts, like barefoot training, different warmups, and sleep tracking. Which one of these things felt most surprising to you at first? What made you a believer in this?
Back when I was an editor, we wrote a story about Steph Curry’s ankles. He later confessed he was privately very concerned that his career was going to be over 3 or 4 years into his career because he could not get healthy. His ankles were sprained all the time. The Warriors hired a new trainer from the Timberwolves, Keke Lyles.
Keke had had hip problems of his own that ended his own basketball career. He was tuned into hips. He thought that maybe you could solve Steph’s ankle problems by strengthening his hips. He put Steph through this program, where he became the second strongest on the team in all of these hip measures. I forget the measure, but he could deadlift 400 pounds or something. He got his hips crazy strong, and he stopped spraining his ankle. It makes sense if you think about it.
I had a similar thing. I had this terrible nerve pain behind my left shoulder years ago. I went to this specialist guy, and he had me working on my right leg and hip because everything gets out of balance. I’m doing all these stretches, and then finally, my left shoulder pain goes away. All this stuff is interconnected, right?
Warming up a muscle makes it two to six times less likely to be injured.
It is. In P3’s data, the primary cause of non-contact injury is landing. The forces are ridiculous. They measured an NBA player landing with 11,000 newtons of force. That’s triple the force required to fully sever a human spine. We’re completely counting on our landing gear functioning.
The plane comes in sideways sometimes, too.
That’s the problem. I think of the egg drop thing in high school physics class. The egg’s going to hit the ground, and it’s going to break you unless you have a good contraption. Our contraption is these three stacked joints, which are the ankles, knees, and hips. It’s a good contraption if they all track in a pretty good line and bend at the same time. A third of us don’t bend our hips at that time. It puts insane force on your lower back.
Where did sleep tracking come in? How did that improve injury reduction?
P3 does not sleep track. It’s not a fact. They poo poo what they call inertial sensors, watches, and stuff. They’re like, “What are you going to know from that?” There is a ton of research I know from outside of this book project. NBA players, in particular, are wrecked with fatigue. We had this woman from Stanford, Cheri Mah. She looked at the base schedule when the schedule came out, and she would predict teams that would lose games completely agnostic from which team it was or who the opponent was.
Travel schedule?
In the travel schedule. She would be in Vegas handily every year.
That’s interesting for an executive to think about in terms of looking at a travel schedule. You have a couple of big pitches or big keynotes, and you are likely not to do as well on those.
The data on driving a car is worse than being drunk.
The data they have on all the people who are against daylight saving is that when that daylight savings shift occurs, car accidents go up dramatically in the first week because people lose that one hour of sleep, which is interesting.
I didn’t know that. That makes sense.
This is typical of our politicians. Everyone agrees we should eliminate daylight saving patterns, but no one can agree on which one we should go to, so we haven’t changed it.
What’s the big argument, though? Who’s vehemently on one side? I don’t get it.
If I explain it to you, you might understand it. The biologists are on the, “It goes better with your circadian rhythm and a lot of these problems if you stay on standard time. You wake up in the morning and get sunlight a little earlier. You’ll fall asleep better if sunlight is on the other side.” The people who like the longer days or the day or benefit from that, they’re strongly on, “We should stay on daylight savings time, not standard time.”
They want the extended sunlight at the end of the day, which has some pragmatic things for being outside, rec leagues, work, or physical work. You can imagine painters and plumbers, people who work outside. It’s not as aligned with our circadian rhythms. Those are the two camps on that. Shockingly, they both agree that if we fixed it, we’d be better off, but they can’t agree on how we should fix it, which is a perfect example of our politics.
I’ve never heard anybody else bring this up. When it’s evident what’s going to happen next, a measure of your leadership is how quickly you get there. How quickly can you pivot?
In this case, either solution is probably better than the change. It’s a weird, sad thing. It’s complicated. There’s a cost to it. There’s confusion. People miss their flights that week. It’s funny.
Two weeks later, we’re over it, whatever it is. It’s fine.
Understanding True Ballistic Movement
There’s an initial adjustment, which you can put a number on that has a couple of billion dollars in cost. They’re like, “Why are we doing this twice a year and paying attention to it?” One of the other things that you talk about is explosiveness. You call it true ballistic movement. When you train correctly, that’s what protects the body. This is the opposite of what a lot of coaches preach, which is more careful than fast. How is this different than conventional wisdom, and how do you explain that to skeptics?
A measure of leadership is how quickly you can get there.
The way that we move in our neurological process is very deeply intertwined with how we use language, but it’s way more complicated. There’s this Oliver Sacks quote that language is this little tiny raft sitting on top of this ocean of movement components of our brain. It’s 600 muscles moving in synchronous ways. You want to train that.
The process of landing safely, which is the key injury risk moment, is something you want to be prepared for. You’re going to have to chase your dog when it gets out. You’re going to have to walk down the stairs. You’re going to have to have these moments of impact, and you want to be sophisticated and trained in how you put your foot out so that you do it in a way that won’t tear your ACL or hurt your hip, lower back, or whatever.
The training is extremely careful. It starts with a dowel. You can use a broom handle. You jump back and forth on two feet over that. They’re watching at P3 how you do that. If you have your toes a little bit up and you’re on the balls of your feet, and your lower leg muscles are activated, then you can progress to bigger movements.
Eventually, you get to what they call line jumps, where there are several large plyometric boxes in a row. These incredible athletes fly completely over them, like bounding along. It’s breathtaking. You only get to progress to that if you earn your way up with good form. I love my gym, but they want you to only step down off the box, not jump down off the box, because they can’t guarantee that we’re all going to do it safely. The idea is you want to have a plyometric part of your routine where you train and rehearse in these things that are shown to be profoundly preventative of injury.
Flexibility sounds like it’s a big part of this, right?
Yeah. They have assessed however many thousands of sets of hips at P3, and every single pair of hips comes away with a recommendation. It’s either for more mobility or for more stability. Women tend to need more stability. Men tend to need more mobility, but it’s not a perfect line. The joke is that everyone who does yoga should lift weights, and everyone who lifts weights should do yoga. You can’t have good hips without both of those things, but people work on the one they’re good at. Well,
It’s interesting. I find that a lot of people, particularly as they enter their 40s, are either big on cardio or big on weightlifting. It’s a similar thing. If you read all the experts, you probably need to do more of one. I, for the last couple of years, was doing almost 90% cardio, and I’ve shifted to more strength training. I have a relative who declares he’s going to be a very good-looking corpse who does all strength training and no cardio. You need both of these things. That’s interesting. Whatever you’re doing too much of, you need the opposite, right?
Yeah, but I wouldn’t agree that those are the two things. You’re missing yoga. Your range of motion is measurable in all of your joints, and it’s declining every year. You’re not making sure it doesn’t. It’s hard to get it back.
It’s strength, cardio, and yoga for something around flexibility.
If you went to P3 every year and got assessed like an NBA player, they’re looking at, when you land, how much range of motion you have in all of those joints. As it declines in let’s say your hips, which would be a common one, you’re putting all the landing force in your ankles and knees. It’s going to decline in your ankles, and you’re going to blow out your knee. You need those three joints to accordion as you land, when you’re running, when you’re jogging, or whatever. It goes away with age unless you fight for it.
We have early data, but not real data. This is for a lot of parents with their kids, and all these club sports that are seven days a week. You’re starting to see repetitive stress injuries in 20-year-olds that you used to see in people who were 50. This seems like it’s going to become an epidemic from all these club sports.
This is a big topic. There’s a great Baxter Holmes ESPN story that involves Marcus Elliot. It is about sixteen-year-olds getting surgeries.
Tommy John.
I’m writing an article about this for a major international publication. Movement vocabulary is the theory. I said language is like movement in your brain. We’re raising kids who have been kept so safe that they don’t have a good movement vocabulary. They don’t know how to put their foot down when they’re landing. They don’t know how to climb a tree, swim in a brook, or whatever. Kids who grew up with much more varied and, frankly, dangerous movement patterns have developed more of a way to cope with all the different challenges of being physical.
It sounds like they know how to fall literally and figuratively, right?
Yeah. The biggest part is knowing how to land. We haven’t done it enough. We spend too much time in the car or on the couch, not being sophisticated about how to land.
It’s interesting. I know you are making the physical argument, but someone could make, and I know this is not your area, an emotional argument. We have stunted people from being able to land on their own physically, mentally, and emotionally. It’s the same problem. They’re not physical, but you’ve got to land at some point on your own.
I agree. It’s about robustness. They are deeply intertwined. They had this giant machine learning project where they went through all of the NBA data that they have on their servers at P3. They let the machine learning group the findings into whatever it would find. There are seven types of NBA players. Specimens are big, like Zion Williamson. They are super forceful. There are hyper-athletic guards.
There’s this group called Kinematic Movers. Those are the ones who are neurologically efficient at moving forces through their body. They aren’t the best at jumping super high or running super fast, but they do very well in the NBA. They don’t get injured. The characteristic is that they’re sophisticated, and they can land on either foot. They can explode in any direction. They are neurologically sophisticated movers. P3’s training has become to train everyone to get into that category, including us. They’re like, “Get more neurologically sophisticated.”
Your sense of movement can get unbelievable sharp by putting some risk around your training.
When I see these kids downhill biking with no helmet or parkour jumping, the kids doing super dangerous stuff, they have learned how to land. When you think about it, they know how to land safely, probably because they played around with it and took some risks early on. In downhill biking, the people who don’t wear helmets are the ones who are going to die if they fall. When you see some of the stuff that they’re doing, it’s pretty crazy, but they land so naturally.
I feel like we’ve made this extremely safe walled garden of approved movement. The people who are outside that are outside the bounds of society entirely.
It’s still good to wear the helmet.
If their parents were like, “I think it’s cool you do this. We’re going to come watch you,” they would probably wear a helmet. Instead, it’s like, “You’re lawless. You’re a renegade out there.” With climbing trees, do kids who climb trees have better health outcomes in life? They’re never going to study that because it’s so beyond the bounds.
I think the answer is yes, though.
We research psilocybin and cocaine, but we’re never going to research kids climbing trees because it’s mindblowing, even though everybody did it.
Are they better risk takers? It’s interesting.
There’s a little quote in the book. Marcus grew up in this wild and free thing where he would jump out of a tree into this little makeshift swimming pool from ever higher heights every year. It was a tiny target. If he missed, the quote is, “This is going to get broken.” The point is, your senses get unbelievably sharp right then. You learn exactly how to jump because you feel the risk. If you land in a trampoline park, you don’t have to get your senses that sharp. It’s never that important. I’m watching wild animals, and they all have these death-defying play moments in their youth. They all do, and they’re the best movers on the planet.
Optimizing Movement For Play
Maybe this can be your follow-up book, Stick the Landing, and they can cover it holistically, both physically and mentally. There’s a section in the book about play, not just drills, but creative movement. For high performers, people who work out hard, or athletes, and whatever the thing is you like to optimize, this might be a weird adjustment. What is the case for play, and how can it unlock better results?
First of all, working out isn’t fun enough for most people. Do you have an ultramarathoner friend? Are you super jealous of all the time they spend ultra-marathoning?
They weirdly like it. All of those people are switch-swapping one addiction for the other, in my experience.
We’ve made sports something for those weirdos. That’s a big L. I’m not a Frisbee golfer, but those people are having fun.
Is pickleball fun? Does that count as fun?
Pickleball is the perfect example of something that has taken people who didn’t want to exercise, and it made them think, “I’ll give it a shot.” It’s pretty fun. It’s a win.
I always say that pickleball and tennis is hand-eye. It’s front, back, left, and right. You’re getting a lot of different movements. It’s not repetitive. Your wrist is, but your legs are going in all kinds of different directions.
You’re moving into all three planes. You’re maybe jumping a little. This is a big win. There’s a fair amount of pickleball in the book for this reason. I spend a lot of time with Alex Ash, who runs their sister business, which is like P3 for you and me. He’s a martial artist and a wizard of movement. His whole thing is that people need to play way more. If your teenage kids want to wrestle with you, do it.
My teenage boys wrestle plenty for me all over the house.
My son is in college, but he would come and start shoving me. I’m like, “Are we dueling now? What are we doing?” These prescribed movements at the gym are not nearly enough to get your hips to move in interesting and cool ways, as well as your lower legs. There are some hip muscles, like the psoas, that if you measure nothing but the volume of your psoas, which is something that you can achieve with some pretty weird and obscure wrestling-type movements, it predicts your mortality. It predicts how long it takes you to recover from cancer. It predicts all these crazy health things. It’s a marker for whether you move in varied and interesting ways. Do you have a big movement type?
What are some other good playthings for people who are reading?
I’m a little bit reluctant to prescribe anything. Everybody knows that what’s outside their comfort zone is the next thing they want to try. If you’re 80, it might be gardening.
I’m sure some people are like, “I don’t even know what counts as playing.” What are some other examples that would be helpful?
Sitting is not a good play. Everything where you’re moving your body, let’s go. Let’s do more.
Chasing your kids around the house.
One of the greatest things in my life is that I have a text group of a ragtag bunch of misfits. We routinely meet and walk twenty minutes into the woods and jump off this waterfall into the icy cold water. On the walk in, everybody has a little anxious energy.
It’s mental and physical.
When you’re walking back, everybody’s high as a kite. There are no problems in life. You’re so excited about everything. These things are available everywhere on planet Earth. There’s someone on a rope swing somewhere near you. Don’t never go there. Go do some fun stuff. It might be that you’re not supposed to park there when you go. I’m on the side of moving.
A little adventure.
Have you ever wanted to ride a skateboard? Figure it out. I live in this little town in New Jersey. This man has been doing this for 20 or 30 years. After work every day, he puts on roller blades. He has long, flowing hair. He rides right down the middle of the street at car speed and tears around the town. Everyone thinks he’s a weirdo, but he’s got something going for him.
Dealing With Long-Time Back Issues
Last question for you. This can be multi-variant, singular, repeated, personal, or professional. What’s a mistake that you’ve made that you’ve learned the most from? It could be a training mistake, too.
I have pretty profound back issues that I know the cause of, which is that I spent my whole life not bending my hips. I bend my hips a little bit, but I had a signature P3 problem, which they call being a blender. As my ankles and my knees bend, my hips wouldn’t bend very much. People who do that are 300% more likely to have profound lower back pain.
That’s because the force of landing that’s supposed to go into your glutes as they stretch down doesn’t go into your glutes. Instead, it goes up the chain. You can see on the MRI how it has damaged my lower back. I’m like, “Ugh.” I know how to do it right. I’m 50. I’ve got to cope with all the DISC damage I’ve done. Bummer. I wish I had done every step of all those marathons with a little more hip flexion.
It’s never too late, though, to get started. Where could people find your Substack and learn about you? Where can they get the book?
All the basketball stuff is at TrueHoop. HenryAbbott.com is my author website. I started a free Substack about the book topics, which you can get from HenryAbbott.com as well. The book is everywhere. I’m a fan of getting it from your local bookshop. If they don’t have it, make them special order it, and then they’ll start carrying it. That’d be great for me.
Thanks for joining us and, hopefully, helping some of the readers here avoid further injury and improve their training and performance.
Super thanks for having me. This was fun.
To our readers, thanks for tuning into the show. If you enjoyed this episode or the show in general, I encourage you to sign up for Friday Forward. It’s my weekly newsletter with over 100,000 subscribers on Substack and shares a pretty quick message every Friday morning. It’s also free. Join at RobertGlazer.com. Hit the Friday Forward tab, or you can go to Substack and look for Friday Forward. Thanks again for your support. Until next time, keep elevated.
