Habits and Hustle - Episode 448: Henry Abbott: Preventing Injuries Before They Happen + The Soviet Secret to Athletic Power

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

Ever wonder why you keep getting injured in the same places despite your best efforts? In this Fitness Friday conversation on the Habits and Hustle podcast, I talk with Henry Abbott, author of "Ballistic: The New Science of Injury-Free Athletic Performance," to explore a revolutionary approach to preventing injuries before they happen. We discuss practical exercises to strengthen your feet, the fascinating Soviet origins of plyometrics, how proper landing technique can transform your athletic performance while keeping you injury-free for years to come, and much more.  Henry Abbott is an award-winning journalist and founder of TrueHoop, a respected basketball media platform. He previously led ESPN's 60-person NBA digital and print team, which published several groundbreaking articles and won a National Magazine Award. His new book "Ballistic: The New Science of Injury-Free Athletic Performance" explores revolutionary approaches to injury prevention through the science of ballistic movements.  What we discuss:  Henry Abbott's book "Ballistic: The New Science of Injury-Free Athletic Performance" How most knee injuries originate from weaknesses in the feet or hips The importance of strengthening feet and lower leg muscles for injury prevention "Toe yoga" as a method to strengthen foot muscles The role of the nervous system in injury prevention The benefits of plyometric exercises as we age The Soviet origins of plyometrics through Yuri Verkashantsev's research Building progressive training approaches for those with existing weaknesses Thank you to our sponsor: Therasage: Head over to therasage.com and use code Be Bold for 15% off  TruNiagen: Head over to truniagen.com and use code HUSTLE20 to get $20 off any purchase over $100. Magic Mind: Head over to www.magicmind.com/jen and use code Jen at checkout. Air Doctor: Go to airdoctorpro.com and use promo code HUSTLE for up to $300 off and a 3-year warranty on air purifiers.  Bio.me: Link to daily prebiotic fiber here, code Jennifer20 for 20% off.  Momentous: Shop this link and use code Jen for 20% off To learn more about Henry Abbott:  Website: https://www.henryabbott.com/  https://www.truehoop.com/  X: https://x.com/truehoop?lang=en  Find more from Jen: Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagements

Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it! Are you getting injured because you're training wrong and don't even know it? On this Fitness Friday, I'm joined by Henry Abbott. Henry is an award-winning journalist, the founder of True Hoop and the author of the book Ballistic. We dig into the science of injury prevention, from why knee pain often starts in your feet or your hips and how toe yoga and better landing techniques can boost your performance. So if you're stuck in the injury recovery cycle or just getting old like me, this episode can change everything.

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So if you want better performance, this is the way to go. Visit LiveMomentous.com and use my code, Jen, for 35% off your first subscription. That's LiveMomentous.com code Jen for 35% off your first subscription. Trust me, you'll be happy you did. So today we have on the podcast, we have Henry Abbott who wrote this book called Ballistic, which is the new science of injury-free athletic performance. We're going to talk all about how we can prevent injury instead of just treating it. And the funny thing is, not so funny to me, I hurt my knee last night and today I have Henry on the podcast. Is that not

coincidental? I mean, I'm not happy about it. I would be more fun to meet you feeling 100%. I mean, I'm not happy about it. I would be more fun to meet you feeling 100%. Thank you. All right, let's explore. I know, right? Like of all the guests to have the day after, which is weird because I've had like a million ankle and achilles' injuries because of my love for running

and cardio, which is probably terrible for my body at this point, but knees never. So what's the most common injury, by the way? What is the most common injury for women and what's the most common injury for men? This is where we're opening with a pop quiz, Jen. Yeah, we are. Are you ready? I don't think I am. I can tell you this. So I spent three years marinating in this movement data from this place called P3 in

Santa Barbara where there are 35 years into gathering it all. And almost everything that goes through there, there are thousands of athletes, almost all of the recommendations are to change something about how you move in the feet or the hips. So knee injuries mostly come from above and below. And I really came to think of it, did you, I did not. The answer doesn't have to be yes, but did you take physics class where you do that egg drop experiment?

I did. Okay, and you used like pipe cleaners and duct tape or whatever materials? Okay. I try to black, I try to like, kind of like not think about my years in high school, but I'm joking. I found, this book has tons of physics in it and I had to learn and like not along,

but I hated physics class. I just, it was literally, I was and not along. But I hated physics class. It was literally, I was a great student, but I had that one class I was like, I don't even care what you're talking about. I did not pay attention. But okay, so you got the little egg. Now think of your upper body is that egg, right? This is 80% of your weight is in your torso.

And our like pipe cleaners and duct tape is our legs. These are the little devices we have to make it so our egg doesn't shatter when you land from running. Right. When you jump off of whatever. One of their biggest husbands they do is you step off an 18 inch box and just land on these force plates on the floor. So they're really well designed for it. You know, we have a good system for this if you land correctly. Right. Exactly. They want you to land with your toes up on the balls of your feet and so the stiff ankle and the force is going to go into your calves and then it's going to go into your quads, and it's going to go into your glutes, and those muscles can handle a ton of force safely in the old age. But if you get a little weird,

right? We all move a little weird, we sit a lot, we exercise strangely, we have odd habits. For instance, if you land on your toes, then the next thing that happens is your heel slams down, which accounts for all of the biggest measurements they have. All of the biggest landing forces come from that heel slapping down. Because now your egg is pushing down through your knee onto bone, the lower leg bone, the tibia, and it's like a pull cue, like punching the ground, right? Instead of passing the forces through soft tissue, it's like a pull cue like punching the ground right? It's instead of passing the forces through soft tissue, it's passing through that bone. Like that's a very common and popular way to hurt your knee is like the force of the ground is traveling up to your knee through this hard device right? Horrible. Yeah so there's a little this is what they're doing there mostly you know and the

other big area focuses the hips. So if you think about it like the ankle and these lower leg muscles control how the lower leg bone expresses the force of the ground and the hip controls how the upper leg bone expresses the force of your torso coming down. And they're going to meet at the knee and hopefully they meet well, right? And it sounds like they have been for most of your running life, but maybe there's a little something. If you went there right now, they assess you, they, my guess is they would find you'd be there for an hour. They'd be like, hey, Jen, there's a little something, we got to strengthen this thing in your hip, or we got to do some of this thing in your lower leg. The thing that you said was very, that I think is very interesting and kind of, I think some people know that, but maybe others don't, that everything comes from your feet or

from your hips. I learned about my, the whole thing pretty recently that if your feet are not strong then your entire body is going to be prone to more injury, prone to more issues basically and you don't get power if your feet are weak. And so the first question I have for you is how do we strengthen our feet so we can get more power in our body? Well there are, there's a whole bunch of like you can go on YouTube and find my daughter right now has a thing she's doing toe yoga. I don't know if you've gotten into this.

Have you seen this at all? No, I did not. I'm doing it with my hands a little bit because you like lift your big toe and you certainly lift the little toes and like there's all these little muscles in the foot that you can strengthen. Oh yeah. So it's called toe yoga. Yeah, if you look up toe yoga, that's not really a P3 recommendation that I've seen,

but they do a ton of stuff. So, you know, if you think of our calf muscles, the kind of like, this is kind of two lumpy muscles on the outside, that's the gastroc. Okay. Underneath it is the soleus and the post-tib, a tibialis posterior. Okay. Let's not be so, like, so sciencey because people are going to, like, basically stop listening to this podcast. Here's what's going to happen.

I assume he knows what he's talking about because in the first five minutes he said tibialis posterior. Yeah. And now I'm good, right? Now I can make up- Now they think you're an expert. Whatever. Exactly.

Or they're like, I don't know what the hell this guy is saying. You know, click off. So look up those muscles though. You want to exercise them. Like a lot of our exercises really work like what we consider those visible outer calf muscles, but it's those underneath ones that I'm telling you in the research from P3, it's like, it's a major recommendation. You want a lot more work capacity in the lower leg.

They had me doing, I went through their procedure and have my own suite of issues, but like this was one of my things. And this would be jumping rope, hopping back and forth over a dowel, every kind of plyometric, but you kind of build up into the bigger ones over time. And at the same time, you mix that in with like, stand on one leg, you know, and raise up and down very slowly. And if you can do 15 of those, then you're cleared for like bigger contacts. I was getting back to running after a back thing I had to get to like where I could really get to 15 slow raises before they left. Yeah, on one leg. Yeah. Okay. So let's say that. So like, let's kind of make this as simple for people as possible.

So in order to strengthen our, I asked you about the feet, how to strengthen our feet, you said we need to strengthen the lower part of our calf. So they're into, at P3, their recommendations are heavy on all of the muscles beneath the knee as a method to stiffen the ankle. Okay. So that when your foot hits the ground, to have your powerful foot, the stiffen the ankle. Okay. So that when your foot hits the ground to have your powerful foot, the Achilles is loaded. Okay.

So like you want to have, they say to land toes up. It's like a little cue. It doesn't really mean you need your toes fully up, but that's if they say that you'll get your foot more on the ball. Right. So if they say toes up, that means you should be landing on your heel.

No, great question. So they want you should be landing on your heel. No. Great question. So, they want you on the ball of your foot, but not with your toes a little bit flexed up. So, instead of being kind of sloppy with a relaxed foot, they want your foot like tense and loaded because they want to activate the spring of your Achilles. They want it so that when your foot hits the ground, you're quickly, subconsciously, this beautiful system will be passing the force of landing on the ground into your glutes, into your butt.

Let's kind of go up the chain. If it hits your toes, now we have a kind of slow process of rolling further down to the heel, like I mentioned. If you land on your heel, then you're getting this bony thing. So you kind of want to be in the middle where all of these muscles in your foot are taking the force of landing. And if you're doing that, think about it. If you jump rope like that on the ball of your foot, if you...

Oh, on the ball of your foot. Right. So when you jump... Okay. So when you do that jump rope on the ball of your foot, so that's why I meant I didn't mean heel. You're working out your foot right there. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't mean the heel before I didn't mean the heel. You're working out your foot right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I didn't mean the heel before. That was just a mistake. Edit it out. Yeah. No, no. It's okay. I just misspoke. So what are the benefits of just jumping jump rope on the ball of our foot then?

Great question. So ultimately running the way you want to run where you're not going to have your knee hurt will come from figuring out hips or lower leg where there's some weakness or oddity is as like a kind of, that's kind of a dumber like building muscle system. But then there's like the much more clever thing is this like nervous system, sending a little electrical signals up and down, which kind of happens faster than we can think subconsciously. So when you're jumping these fast things, this is the reason the book is called Ballistic. That means airborne, right? When you're doing these airborne things, you're engaging your brain to get better at landing,

to fire the systems that need to be fired in time. So these little things happen in life where you like maybe you're walking down a mountain trail and you trip a little and you have to like throw that foot out and like you want to that could be a moment you would tear your ACL or it could be a moment that you just go pink and on this thing and you want to like have your system practiced right and being snappy with like the good foot placement and the good knee over the toes and the hips over the knees. So we're basically essentially training our nervous system. Totally. Right? So when we could potentially have an accident,

like that tweak of an ankle or something, we are conditioned to snap back, like to be strong enough, or our reflexes to be fast enough that that won't happen. Absolutely. Right. OK. So that I guess because I also heard that just overall like plyometrics as you age is really important.

Totally. Is that accurate too? They don't have a lot of recommendations at P3 for everybody, but that's one of them. They want everybody, almost everybody who's in there gets some kind of weightlifting recommended and some kind of plyometrics. And then there are, I mean, some of the trainers make fun of the founding doctor, Marcus Elliott, because he just loves the plyometrics so much. Like he's just, to him it's like everybody should be doing them.

Aggressive plyometrics, he wants you to. So what they do is, in the first assessment, they have a, you can do it with like a broomstick. They just lay a dowel on the ground and they put eight seconds on the clock and you have to like put your feet parallel to the dowel and you hop back and forth sideways on two feet as many times as you can in eight seconds. There's a guy whose name is Sanford Spivey he's a venture capitalist now but when he was like a Boston University soccer

player I think I'm saying he did it 42 times in eight seconds like that's five plus times a second. That's amazing. They show that video to NBA players, and NBA players are like, what? So he's obviously got this really snappy nervous system and good musculature and all that stuff. So that's how we start with the plyometrics at P3. And then it just goes up from there.

What's the benefit of doing plyometrics from side to side for your body? They do it all different ways. I don't think there's a kind of plyometrics from side to side for your body? They do it all different ways. I don't think there's a kind of plyometrics they don't do in there. So it's just, you know, would you know the history of plyometrics? It's so cool. I love this story so much. Please let me tell you the story.

Okay, go ahead. Okay. So in Soviet times, they kind of invented sports science because they just used humans like guinea pigs, right? They just did tons of testing. I'm like their top Olympians. They just try this workout, try that workout and they put sensors on them and have them do all this stuff. It was kind of cruel and there was tons of doping. But

this guy, Yuri Verkhoshchansky was kind of a heroic early doctor of this and he did calculations. He figured out like when triple jumpers, triple jump is a weird sport. I never really, do you know how it works? It's like... Not really. You run... This is going to be wrong. You run and you leap off one leg and then another leg and then that third leg goes down and you do a long jump. And you can do the math of like the athlete weighs this much and they travel this far so that means they're pushing on the ground this hard. This is where the physics comes in. I would not want to do this calculation.

And he's like, well, they're pushing on the ground with like 300 kilograms of force. But in the gym, none of them can lift 300 kilograms. So like, some of them are magically way stronger when they're doing the triple jump than when they're lifting weights. So he's like, well, maybe if we have them do a shorter lift, right, instead of doing a full squat, do like a half squat. And they could lift a lot more, but then none of them came in the next day because their backs all hurt. So there's something about this. And finally you figure out that it's because it's so fast.

Like when they push on the ground for the triple jump, their foot's on the ground for like a 10th of a second. And when you're super fast like that, you have kind of magical ability to access force because you're taking energy from the approach and using it in the explosive jump. Does that make sense? Yeah. So in weightlifting, you're taking energy from the approach and using it in the explosive jump. Does that make sense?

Yeah. So in weightlifting, you're not doing that, right? So that was his big aha moment and he invented plyometrics right then. He called it the shock method. And basically he started teaching all these Russian athletes to do all these quick hopping things because you can train to be faster on the ground and you're training all these muscles in your lower leg and such. And if you're faster on the ground, you're moving more force from one step into the next one.

And it's like a huge difference. I think some runners carry... I think there's some research that some runners only need to generate 10% of the energy for the next step because they're carrying 90% from the step before. Whereas some runners need to generate 60% of the energy because they're only carrying 40% from the step before. So we're all in the middle there somewhere, but like it's a lot less work to run if you're really good at plyometrics, if that makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense. So basically, plyometrics isn't only jumping really high onto like a box, right? Like plyo, what would fall under the plyometrics category? I think it's all of these things that are like

training you to be really snappy on the ground. So they'll do things like step off a box and jump on the next one. Yeah. Or hop sideways, or they'll like, you know, hop three times on your left leg. So it's all jumping basically. Yeah, it's all just kind of, yeah.

Quick jumps. Yeah. Because what I would,. Yeah, it's all just kind of, yeah. Quick jumps. Because what I'm scared of, to be honest, when you're talking about that broomstick and it goes from side to side to side, from over, over, over, I would be scared that I would twist my ankle because if I'm not, if I'm weak in my ankles, which I am, right?

Like once one bad move and I'm done, right? So it's like- I think we're putting our finger on your issue. I think this may be why your knee hurts. Probably. Yeah. But it's probably like it's a chicken or the egg, right? If you're not strong enough, or you have a weakness in let's say your lower extremity,

like an ankle or whatever, your foot, and then you have to go side to side to strengthen, it's easier to get hurt that way and then you're out for like two months. Totally agree. So they would put you on a progression. There's a million ways to strengthen your lower leg and hopping wouldn't probably be like job one for you. Lifting weight, honestly, I used to strain my ankle all the time. I once had a doctor tell me like never play basketball again because I was like so prone to ankle sprains. And then for other reasons, I started lifting weights 10 years later.

I've never turned my angle since then.