# Is Real Madrid Doing Its Best To Prevent Injuries? Ft. Ballistic Author Henry Abbott

An episode of [The Real Deal: A Real Madrid Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1807821669), 21 Jul 2025, 56 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/103607aa8/podcast/play/105788508/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-6-21%2F404281085-44100-2-355e77b05bca4.mp3

TrueHoop creator Henry Abbott joins Jarod Hector to dig into the science behind the club’s never-ending fitness setbacks. From ACL blows to soft-tissue strains, we look at what’s happening inside Valdebebas, why so many players go down at the worst possible time, the evolution of this space from Henry's book "Ballistic" and what the data says Real Madrid must change going forward.

## Transcript

[1:02] Welcome to The Real Deal, a Real Madrid podcast with me, Jerrod
[1:06] Hector. I am joined by the man who
[1:09] started ESPN True, their print and digital NBA outpost that
[1:15] nurture the careers of all of your favorite NBA writers.
[1:18] Pretty much all came through that.
[1:20] And he's also the author of the brand new book Ballistic, the
[1:24] New Science of Injury, Free Athletic Performance.
[1:28] Henry Abbott, how are you, Sir? Great man, I really like the
[1:31] intro funky music. The music was like sounded
[1:34] really good in the headphones, I got to say.
[1:36] I always joke to Sid that it sounds gladiatorial, like we're
[1:40] about to head into the arena, right, and get ready for battle.
[1:42] And that's, you know, it's very much if you are a Real Madrid
[1:45] fan, that is, that's that's the ethos, right?
[1:48] Like you walking into the Burnabow and it's like, like,
[1:51] all right, man, it's time to go. Our, our gladiators are going to
[1:53] battle. Folks.
[1:55] This will be a really, really insightful and enjoyable
[1:59] conversation for you. Henry, beyond being one of the
[2:03] foremost NBA journalists, reporters, writers, is just a
[2:08] excellent storyteller and someone who's delved deep into
[2:11] the world of injuries and injury prevention for not just peak
[2:16] athletes, but also for human beings, just regular people
[2:19] walking in the streets. And it'll be really interesting
[2:22] a conversation because as you all know, we have a a club that
[2:25] has been dealing with some serious injuries over the last
[2:28] few years. And one of the ways I think the
[2:31] club needs to innovate is make sure they're doing everything on
[2:33] the preventative side to stop this from happening.
[2:37] I believe as Henry does, that that is the next frontier of all
[2:41] professional sports. The teams that will be the most
[2:42] successful in whatever sport and win all the titles going forward
[2:46] will be the team that figures out this piece right here.
[2:49] Now, easier said than done because there are a billion
[2:51] reasons why it's hard for teams to do that.
[2:55] But we still think there's a way you can bring humanity and be
[2:58] more humane when it comes to to injuries.
[3:01] So, Henry, I thought it was really that broad basic
[3:03] question, which is what was the impetus for writing this book
[3:07] and delving deep into injury prevention and working with Peak
[3:11] Performance Project, which is P3, the Santa Barbara outpost
[3:14] led by the great doctor Marcus Elliott.
[3:18] Yes, well, you know, well drew the eyes for some reason took a
[3:22] detour into like money laundering and dirty money.
[3:26] And you know, I think it's important and I'm I am proud I
[3:31] did it, but it was also just such a bummer, right?
[3:33] You and I would talk about like just it makes you feel terrible
[3:36] about the world, right? All this bad people, a lot of
[3:39] bad billionaires people. Yeah, a lot of bad billionaires
[3:41] and, and I honestly just wanted to write something.
[3:44] I wanted to go really deep into some topic and I wanted to be
[3:47] something that wasn't such a bummer to talk about every day.
[3:50] And I was like, what's the most inspiring thing I know of in
[3:52] sports? And I immediately thought of
[3:54] Marcus Elliott and P3, because they're healing human bodies,
[3:57] right? They're taking people who are
[3:58] having a little close to injury and just making them robust.
[4:01] And I thought that was pretty cool.
[4:03] And so I literally just like, you know, my first thought and
[4:05] I, I've writing a book has been kind of a bucket list thing for
[4:08] me. I'm 50.
[4:09] It's like time to get on it. You know, you can't leave these
[4:11] bucket list things forever. And so I called.
[4:13] Marcus because you might kick the bucket.
[4:15] I mean, it's a lot. Don't worry, you know, you gotta
[4:18] you gotta think about these things.
[4:19] But but yeah, I called Marcus and said, you know, would if I,
[4:23] if I can sell this book, would you agree to participate?
[4:26] And he said, Henry, you're the only writer I would say yes to.
[4:29] He's like, well, you or Charles Bethea of The New Yorker, which
[4:32] was lofty company, made me feel kind of special.
[4:35] You know, it wasn't like, totally.
[4:37] We were exclusive, you know, but.
[4:40] But Charles wasn't pitching a book, so that was lucky.
[4:42] And yeah. And it's been honestly kind of a
[4:45] thrill ride ever since where there's something about, you
[4:48] know, this topic, these people, this journey that's just mega
[4:53] interesting to me and super authentic.
[4:55] And I know like a lot of authors and they all say they get burned
[4:58] out on the topic before the book is done, but I did not, I could
[5:00] write another book on this right now.
[5:01] I'm super fired off about it. Like, I really believe in what
[5:04] they're doing. I really believe that this is a
[5:07] pivotal moment in the history of sports and injuries and bodies
[5:10] where we're just going to change how we address all these
[5:12] problems so that we can prevent these problems instead of just
[5:15] having them land on us and ruin our days.
[5:17] Well, you and I have talked about it the in terms of writing
[5:20] a second book on this, the stuff on the cutting room floor that
[5:23] didn't make this book is enough for a second book.
[5:26] Part of that's just my writing style, right?
[5:28] Like I, I, I don't remember exactly all the math, but I
[5:32] think I turned in the first draft at 120,000 words when the
[5:35] contract called for 90,000 words.
[5:37] And then I wrote a second draft that almost took a year to
[5:40] rewrite the whole thing. And then my own fault, I had it
[5:45] spread across multiple Google Docs.
[5:46] And at this point I'm like, I'm feel like I'm a pretty
[5:49] established book writer, know what I'm doing.
[5:51] I don't need to do the word count all the time.
[5:53] I kind of have a feel for it. So literally like four or five
[5:56] days before the second draft was due, I was like, let me just do
[6:00] the word count. It was, you know, spread across
[6:02] these Google Docs and, and now I really do.
[6:04] And now I'm getting hints for the first time from the editor.
[6:06] They really do want it at 90,000 words, not 100.
[6:09] And 20 which? And so I, there was a day where
[6:13] I did all the math and it was 150,000 words with like 4 days
[6:18] to go. Luckily the editor was dealing
[6:21] with a lot of family shenanigans and, and like daycare and
[6:25] running around pretty stressed. And I was like, hey, would it be
[6:27] OK if I turned this in in two weeks?
[6:29] And he was like, oh, actually that would be amazing.
[6:32] And so he took two weeks and I just, I came out of dinner every
[6:34] day and my kids would ask like, how many words did you cut
[6:36] today? From 150,000 to 89,000 in in
[6:41] under 2 weeks. And I honestly think the book
[6:43] got like better. Like it was AI mean.
[6:46] It was a stupid way for me to handle it.
[6:48] But but yes, there are 60,000 + 30,000 in the first draft.
[6:52] There's like a whole book's worth of stuff that isn't.
[6:55] In there that's that's taking a sight to this.
[6:58] So one of the great parts about this I love in the book is that
[7:02] you talk about acts of God, right, versus science and data
[7:07] and real things. And you use the story of Paul
[7:09] Dudley White as someone who used to work for the American Heart
[7:12] Association, and I'm wearing an AG shirt right now, I'm very
[7:15] familiar with Doctor Paul Dudley Wright, the goth in Boston.
[7:19] He sure does. Yeah.
[7:20] The the, the godfather of modern cardiology, right.
[7:24] We used to think, Henry, that heart attacks were acts of God.
[7:28] It's just your time. God decided to strike you down
[7:30] with a heart attack and life's over.
[7:32] And Paul Dudley Wright was like, what?
[7:34] I don't think that's probably true.
[7:36] There might be other reasons that that that lead to heart
[7:39] attacks that have nothing to do with God, right?
[7:41] And he was able to say, oh, look, here are all these signs
[7:44] and symptoms that happened well in advance of getting the heart
[7:47] attack that we should be monitoring for.
[7:50] And you believe that? And with Marcus, it is the same
[7:54] with injuries. Yeah, I'm so glad this is this
[7:57] is, I think the best way to think about this topic.
[7:59] I'm so glad you brought up Paul de Lewhite.
[8:00] So, so he was, he gave a lecture to the graduating class of
[8:06] Harvard Medical School in the 50s.
[8:07] At some point once he'd become like a really big name and he
[8:11] was like, it wasn't always set in stone that cardiology would
[8:14] become scientific, right? He's like, he goes through the
[8:17] history of cardiology and you know, there's just so many back
[8:20] going back to Roman times, like the people who are treating
[8:22] hearts are using theory that's just totally crackers, right?
[8:27] Like they're talking about the most common thing was literally
[8:30] God struck this person down for thinking evil thoughts or
[8:32] cheating on his wife or whatever, right?
[8:34] That was the a leading cardiology theory of people
[8:38] dying from heart attack. And then they got to all they
[8:41] didn't know, like how the arteries and blood vessels
[8:43] interconnected or where blood even came from.
[8:45] And anyway, so, but then the electrocardiogram was invented
[8:49] around the beginning of the 20th century, and probably White was
[8:52] one of the early ones too. He was dedicated to it because
[8:54] his sister had died in youth and he wanted to understand that.
[8:57] And he wrote a paper on coagulation.
[8:58] So he got invited to go and study with these people in
[9:00] Europe who were pioneering this technology.
[9:03] And you could see the blood flow through the heart, which was the
[9:07] missing link, right? And you could see that 10 years
[9:10] before there was a heart attack, the arterial blood flow was
[9:14] starting to slow down, which meant here's the Ding, Ding,
[9:17] Ding part if you're a soccer fan, right?
[9:19] Which meant you could treat the heart attack before the heart
[9:22] attack, right? So Marcus Elliott is basically,
[9:28] he's pushing 60 and his whole since high school he's been on
[9:31] this path of like, he wants to do that for ACL tears and
[9:35] Achilles tears and lower back pain and hamstring strains and
[9:38] all these things that ruin sports.
[9:40] And it was a big journey, right? He went, he, he studied
[9:44] microbiology undergrad looking for the upstream signal there.
[9:48] It wasn't there, right? He, he studied a ton of
[9:51] Physiology and like, and there's some clues in Physiology, but it
[9:55] wasn't quite the magic. And you know, he worked for the
[9:57] New England Patriots and the Seattle Mariners and he went to
[10:00] South Africa and studied under Tim Noakes.
[10:02] He was like this leading physiologist and looking for
[10:05] like, what is the, what is the electrocardiogram of an ACL
[10:08] tear, right? And I think he would tell you
[10:11] decades into his career, he didn't know.
[10:13] But then they got force plates in the floor and then a few
[10:17] years later, infrared cameras in the ceiling.
[10:19] And what emerges from that is what they call granular movement
[10:23] data. So this is where top players
[10:25] actually don't know if Real Madrid players have been to P3,
[10:27] but I'd be surprised if none have top players get assessed.
[10:30] It takes about an hour and move in all sorts of exciting ways.
[10:33] And that creates about a million data points.
[10:35] And in there, this is kind of the electrocardiogram right now.
[10:39] We're seeing movement habits that P3's data now will tell us
[10:45] it gives you a higher risk of ACL tear, etcetera.
[10:48] And it's a whole new way of doing it.
[10:50] And I'm sorry to keep going on, but let me just so if you one
[10:54] thing I did in writing the book, which is kind of fun was I just
[10:57] looked up like the greatest, most respected orthopaedic
[11:00] surgeons and experts on ACL tears in the world.
[11:03] And they are giving lectures right to other doctors on like
[11:06] everything they know. And you do, I recommend you do
[11:09] this like go and watch those lectures.
[11:11] And what you'll see is that everything, every theory that
[11:14] there is about the bio mechanics of ACL tear is wrong.
[11:19] By that I mean like if there's a study saying that like people
[11:23] who tear their AC LS have like for instance, narrower tendons
[11:27] or a narrower canal to the tendon sits in or valgus
[11:31] collapse or and on and on, there's all these different
[11:34] theories, right? Wider hips and on and on.
[11:37] There's a study to show that that is so.
[11:39] And there's also in every one of those cases a really good study
[11:42] to show it is not. So you can, you can find studies
[11:45] that people with who tether AC LS don't have narrower tendons
[11:48] and don't have a narrower canal and don't have more valgus and
[11:51] on and on. So this is like the cardiology
[11:56] back when we had no idea what the signal was, back when people
[11:58] were being struck down. And we're just like, I don't
[12:01] know, right? We're in that with ACL, except
[12:04] now think about how P3 handled this, right?
[12:06] So they have more than 1000 NBA players have been scanned, which
[12:10] is significantly more players than are in the NBA.
[12:13] That's because they've been doing this for a while, right?
[12:16] And they did a retrospective study of, I take these million
[12:20] data points for almost 400 NBA players and then look at the
[12:24] ones who end up with ACL tears or catastrophic injuries of any
[12:27] kind. And then you kind of at the over
[12:30] 2 years, right? You look at everybody for two
[12:32] years and then the ones who do tear their ACL or have a
[12:35] meniscus tear, etcetera, go back in time, how did they move
[12:39] before, right? And you can do have these
[12:41] factors that are correlated. And it's incredible. 100% of NBA
[12:47] players for the ICL had the same movement habit of how their foot
[12:51] hit the ground. This is a thing.
[12:53] We can talk about it, but like no doctor, you know, is looking
[12:56] for this. No physical therapist is looking
[12:58] for this. Like this is a novel thing.
[13:00] And it's not just coming from their own personal theory.
[13:03] In fact, it's not coming from that at all.
[13:04] It's coming from a million data points.
[13:06] And these are the ones that go Ding, Ding, Ding, right, all the
[13:10] way down the list of like, what are the factors is just a brand
[13:13] new set of factors, which is the best news in the world for you
[13:15] and me and everyone. Because we're out of this trap
[13:18] of these lectures of saying that we don't know anything about
[13:21] what injury looks like before it happens like I think we do.
[13:23] And I think we will know a lot more.
[13:25] And I think that we're going to move into a world where we can
[13:27] all have our bodies scanned with our phone or with something at
[13:29] home or some video game console, etcetera.
[13:32] And and we're gonna have a better we're gonna have a better
[13:34] ability to just live happier, healthier lives.
[13:37] That wow, I mean, incredible. So much to go on from there.
[13:42] So obviously basketball NBA players, I'm pretty sure in
[13:45] saying this is the population size that Marcus and P3 have the
[13:49] most data from, like the athlete group they have the most info
[13:51] from. Is that correct?
[13:53] In terms of pro leagues, yeah, for sure.
[13:54] OK, Yep, Yep. And is it so granular that they
[13:57] can say, oh, look at how all shooting guards move versus how
[14:01] all power forwards moves? Yes.
[14:03] Yes, guys, when I tell you how important that is, we would get
[14:06] it. We're going to bring it to
[14:07] association football or soccer as, as it was in America, say
[14:11] how strikers move differently to how center backs and full backs
[14:13] move, right? Those are very different types
[14:16] of things. This is the kind of granular
[14:17] detail you want to know when you're looking at the predictive
[14:21] part of this, right? Because that's ultimately what
[14:22] we're doing. It's saying, how does someone
[14:25] move prior to, oh, now this thing happens, right?
[14:29] Everyone, it's easy to see the, oh, this horrific slide tackle
[14:33] that tears someone's ACL. It's like, well, yeah, that we
[14:36] saw that that thing caused the thing.
[14:38] But what about the one where no one touched them and they just
[14:41] ran and fell, right? Like, what's the reason there?
[14:44] And that's the area where where I think it's so fascinating,
[14:46] where Marcus obviously is doing pioneering work.
[14:50] So I think, Henry, one of the things that is I think widely
[14:55] become accepted in sports is that players need rest and that
[15:02] if they have rest, that will hopefully lead to less injuries.
[15:08] You know, the Sloan Conference in Boston is one of the widely
[15:12] attended events every year. You've been numerous times like
[15:15] you were there this past year. But there was a paper presented
[15:18] on soccer association football players and rest.
[15:21] What insights did you have coming out of that particular?
[15:24] I just thought it was pretty cool.
[15:26] So there's the the gist of the paper was kind of like using a
[15:31] machine learning model to figure out like how to prioritize your
[15:35] players. And like, so let's say you're
[15:37] playing like a crappy opponent on Wednesday and a top opponent
[15:40] on Sunday. And then and maybe the opponent
[15:44] on Wednesday has a certain style where you have a certain line up
[15:46] that's better and the different stuff.
[15:48] So like, you know, do you play your star players for both games
[15:51] or only one and blah, blah, blah.
[15:53] Like, and they made all these different models of like, you
[15:57] know, how to get the ultimate outcome over the season to
[16:00] prioritize a little more rest for your stars, right?
[16:03] And then they, you know, had a little chart of like, you know,
[16:07] if you were the most conservative, you would play
[16:10] this way. And if you wanted to get the
[16:11] most wins, you would play this way.
[16:12] If you wanted to produce injuries the most, you play this
[16:14] way. And then there's like the
[16:15] absolutely batshit crazy, I do not care whatsoever about my
[16:19] players health way. I just want to win.
[16:20] I'm only thinking about today. And they were like, that was a
[16:24] machine learning model that correlated almost perfectly with
[16:26] reality. Like that's how coaches coach in
[16:30] top level soccer. This is just this like, I'm
[16:32] worried about getting fired today.
[16:34] And so I'm going to burn all the matches, right?
[16:36] Because there'll be no thought of long term planning
[16:38] whatsoever. And that's the norm.
[16:40] And you know what's so interesting about that as we
[16:42] drill down to Real Madrid as, as our fans of, of the club know,
[16:47] we have players on this squad who, and you know, association
[16:50] football is different from basketball in the sense that
[16:53] they're playing multiple competitions throughout the
[16:56] calendar year, right? So if you're Real Madrid and
[16:59] you're in La Liga, right, there's the La Liga season,
[17:01] right? Just like how Arsenal has the
[17:03] Premier League. That's once a week national.
[17:04] League, right, And that's one match a week, right?
[17:06] Then you're in your European season, which is Champions
[17:09] League or Europa Liga conference, like you're someone
[17:12] on leg. So often times there's a
[17:14] Champions League match on a Tuesday or Wednesday and your
[17:17] league game on a Sunday. There is also your domestic cup,
[17:21] right? So if you're in the Premier
[17:23] League, it's FA Cup. If you're in La Liga, it's Copa
[17:25] del Rey, right? And then there is your national
[17:28] team in the international break when you have these ridiculous
[17:31] matches that you also play. So soccer players are literally
[17:34] playing year round without any kind of rest.
[17:38] And I saw this stat and it, it, it blew my mind.
[17:41] A couple stats. First, Drew Bellingham.
[17:44] By the way, Henry's from England, so he's in.
[17:47] England, that one player. So he is obviously England's
[17:53] young * and he is Real Madrid's young star.
[17:55] David Beckham, everybody knows him.
[17:57] One of the great players of all time at the same age of 21, Jude
[18:00] Bellingham has played five times as many minutes as David
[18:04] Beckham. Henry.
[18:05] That to me was alarm bells. I was like what the I was like.
[18:09] So what we're saying is we want, we want Jude Bellingham's career
[18:12] to end at 25 is what we're saying if we do that.
[18:17] Yeah, I said. There's a when back in the
[18:19] earliest part of me caring about injuries.
[18:22] I don't know, 2010, eleven, something like that.
[18:25] There was a study that really motivated me which was from, I
[18:29] think it was from the Premiership, but basically those
[18:33] players used to play once a week as you say, which meant the
[18:36] habit was they would say play super hard on Saturday or Sunday
[18:39] and then they would rest a couple days.
[18:40] Then they would do a crazy hard training on Tuesday and then you
[18:44] have the full three day. If you're going to do a crazy
[18:46] hard workout like a cardiovascular, like 70 minutes
[18:48] on the treadmill or something like big workout right, then
[18:52] you'd have a full 3 days to recover.
[18:53] Then you play again the following weekend and on that
[18:57] schedule, your body gets stronger as the season goes on.
[19:00] But then they added just the the Champions League, which meant
[19:05] twice a week, which meant never having a hard workout other than
[19:09] in games and injury rates went up six fold.
[19:13] And there's debate about is that because of the more minutes or
[19:15] because of the missing the training?
[19:17] But it's something happened, right?
[19:19] So to me I was like, well, this is basketball lives in that more
[19:22] than twice a week thing already and with the no hard training
[19:25] mark so interestingly. And so I have my like informed
[19:29] by studies like that position of like, we're just playing too
[19:32] much. Marcus actually has a different
[19:33] view. He's like, we had no idea what
[19:35] bodies can take 'cause we trained so stupidly to in his
[19:39] point, Like every single player should have a super granular
[19:43] assessment and then a workout designed just to just to shore
[19:47] up that body's exact weaknesses. And he's like, if everybody did
[19:50] that, we don't know what we can take.
[19:51] We know that with dumb training, we can't handle the schedule,
[19:54] but like, maybe we can with really good training.
[19:56] So I don't know, like, I don't know who's right about that.
[19:59] Nobody knows, right? But Marcus knows more than I do
[20:02] about human bodies, that's for sure.
[20:03] And he's like, why don't we just get the training good first?
[20:06] And in a way, he has this. He's like, he's like, in a way,
[20:09] pro athletes are underworked. He's like they're overplayed.
[20:12] Oh, I love it. I love it.
[20:14] This is brilliant. This is brilliant, brilliant,
[20:17] brilliant stuff. Because the way you mentioned
[20:19] it, right, This brings me back to and football fans know this
[20:21] name Diego Maradona, right? A mercurial figure, say the
[20:25] least. But I mean a freaking supernova.
[20:29] I mean talk about a dude who on the pitch, Holy hell that man
[20:34] can boss, can also boss off the pitch.
[20:36] This is part of the reason why he ended, ended his life a
[20:38] little bit prematurely. You would argue, but he would go
[20:42] balls to the wall in that game on Saturday or Sunday, party
[20:46] like a maniac for 48 hours. Like after the whole weekend,
[20:50] have those days that Henry talked about to recover super
[20:53] hard training on Wednesday or Tuesday midweek have the
[20:56] recovery bang. I'm ready to do it again on
[20:58] Saturday. Like I was like, well, you know,
[21:00] that's so there is. Sounds like you're thinking
[21:02] about that lifestyle for yourself throughout.
[21:03] Are you in the cars? I think you had to have already
[21:07] been like trending towards that. I think now starting it probably
[21:10] not going. To end so no.
[21:12] I don't think at this stage of my life, probably not going to
[21:15] work out well, but I've been doing it like late teens.
[21:17] Yeah, might be OK, but I don't think so now.
[21:20] But that that is, that's the idea though, right?
[21:23] Because if you have all these matches, right, 2-3 times a
[21:26] week, to your point, well, when are you training?
[21:28] You're not, It's literally OK. We're just going to kind of get
[21:32] some rest and the games become sort of those super hard
[21:35] training sessions, which to me are isn't good because the games
[21:39] have stakes and consequences, IE we have to win this thing or
[21:42] we're getting knocked out. And they have mean people
[21:44] shoving you to the ground and knocking you over And like, and
[21:47] the, you know, I, I this again, this study is older, but like, I
[21:51] think that the like injury rate per minute of practice is X.
[21:57] And, and if you're using the game as practice as your
[21:59] exercise, right, it's the injury rate per minute is 4X.
[22:03] So basically like it's just a shitty way to train, right?
[22:05] Like you're, you're going to get your guys beat up if you if you
[22:08] train them there. I know there's no choice in most
[22:10] of these things, but but I do think there's every reason to
[22:12] believe we could do better, right?
[22:15] The the model, like come on my paper, it's Sloane.
[22:17] And like the we're doing the the Super insane short term thinking
[22:21] over here that everybody already knows that's not right, right,
[22:25] Like. Real Madrid fans will know the
[22:29] name Federico Valverde. He is our 26 year old
[22:32] midfielder, the engine of our team.
[22:34] Henry, he's the kind of player when you watch football, he's a
[22:37] guy that you would like in that he gives Max effort all the
[22:41] time. Fans joke that like Fetty must
[22:44] have like 17 lungs because it seems like he never runs out of
[22:47] energy. And I'm like, Oh no, no, he he,
[22:50] he for sure will run out of energy at some point.
[22:52] He led all the top five leagues in Europe in minutes this year
[22:58] between club and country with 6480 minutes, 466 minutes more
[23:03] than the second place person, which is Bruno Fernanch of
[23:06] Manchester United and Portugal, 400 and 686 minutes.
[23:10] Henry is essentially by a little over 5 full 90s, right?
[23:14] So we essentially played five more games, a little more than
[23:16] five more games than the second best, the 2nd place person on
[23:20] that list. And I joke to fans, that's not a
[23:22] list you ever want to be #1 on is most minutes across.
[23:25] Nope, that's. That's not a, that's not a
[23:27] highlight. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a sign
[23:30] that he's very lucky that he can, he has a like a Physiology
[23:35] and biology and that he can cope with a crap ton, right.
[23:39] So that's kind of like saying, I don't know, like maybe you know,
[23:43] someone who can lift the front of a car, right.
[23:45] Great. They've achieved a lot
[23:47] physically. Does that mean it's smart to
[23:48] give them a car to hold? Nope, you know.
[23:50] Like, what is dumb use of that person, right?
[23:52] Like yeah, yeah, I don't like. So I guess like one of the
[23:57] things that comes to mind when you say this is a guarantee,
[24:01] actually there's a little story that's not in the book that was
[24:04] in the version of the book is I, when I went to Chicago to meet
[24:10] the P3 staff at the combine, they had just had dinner with an
[24:14] NBA team that they think is really smart, right?
[24:17] And at the dinner, the guy who is like their director of
[24:21] performance or something broke the news that they were not
[24:24] going to sign a deal with P3 because in his view, the
[24:27] organization wasn't ready for it.
[24:29] They weren't like responsive enough, open minded enough,
[24:32] data-driven enough, like ready to train in according to P3's
[24:36] recommendations. And Marcus is a very calm, stoic
[24:41] guy. Like he meditates and you can
[24:42] tell. And I, I, I'm blown away at how
[24:44] many different curveballs come in him and he's just like, OK,
[24:46] and he can just navigate. He's really, really amazing at
[24:49] this. Like he's maybe the calmest
[24:51] person I've ever known. But this particular line of
[24:54] argument pissed him off And and he actually later apologized for
[24:58] whatever he said at dinner, right?
[24:59] I don't know, I wasn't there. But but his point is, look, like
[25:03] we know like to talking to this guy who is also a sports
[25:07] scientist. He's like, we know that if we
[25:08] scan your whole team, that we're going to find 3 or 4 players who
[25:13] are super high risk of some kind of truth or threatening injury,
[25:16] right? And we know if you, if we don't
[25:18] scan your whole team, you still have those three or four players
[25:21] with those risks, right? And your only choice, like
[25:24] you're hired at this place to take responsibility for
[25:28] preventing these crises, right? Like you're telling me that some
[25:32] people in the building don't love that.
[25:33] How that would go? Like now you need to be louder,
[25:36] right? Like, like now your job is more
[25:38] important, not less important. And, and so I mean, that team
[25:42] didn't do this deal, didn't scan those players did have a bunch
[25:45] of significant injuries that year, right?
[25:47] And. So to me, like and, and just as
[25:50] a little little throw, in fact, here, almost 100% of the
[25:54] athletes that they scan come away with pressing needs for
[25:57] their hips. I think that's 'cause we all sit
[26:01] so much. But they, you know, I've already
[26:04] forgotten the name of your midfielder who doesn't tire.
[26:07] Fete Valverde. So Fete Valverde, we'd already
[26:11] can surmise they'll have a hip recommendation where his hips
[26:13] probably need to be more stable or more mobile.
[26:16] We don't know which one, but he's been working on that,
[26:18] right? And whichever one of those
[26:20] things he's not currently consciously working on, I'm
[26:23] working on that four days a week.
[26:25] I'm doing like big robust workouts.
[26:27] All about these hips issues, right?
[26:31] The normal course of aging and stressing your hips will make it
[26:35] so that like he's going to feel, I mean, he might feel other
[26:38] things. Your hip issues can might
[26:39] manifest in the knee or the ankle or the back or whatever.
[26:42] But but my guess is that on top of anything else you might have
[26:46] with this heavy workload, we're just getting closer to the day
[26:48] that this comes to fruition. And then bummer.
[26:51] And he's going to have to deal with whatever that, you know,
[26:53] like sometimes people have messed up hips that results in
[26:55] ACL tear. Henry, it's so interesting that
[26:57] you say that because you know what, in what Fedev Alberti
[27:00] suffered from the end of this past season, he was having lower
[27:03] back trouble. I was like, I wonder, right?
[27:08] And it's again, it's this idea of at this stage, it's not just
[27:12] about OK, give them the rest. The training needs to change.
[27:15] Understanding what the issues are, getting that scan.
[27:18] So we know, oh, wow, here are all the things we have to work
[27:21] on right now so that we preserve you so that you can play into
[27:25] your 30s and not literally be dead.
[27:28] But, you know, just metaphorically, not physically
[27:30] at 27 because, well, that's what happens when you play 7000
[27:32] minutes a season, yeah. Well, can we talk about his
[27:35] lower back really fast? That's the key finding.
[27:37] So there's so many things they found at P3 because of their
[27:41] approach is so different that like no one's ever known before.
[27:43] But one of them, which is my exact issue with my body is that
[27:48] I don't, when I land from running or jumping or whatever,
[27:52] I'm getting better, but like I tend not to absorb the force of
[27:55] landing in my glutes, right? So there, there's three stacked
[27:59] joints here, right? It's your ankles, knees and
[28:00] hips. And they're all, ideally, they
[28:01] all flex together. About 1/3 of NBA players and
[28:06] about a third of every population they test have their
[28:10] ankles and knees bend as they're supposed to, and the hips don't
[28:14] join the party in quite the right way.
[28:16] And what happens P3 has discovered and now is like kind
[28:20] of a big finding in medicine is that the force that was supposed
[28:24] to go into your glutes just keeps going up the chain, right?
[28:26] It's got to go somewhere. And it goes into your lower
[28:29] back, which is not well designed whatsoever to deal with the
[28:33] force of landing, right? Like we were definitely designed
[28:37] to land with those three joints compressing together.
[28:40] And I don't know why, but my hips didn't.
[28:42] I think I kind of, I blame a little bit my British heritage,
[28:45] but like, don't we all agree that's probably what happened
[28:49] like a little too British in the hips, like, but we didn't bend
[28:54] properly. And now that's what I work on,
[28:56] right? It's like all kinds of
[28:57] strengthening and mobility and stuff just to engage my hips
[29:00] more. Like this is the, I mean, I
[29:02] don't, I haven't ever heard this man's name before today.
[29:06] I've never seen him play. I have no idea what I'm talking
[29:08] about. But like, it could be that he
[29:09] should be doing the work I'm doing just just so that every
[29:12] single step he takes over all those minutes, the force goes
[29:14] into his glute and on his lower back.
[29:16] And if that's the case for him, then it's never going away.
[29:19] Like until they start addressing this, it's never going away.
[29:22] And the thing about his minutes, Henry, is that they're not.
[29:25] They are long busting minutes. He is giving 100% every single
[29:29] minute he's out there. He's I mean, listen, his blood
[29:33] lactate clearance abilities got to be like in the .0000.
[29:36] Like, he's ridiculous. Yeah, he's ridiculous.
[29:39] But still, all these other things are causing issues.
[29:41] You mentioned the force that hits when we run, right?
[29:44] That like and I forget either you or Marcus might have said it
[29:47] to me one time, but the amount of force like when you come up
[29:50] and land running is ridiculous, right?
[29:53] And that's hitting those small muscles, not your glutes, your
[29:57] hips. You're so as like the right, the
[30:00] big things that need to be absorbing that not the little
[30:02] on. Now I got a bad ACL.
[30:04] Now my lower back hurts. Not right because everything
[30:06] else is in firing the way it should be.
[30:07] Yeah, exactly. So one of the standard tests
[30:10] that's part of this assessment they do is you stand on an 18
[30:14] inch box and then you just step off.
[30:15] Don't jump off, you just step off and land on 2 force plates
[30:18] and the record for NBA players is to land with 11,000 Newtons
[30:23] of force. And for perspective on that, it
[30:26] takes about 3000 Newtons of force to fully sever a human
[30:30] spine. Jesus Christ.
[30:33] So, yeah, we land with like, I mean, and and there's like a
[30:35] little, there's a this pro volleyball player, Katie
[30:37] Spieler, who's a tiny person. She's 55.
[30:39] I can almost, she weighs, but not much.
[30:42] She stepped off with 3100 Newtons of force.
[30:45] So the point is, we land super hard, and the answer is not to
[30:50] get terrified of those Newtons. In Marx's view, the answer is to
[30:53] learn how to cope with them because they actually help you
[30:57] if you land well. So if you land as Marx wants you
[31:00] to land, your toes are up and the ball of your foot is on the
[31:03] ground, and then your ankle is engaged and strong and the lower
[31:07] leg muscles are strong to hold your heel in the right position.
[31:10] And then the force of landing passes cleanly, as you suggest,
[31:13] from like the floor to your Achilles and calf, to your quads
[31:16] and your glutes. And then not only does that
[31:18] attenuate the force of landing to break you as you land, but
[31:22] you're stretching the upper bands of these big strong
[31:25] muscles, which helps you jump, cut, step, run to the next step,
[31:30] right. And like, the variance is huge.
[31:32] Some runners carry 40% of their force from one step to the next,
[31:36] and some runners carry 90%. Wow.
[31:38] Well, like you want to get in that 90%, right?
[31:42] Like, and this is biomechanical is up, it's trainable.
[31:44] This is what they're doing, right?
[31:45] They're, they're assessing how you, how you kinematically carry
[31:49] force around your body. And we can work on it.
[31:52] We can improve it, just as we can improve how we speak Spanish
[31:55] or French or whatever. You know, you mentioned that,
[31:58] that NBA team that said, you know, we're not we're not ready
[32:01] to do that. Marcus is like, what?
[32:02] What do you mean you're not ready?
[32:04] Yeah. But Henry, there are real, when
[32:07] I say real concerns, real from the standpoint of there are
[32:10] people with competing agendas inside every organ.
[32:13] Well, there's an NBA team, an NFL team.
[32:15] Hey. Everybody holds hands and sings
[32:17] by odd. Yeah, right.
[32:19] Bullshit. Whether you're Real Madrid,
[32:21] Arsenal, Liverpool, it doesn't matter.
[32:23] Everybody because as I've said before, and you know this very
[32:26] well, Henry, jobs inside these organizations are coveted, one,
[32:31] because they pay a shit ton of money, 2, the lifestyle you get
[32:36] to live because of that is quite good.
[32:39] And all the fringe benefits and read between the lines and I say
[32:42] fringe benefits are pretty fucking good.
[32:45] Right. Well, and with the European
[32:46] soccer teams too, like let's be honest, like the coaches dress
[32:48] really well I. Mean they do.
[32:51] They have the good swag, they they team gears really cool and
[32:54] and the MBA everybody looks terrible.
[32:55] But in European soccer, come on, you're getting off the bus
[32:57] looking pretty sharp. Like, oh, listen, that that,
[32:59] that the deals and all this stuff, I mean the BMW, all the
[33:02] great things you get. Yeah.
[33:04] So there are competing factors and reasons that make things
[33:09] that make consensus building very difficult inside of
[33:12] organizations. However, let's let's let's break
[33:15] it down and let's get into the details, right?
[33:17] Like, why is it so freaking hard for a team like on Real Madrid?
[33:22] Because that's what we're talking about.
[33:23] The richest club in world football.
[33:26] This should be an easy thing higher Marcus and his club, come
[33:28] on out, let's do the thing. Let's roll with it.
[33:30] Why is this so difficult and challenging?
[33:33] So think about being a doctor in the a cardiologist in the 30s
[33:36] when Doctor White is saying, like, you know, everything that
[33:40] you've ever practiced is wrong. You're an idiot.
[33:42] Yeah, people aren't like, oh great, get more of that guy in
[33:45] here, right? That's not how it.
[33:47] Goes you're proud. You're a proud cardiologist.
[33:48] You've been telling your patients XY and Z forever, and
[33:51] now it's like, maybe that's just wrong, right?
[33:53] So there are, there's somebody who has a prominent job with
[33:56] Real Madrid who's in charge of this, who doesn't have Marcus's
[33:59] data set and doesn't have this granular biomechanical approach
[34:02] and has some and probably has published academic papers on the
[34:06] width of the canal and the ACL, you know, that sits in and all
[34:09] this kind of stuff, right? So we are literally in a moment
[34:12] where one set of science is being kind of obviated by
[34:15] another or actually in, in sports.
[34:18] There are also a ton of like just not that educated people
[34:22] who are in the training space, right?
[34:24] And, and they're terrified, right?
[34:26] Like there's a there's a whole chapter of the book about the
[34:29] Utah Jazz became like early adopters.
[34:31] And there's this guy Mark McCown, who's an incredible
[34:33] character. And he didn't, he was exactly
[34:36] the kind of person who would be obviated by Marcus.
[34:39] I mean, he's an educated guy, but he didn't understand what
[34:42] the hell Marcus was talking about.
[34:45] My kind of dumb, weird luck P3 ended up training this guy
[34:49] Rafael Arujo. Do you remember him?
[34:51] Hoffa, they call him and and Mark noticed that Hoffa went
[34:56] from like totally immobile to like a little bit mobile after
[35:00] training with P3. And so he flew out to Santa
[35:02] Barbara and into like, you know, basically what are you doing?
[35:04] And then just dedicated essentially the rest of his
[35:08] career to like pivoting to this new approach, this biomechanical
[35:12] approach and brought out ton, I mean, a whole almost everyone
[35:15] who played for the Jazz for year, Darren Williams, Kyle
[35:18] Korver, Rudy Paul Millsap, Rudy Gobert, they all became like
[35:21] some of the earliest adopters of P3 in the NBA.
[35:24] And but Mark was very, very, very unusual in that he was
[35:27] willing to just kind of subvert his own learning for somebody
[35:31] else's, right? And and eventually it cost him
[35:34] his job. Like it took a while, but
[35:36] eventually somebody who was like, hell no, we're not
[35:38] listening to Mark's MP3 replaced Mark, right.
[35:41] And you know, maybe Mark's a little pissed about that.
[35:44] But but yeah, there's somebody, you know, and Mark's explanation
[35:47] to me is that every single person in pro sports is job
[35:50] scared. And they're particularly job
[35:53] scared if someone comes along and says, you know, the way
[35:56] you've been doing it isn't the way we want to do it anymore.
[35:58] So Marcus's take is that, you know, the the billionaires
[36:02] actually really legitimately want to reduce injuries, but
[36:05] can't help but rely on their trusted experts who are in the
[36:09] house who very often treat the billionaires own family, right.
[36:13] There's someone who's like trained your wife when she had
[36:15] lower back pain or whatever. These are people who are like
[36:17] part of the family and that person just isn't eager to, to
[36:21] give up control of these things and to look silly.
[36:24] And actually there's one other part too, which is I witnessed
[36:26] this first hand. So there are then there's
[36:29] another category which is I don't think I should say the
[36:33] name, but there's like a a pretty famous NBA front office
[36:36] guy explained to me that he thinks that everything they're
[36:40] doing AP 3 is exactly dead on and you know and 100% the
[36:45] future, which is why they've purchased all the same equipment
[36:49] and they're going to do it all themselves in their own
[36:51] facility, which is kind. On the one hand, you can see the
[36:55] logic. The problem is the data set
[36:57] right, correct. Like you, you know they're AP3.
[37:00] They didn't have any useful conclusions until they had
[37:03] hundreds of players right? Like so for instance, if I'm
[37:08] landing on the 1st place as I was describing with, you know,
[37:11] 3000 Newtons, is that too much? Is that not enough?
[37:14] Like if you only have 12 people in your data set, we don't know,
[37:16] you can't answer any questions like that or actually one that
[37:19] came up there. This is actually important for
[37:20] soccer, I think is they do this thing called a one off skater,
[37:25] right? So you can imagine like you
[37:26] stand on one leg on the force plate and then as explosively as
[37:30] you can, you just leap side, right?
[37:32] Some people leap with the their shin at a very steep angle and
[37:36] some people it's more upright. And you know, does the Super
[37:40] steep angle relate to injury? It's like, well, if it's your
[37:44] mom, we're testing then and she gets a steep angle, she's going
[37:47] to hurt herself at a steep angle because he takes incredible
[37:49] musculature to like be stable in that position.
[37:53] But if it's if you only test like cornerbacks in the NFL,
[37:58] then you're going to find they can handle they cut like that
[38:00] every day. They can handle it like crazy.
[38:03] And so it's safe for them, right?
[38:05] You have to have so many elite athletes in your data set to
[38:08] even answer these questions. So like when you're Real Madrid
[38:11] players go through like, I guarantee that they can handle a
[38:14] really steep angle, but you need to have 100 of them before you
[38:17] can start drawing conclusions about like what are their injury
[38:19] risks, right? So, so that's what this, you
[38:21] know, the individual team approaches is sunk on this very
[38:25] point. There is a new deal in place
[38:26] right now. It's just starting.
[38:28] It'll take a few years to really like where like every NBA team
[38:30] will have this kind of assessment for every NBA player
[38:34] four times a year and the data will be shared with a bunch of
[38:37] vendors including P3. So we're going to start to have
[38:40] like a more systemic thing in the NBA, which might lead to
[38:44] amazing things and maybe that kind of stuff.
[38:46] They've, there's been discussion about having this kind of stuff
[38:49] with like the German federation and some other place Anyway, so
[38:52] I could it's, you know, it, it's, we're not nowhere on this.
[38:55] And I'll bet you that if we called up P3 right now, they
[38:57] would tell you They've had a few Real Madrid players like I
[39:00] they're, they're pretty plugged into this scene.
[39:02] But but yeah, it's it's hit or miss at the current time though.
[39:06] One of the other challenges too, Henry is OK.
[39:08] So the team aspect of it is one thing that you mentioned pretty
[39:11] sunk on them because of job scarcity.
[39:12] All the things is the athlete portion of this, right?
[39:15] Because these players are competing for minutes, minutes
[39:20] means salaries of your contracts and whatever.
[39:24] The more time I am out on the bench gives another time, more
[39:27] time for some replacement to come and be better than me.
[39:31] And now I'm out of a job, right? And it is one of the big words
[39:34] you love to use with an organizations that do things
[39:36] well is trust, right? It's trust to know that I'm not
[39:40] going to lose my job because I was injured and I had to follow
[39:43] my civic protocol to take my time to come back.
[39:45] We had a player, Antonio Rudiger, defender, 31 year old,
[39:49] sent her back who had ligament surgery on his knee the end of
[39:54] the season and literally rushed back for the Club World Cup and
[39:57] looked God awful. Like look like dog shit.
[40:00] And I'm like. Why was Rudiker rushing back?
[40:03] Like what like? And his boat process was, we're
[40:05] bringing these young kids in, we're signing deals, I got to
[40:07] sign one more big deal. I don't know what's going to
[40:09] happen. So that's also an issue in this
[40:11] too, right? Anxiety makes us all stupid, you
[40:14] know, like it does like I mean, I don't say that lately, like we
[40:18] everyone's anxiety is like very popular globally right now,
[40:21] right, for sure, But you know, it's not the way to make good
[40:25] long term decisions, right? You know, I think you, you
[40:27] really do want to have a manager who's, you know, trying to get
[40:31] I, I think it would be good to have a selfish manager who wants
[40:34] to get the most possible wins this season.
[40:35] But like, just the technique of that shouldn't be spaz, right?
[40:40] Shouldn't be panic. It should be like, well, you
[40:41] know what, we're going to want you in the cup final.
[40:44] And so we're not going to play you today and like, and I still
[40:46] love you. I'm going to forget you and
[40:47] we're not going to fall in love with the other person just
[40:48] 'cause you're gone, etcetera. Yeah, it's just crazy.
[40:52] It's crazy to me. I you know, I've been watching a
[40:53] ton of the US women's national soccer team and Emma Hayes and I
[40:58] just read her book and, you know, she's she's been plugging
[41:03] in and I think something like 24 players have their first new
[41:07] caps on her. And like, she is, she has
[41:10] convinced the veterans on the team that that's a good thing,
[41:13] right? And many of them have been
[41:16] absent from like the whole international window entirely,
[41:18] right. And because in case it's having
[41:19] babies and stuff, right? And like, I just feel like, OK,
[41:22] like it can be done, right? If that if your goal is to, you
[41:25] know, to make the US national team super strong, then they
[41:29] have a pool of 50 players. And because at any given time,
[41:33] half of them are going to be out injured because that's how
[41:34] women's soccer goes right now, right?
[41:36] But but I feel like Emma Hayes isn't, I mean, she's a very,
[41:40] very high skilled coach, but I don't think she's like the only
[41:43] one in the world who can pull this off.
[41:46] I just don't think other teams are trying that, right?
[41:48] I don't think they're trying to build this kind of trust, which
[41:50] is a bummer because I think that we're going to want that, right?
[41:52] Where with this thing, you know, with the, with the two games a
[41:55] week and the six times injury thing, it's like that's a
[41:57] problem we should all try to solve together, right?
[41:59] The coaches and the players and the agents and everybody, the
[42:02] owners. Nobody wants these players
[42:04] injured, right? And it's, it's doable.
[42:06] We can do better. Especially because it doesn't
[42:09] seem Henry that in any sport, whether it be football, NBA,
[42:14] whatever, these calendars are shrinking anytime soon.
[42:17] They're it's just, we're just adding more and more games and
[42:20] more and more tournaments because the greedy people who
[42:23] run these leagues and whatever just want more and more dollars.
[42:26] But as you always say, the special thing is the athlete,
[42:32] right? Tyrese Halliburton is a special
[42:34] thing. Jude Bellingham is the special
[42:36] thing. These are the special things
[42:39] that that everybody wants to see do and perform at its peak
[42:43] level, increasing games. And this kind of that's not the
[42:47] way to do that, right? It it is.
[42:49] And so now to take a lesson from the NBA, since we know that
[42:54] we're not reducing games anytime soon.
[42:55] As a matter of fact, we're adding two new teams in the near
[42:57] future, which means more games. The goal is how do I deliver my
[43:01] guys to the most important part of the season at their
[43:04] healthiest so that they can be the best, so they can win
[43:07] tournaments? And that is depth, right?
[43:10] And that, I think, is a huge part.
[43:12] Part of that. Depth also is this kind of
[43:15] preventative nature when it comes to injuries, right?
[43:17] Being at the forefront of this. And you know, it's also humane,
[43:22] right? It's the humane thing to do,
[43:23] right? And it's good for your end
[43:25] product. That's what's going to cost
[43:26] people to spend a kajillion dollars because they're like,
[43:29] whoa, I'm gonna get to see Terry's Halliburton run around
[43:31] and do amazing things. I get to see Jude play until
[43:33] he's 30. Like that's what you want?
[43:35] Yeah, I think if you you know, I at one point I asked Marcus kind
[43:39] of like, what's the like, what's upstream of all of this being
[43:43] handled so stupidly, right? And his take was basically like,
[43:47] people just don't think you can prevent injuries, right?
[43:49] Like if you if you merely think that it can't be done, then, OK,
[43:53] play your guys like, you know, maybe lightning strikes, maybe
[43:55] it doesn't like you can't worry about it so much, right?
[43:57] And I get that's the Tom Thibodeau approach.
[43:58] Like I, I, I, it used to be true enough, right?
[44:02] If you listen to those ACL lectures, they're like, well, I
[44:04] don't like, we don't know which ones are going to have the ACL
[44:06] tear. And so why, why would you worry
[44:08] about it so much? But it's changing now, right?
[44:10] So I think that the science is real science is on the side of,
[44:13] you know, that one today is high risk, right?
[44:16] And or, or to your point about return to play, right, This is a
[44:20] this is one of the areas where Marcus gets pretty fired up.
[44:22] His thing is pretty basic if you think about it.
[44:25] So return to play has been run by surgeons and they have
[44:29] calendar based timelines. So you get an AC, I'm going to
[44:34] screw up the numbers that let's it's something like, you know,
[44:36] 120 days after your ACL surgery. Then you can do XY and Z stuff
[44:40] in the gym and eventually you get to like plyometrics and all
[44:43] this stuff. And and then you can return to
[44:45] play when you're operated on leg is like 90% as strong as your
[44:50] other leg. To Marcus, these are like the
[44:53] most archaic possible measure. Stupid.
[44:56] Your ACL tear was caused by a biomechanical movement pattern
[45:01] that maybe you still have right To them.
[45:03] It's just high school physics. You can literally see in a
[45:05] little computer model in the back of the gym, like, oh, look
[45:07] how much force there is. Look how many Newtons are
[45:09] pressing on this ligament. Like, is that still happening?
[45:12] So and the and like, and the leg that you're doing is 90% of like
[45:17] the other one that the healthy leg has not been trained for all
[45:21] these months. So now you have this super weak
[45:23] leg and you got 90% of his weak leg and we don't even know if
[45:26] you can move. So his point is we should do the
[45:30] full assessment, the P3 assessment that we did back when
[45:32] you were healthy and you should return to play when you move
[45:35] like you, right? When you, when you have the
[45:38] ability to cut and etcetera, like you used to do, right?
[45:42] And when, when you're moving like you, OK, now we're good to
[45:44] go. And, and the surgeon shouldn't
[45:46] be in charge of that, right? That's a, that's a biomechanical
[45:48] question, not a surgical question.
[45:50] And the tissue is like only a fraction of the issue, right?
[45:53] It's mostly like, you know, how do you move?
[45:56] We, it's so interesting that you bring this up because it, it, it
[46:02] is, I've talked about this forever.
[46:03] It's like this idea of personalized medicine, right?
[46:06] Everybody is different, right? Someone who comes off of an ACL,
[46:11] it may take them 5 1/2 months to move like how they used to move.
[46:15] It may take somebody else 8 1/2 months.
[46:17] It may take somebody else 13. I don't know.
[46:19] But those are the timelines. Not my calendar says this, this
[46:22] and this and Real Madrid fans know this well.
[46:25] Eden Militao, by the way, we had a rash of ACL injuries, Henry
[46:28] like just a rash. Eden Motao tore his ACL in
[46:32] August of 2023, was out for a full year, came back in 2024.
[46:38] Guess what he did towards other ACL in November of 2024?
[46:40] And I was going to say, right, And I imagine it's common
[46:43] because of what you just said. Yeah, like super weak.
[46:46] You still have that same problem in how you move.
[46:49] Now it's the other leg, which is way more compromised.
[46:51] Now you're hurt. Again.
[46:52] Well, and now you're scared, right?
[46:53] Like like this, you know, I hurt my back.
[46:55] It was on the right side and you could see when I would stand,
[46:58] jump off the little box and land.
[46:59] Like I felt like I was landing with my feet even, but I put
[47:02] tons of force on my left side because I'm a little scared on
[47:05] the right side, right? Everyone who tears the right ACL
[47:08] does the same thing, right? So now, like maybe you used to
[47:11] move in a way where your left ACL wasn't at risk, but guess
[47:13] what? You just shifted all this force
[47:14] over to the left side because you're a little scared over
[47:17] there, right? It's totally normal.
[47:18] But and you can train out of that like you can, you know, but
[47:21] I was actually kind of blown away, you know, I landed with a
[47:23] 30% difference between my right and left fire alarm, fire of
[47:28] injury risk. But I'd at that point I'd been
[47:30] to like several fancy sports medicine institute, several
[47:34] physical therapists, like all these different places.
[47:36] Nobody knew that. Like literally nobody knew that.
[47:40] Like it's such a basic thing once you think about it.
[47:43] And the fact that I have to go to Santa Barbara to this like
[47:46] cutting edge gym just to find out that I'm landing with like a
[47:49] fire alarm, fire risk. Like you could you could sort of
[47:51] assess that with just to scale bathroom scales, you know what I
[47:55] mean? Like, yeah, it's a pretty basic
[47:57] thing, but like, no one's thinking that way.
[48:00] And that's it. That's got to change.
[48:02] Oh man, this is listen, you know, we can talk for multiple
[48:05] hours about this because this is like this is my wheelhouse.
[48:08] I do have a a a question I want to kind of, as we wrap here,
[48:13] Henry, why are bunnies and cheetahs and Ospreys important
[48:16] to understanding human movement? Now we're talking.
[48:20] This is what this is what I fall asleep thinking about.
[48:25] Yeah. So I immersed in Marcus's
[48:27] lessons and like, you know, just freedom of movement.
[48:30] And, you know, ultimately Marcus's view is that you want
[48:34] to move super freely. Like I already started thinking
[48:36] about like if two dogs off leash on the beach just romping,
[48:40] right? Like, like that's what we
[48:42] naturally do. If you have kids, would
[48:44] naturally do that on the beach if we let them, right?
[48:47] But instead we're all in car seats and we're rigid and bike
[48:50] helmets and you know, and we don't get to be quite so free
[48:52] like that. Actually, the dogs don't even
[48:54] get to feel like that anymore. But someone's going to yell at
[48:57] you. But but that's how you get the
[49:01] bio mechanics of a really elite mover, right?
[49:03] Is this like all that kind of twisting and turning like this
[49:06] is this is like learning a language, right?
[49:08] This is like learning to play a song on the guitar.
[49:10] Like this is this is a neurological process of like
[49:13] perfecting all these little movements and getting good at
[49:15] it. And once you're really good at
[49:16] it, you don't get injured as much, right?
[49:17] So in Marx's view, unfortunately, to gussy up your
[49:23] half broken body, you got to go and do some prescriptive things
[49:27] in the language learning model. This is like, you got to go
[49:29] decline verbs, right? You have to go master vocabulary
[49:32] list. But ideally that's so you can
[49:34] just have a fun night out in Buenos Aires and and speak the
[49:38] language and have a blast, right?
[49:39] Like a lot of it's a kind of full immersion movement thing.
[49:41] So in full immersion, it just kind of became clear just as a
[49:44] human being with eyes. I was like, oh, but I mean, I
[49:48] love how Anthony Edwards moves, but man, have you seen a fox?
[49:53] Have you seen? A cheetah owl.
[49:55] A cheetah. Like these are the best movers
[49:58] in the world, right? And like 100% of them grow up
[50:01] just romping wild and free, right?
[50:04] They're kids. They're the babies of all of
[50:06] these. Just fight each other all the
[50:07] time, right? And, and you know, that's how
[50:10] you get really good moving. And that's, that's kind of
[50:12] that's that's what we're maybe not doing so well in our like
[50:14] single sport, specialized supervised everyone in the car,
[50:18] you know, lifestyle. We're just not moving.
[50:21] We're not. We're not fluent enough in
[50:23] movement. I, I would encourage everybody
[50:25] to take a video, go on YouTube and watch Ospreys dive down into
[50:30] the water and watch a cheetah when it moves and it's stalking,
[50:34] praying it's running in slow MO. Cause I've done it.
[50:37] And one of the great things about it is the cheetah's head
[50:39] is so still that you can probably put a cup of water on
[50:42] top of it and have it not fall off right?
[50:44] Because it's just like, but like it it, it is rangely movie.
[50:48] And in my own life, Henry knows my dog Ginger.
[50:50] She's now she'll be 5 next month.
[50:52] We go to the field in the morning times when we can, and
[50:54] there's no one around. Yeah.
[50:56] And I take the leash off and I stand on one end and she's on
[50:58] the other end. And I'm like, Sprint to me,
[51:01] Henry, like watching her run is the most majestic thing ever.
[51:05] It's just like this coordinated motion.
[51:07] She almost levitates off the ground and she's coming.
[51:09] I'm like, this is fucking incredible.
[51:11] Like you're so good at this. Shit, that's what that body was
[51:14] designed to do. Like for sure.
[51:16] And like not letting it do that seems good.
[51:17] Here's the this is the meanest thing.
[51:19] Like I, I'm a I'm an animal lover.
[51:21] I'm a pacifist. I'm like, I'm nonviolent.
[51:23] But like, I'll tell you when I go to the Bronx Zoo and they
[51:26] have like lions with the MIT plexiglass, I'm like.
[51:30] I. I kind of wish a Bunny was
[51:32] straight in there. I want them to, I want them to
[51:34] like Hunt. You can tell that all this
[51:36] musculature that's not for lying around, right?
[51:40] You know, like they have a lifestyle from like Wally, you
[51:43] know, like, no, no, no, they're meant to.
[51:45] Move me. Yeah, they are like.
[51:48] Yeah, they are coordinated ways and like, like I love the Bunny
[51:51] and I don't want to die, but like, but man, I like they, they
[51:54] those guys want to move. They want to nuke from things
[51:57] like. Circle of life when you watch a
[51:58] pride of lionesses go out on the hunt, that is some of the most
[52:03] like I'm just like yo and and they're talk about coordination
[52:06] all right and like I imagine they're talking to each other.
[52:09] I'm gonna go take the lead in front.
[52:10] You grab the left side. You put up the rear.
[52:12] I'm gonna go, we're gonna encircle them.
[52:14] Then that one little one that slow is gonna be, that's the
[52:17] one. We got it and the four of us
[52:19] around and it's over. And that's, it's very similar to
[52:22] Real Madrid at its best, right? Like it's very, you know, this
[52:25] is how we hope to move, right? We aspire to move like that
[52:28] bunch of linuses, right? Like it's a it's an awesome
[52:31] thing. And, you know, and, and to the
[52:33] extent we can mimic that, including like, you know, what's
[52:36] the range of motion in your hips and how do you get your
[52:38] shoulders? Like, you know, all this kind of
[52:39] movement stuff. It's it's all very similar.
[52:42] Actually, there was a weird moment where I was hiking with
[52:44] Marcus and OK, like there's so much effort is spent in the
[52:49] animal world on like, who's alpha and are we going to fight
[52:51] over, you know, the right to meet with this one or that,
[52:53] whatever. And like, but I, I kind of like,
[52:56] I was like, oh, I understand what he's saying.
[52:57] It's basically like, like, first of all, they don't want to fight
[53:00] very much because they don't have doctors.
[53:01] Right. Yeah, yeah.
[53:02] Like, you can't be just getting big, big wounds all the time
[53:06] when you're like a bear or a lion, right?
[53:08] You're gonna die. What you need to do is walk up
[53:11] in such a way that everyone's like, oh, we're leaving her
[53:13] alone, Leaving him alone, Right. Exactly what's that walk?
[53:16] That walk is biomechanical perfection, right?
[53:19] Like, like it's expressed. It looks like poetry almost.
[53:22] But like, but this is like, you, we all actually, I maybe even
[53:25] you've seen a top athlete in the airport something.
[53:28] And you're like, Oh yeah, you've been.
[53:31] They're walking better than we walk.
[53:32] And, you know, you're like, oh, this is a who's that?
[53:35] Yeah. And like, I think that's like,
[53:37] that's actually how you want to train your body, right?
[53:38] You want to train your body to be like bio.
[53:40] If you have these soft tissues working in great ways, like
[53:43] you're moving in a pretty cool way where people are going to
[53:46] kind of know, you know, like, and, but we don't like, we don't
[53:50] have a handbook for training like that by and large, but I
[53:52] think it's coming. Henry again, we could talk for
[53:56] multiple hours about this. This has been a fascinating
[53:59] conversation. Listen, Real Madrid fans,
[54:01] Matridistas like it it. This is what I talk about when I
[54:05] say the greatest club in the world can be innovative.
[54:07] This is the area where you innovate right here, right?
[54:11] So that we keep these Jude Bellingham's, these Fete
[54:14] Valverde's and these incredible players healthy for as long as
[54:17] possible, right? Like we have a young player and
[54:19] article layers coming up now. Franco Mastantuano got here.
[54:21] We don't want to burn these dudes out by the time they're
[54:23] 22. You want them to be here till
[54:25] they're 30 playing elite level football and we do that by
[54:29] getting granular with this data, sending them all to Santa
[54:31] Barbara. Look, they need a vacation
[54:33] anyway, so let them go hang out in Santa Santa Barbara's lovely
[54:36] if you've never been by the way, it's so wonderful.
[54:39] Have a great time out there. Learn this stuff.
[54:41] Go out and get Henry's book ballistic.
[54:44] It is. Listen, it's a page Turner man.
[54:47] And it's again, yes, it's about elite athlete performance, but
[54:49] also about me and you just everyday I'm a runner.
[54:52] Henry's a runner. Like I one of my great fears,
[54:55] Henry, is the United States healthcare system and I don't
[54:58] want to be dependent on it and into my later life and I don't
[55:01] want to be immobile or like that terrifies the shit out of me.
[55:05] I want no part of that. So I am all in on making sure I
[55:09] get my hips and all these things moving the right way so that
[55:12] that's just not me. I don't.
[55:13] I don't want that life. Shakira knows.
[55:18] Thank you all for tuning in. As always, like subscribe to
[55:21] video comment on YouTube and we will definitely we'll share
[55:25] those comments and we'll we'll we'll iterate if you want the
[55:28] audio only version, Apple, Spotify, wherever you get
[55:30] podcasts. And until next time, take care.

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