In a league that chews up quarterbacks every year, Tom Brady’s legacy isn’t just built on Super Bowl rings or MVP awards. It’s also defined by his unmatched longevity and consistency.
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Over his 23-year NFL career, Brady played 335 regular-season games, won seven Super Bowls while appearing in 10, and set countless records, most notably for career passing yards (89,214) and touchdowns (649). Most impressively, the GOAT was only sidelined once by a non-contact injury (in 2008), a truly unreal achievement. Even that instance is up for debate, as the injury came after a hit from Chiefs safety Bernard Pollard. So, very rare.
But, as Brady recently revealed in the latest edition of his newsletter, 199, there was a time early in his career when staying fit was one of the toughest challenges in front of him along with climbing up the depth chart.
And according to the Patriots legend, there was even a point when it wasn’t clear if he’d last in the NFL at all.
“For my first eleven years playing organized sports, I had a very bad elbow,” Brady shared. He explained that his problems started in junior high and high school, when he went straight from football season to baseball season without rest, routinely throwing year-round. So by the time he entered the NFL, his elbow pain had become a constant struggle.
“I really wondered how long I could play if I was never going to be able to throw the football without pain,” Brady admitted.
But when all hope seemed to be lost, that’s when fate intervened in the form of Brady’s teammate Willie McGinest. The former LB introduced Brady to Alex Guerrero, a specialist in muscle pliability treatments who had already extended McGinest’s own career. Hence with nothing to lose, the future seven-time Super Bowl winner decided to give it a shot.
“Fairly quickly into working together, Alex realized that the muscles in my throwing arm were all very tight,” Brady recalled.
The tightness caused tendons to tug on his elbow, inflaming it with every throw. So Guerrero’s solution was a rigorous manual treatment focused on softening and lengthening Brady’s forearm, biceps, and triceps muscles, a method they later called “pliability treatments.”
And as it turned out, the results were astonishing.
“This would allow the tendon to relax and the tugging to stop, which would allow me to throw the football without constant tension,” Brady continued in his newsletter. “Then, the swelling would go down and the pain in my elbow would go away. That is exactly what happened…in a matter of three days.”
The Patriots legend’s elbow pain vanished almost instantly. From there, he and Guerrero worked on other parts of his body, shoulders, hips, quads, hamstrings, calves to unlock flexibility, prevent tightness, and maximize performance. And boy did it work, because even Brady believes that this process was the key to his long-lasting career.
“I never missed a game due to a non-contact injury, as a result,” he wrote. “I’m convinced Alex’s pliability protocols were the only reason I was able to play for 23 years, basically pain-free.”
As we now know, Brady’s partnership with the Argentinian back then was just the tipping point, as from there, the duo went on to launch the wildly successful TB12 Method. Gurrero also ended up being the godfather of Tom Brady’s son Ben.
So all in all, it’s a fascinating story of how an injury once seen as career-threatening became the catalyst for a revolutionary training approach, one that not only saved Brady’s elbow, but helped redefine what longevity in sports can look like.
