Tom Brady has solved humanity’s longstanding summer scourge. If you hydrate properly and using the right supplements he happens to be selling, you will never again be harmed by the sun’s rays.
Brady really does believe that he doesn’t get sunburns because he’s really, really hydrated. It’s one of the many weird beliefs he let loose on the world in an ESPN The Magazine piece that was posted online Tuesday.
Among them? Other than that his hydration levels are championship-level, he thinks he’s remained relatively injury-free these last few years because he focuses on not getting injured when players hit him.
But first, let’s talk about that hydration thing. If it all sounds like a loose infomercial for his TB12 products and merchandise, it’s because his life basically is exactly that. But Brady really does believe that this stuff works! He’s just trying to share the good word with you, no matter how much it pads his own bank account.
It has become customary to think of Brady as an athlete without limits, one who overturns expectation by refusing to concede an inch to anyone else’s idea of the inevitable. But The TB12 Method offers a portrait of a ferociously limited human being, albeit the world’s “most hydrated” one. Every day, he wakes up at 6 in the morning and immediately drinks 20 ounces of purified water, augmented with TB12 electrolytes, which, as he tells us, contain the “72 trace minerals” generally lost in perspiration. As a result, he says, he is so well-hydrated that “even with adequate exposure to the sun, I won’t get sunburned,” and he presumes that the muscles under his skin look like “beautiful tenderloins” instead of “shriveled jerky.”
Look at that beautifully tenderloined football-throwing boy. What an athletic marvel. There’s a lot of weird pseudoscience in the piece that’s worth poking fun at. The whole thing is a nice glimpse at causation and correlation and the superstitions that an athlete can grasp hold of because whatever it is they are doing is working for them.
For example, Brady also believes that he has trained his body to think about muscle pliability before he is hit by a defender, which prevents him from getting injured.
To what extent does Brady now think he controls his fate? “The moment another player’s helmet makes contact with my body, my muscles are pliable enough to absorb what’s happening instantly,” he writes. “My brain is thinking only lengthen and soften and disperse before my body absorbs and disperses the impact evenly and I hit the ground.” Or, more simply, as he puts it in the interview, “I know my focus on pliability has helped me avoid so many injuries and bounce back so quickly from hits.”
Clearly he wasn’t focusing on body wellness enough when he tore his ACL and MCL in 2008. Basically, Brady is Spongebob from that episode where he wanted to be a plant, so he laid on the ground and shouted “photosynthesis” for a bit. None of it actually works, and you look a bit silly saying it, but damn if I’m not impressed by the confidence it takes to sound like that in public.
