REFLECTION
For my first eleven years playing organized sports, I had a very bad elbow. It started with going straight from football season to baseball season in junior high and high school, then it continued with all the throwing required from the quarterback position at the collegiate and pro levels. To deal with the issue, I stretched, I lifted weights, I did a number of different things in order to get stronger and to try to relieve the pain, but none of it really worked.
I loved football, but a year or two into my pro career, I really wondered how long I could play if I was never going to be able to throw the football without pain.
That’s when Willie McGinest introduced me to Alex Guerrero. Willie had his own struggles with pain and injury. By his sixth year in the league, he was already prepared to retire. Then he started working with Alex, who not only alleviated his pain and injury problems, but extended his career another eight years.
If he helped Willie, I figured, maybe he can help me too.
Fairly quickly into working together, Alex realized that the muscles in my throwing arm were all very tight, and when they got tight they’d tug on my elbow tendon. Then the tendon would get inflamed, and I would start to feel pain with every throw. We began a process of manual muscle work, which we later called ‘pliability treatments’, where Alex would lengthen the muscles in my forearm, my biceps, and my triceps. He assured me, through this novel process which he had developed over years of trial and error with athletes in other disciplines, that we would lengthen and soften the muscles surrounding my tendon so they could expand and contract and move in an unrestricted way. This would allow the tendon to relax and the tugging to stop, which would allow me to throw the football without constant tension. Then, he said, 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.
With elbow pain in the rearview mirror, Alex and I next worked on my shoulder, which had also become a problem. Then we looked at my lower body, which is where much of the power comes from when throwing a football. We started pliability treatments to lengthen all the muscles that surrounded my hips, then my quads and my hamstrings, then my calves. All to relieve any tightness around my joints and allow for greater rotation and power and efficiency.
These innovative treatments, along with related training methods, became a major part of my routine, and I never missed a game due to a non-contact injury, as a result. In fact, I’m convinced Alex’s pliability protocols were the only reason I was able to play for 23 years, basically pain-free.
LESSON
Here’s the reality: pain is a yellow flag. It’s an indicator. Like when the ‘check engine’ light comes on in your car. Soreness, tightness, and discomfort are warning signals that if you don’t take care of something soon, something worse is going to happen.
Most people know in that situation to go to a mechanic and get their car looked at. But once the issue gets fixed and the warning light turns off, too many people go right back to driving the way they always have. They don’t think to start taking care of their car in ways that might prevent the check engine light from ever coming on in the first place.
It feels like that’s where we still are with Achilles injuries. We’re decent at pain management and rehab, yet we continue to send many of our best athletes right back to the same archaic training methods that technically make them stronger but also continue to tighten them up. And we do this despite knowing, literally for decades at this point, that muscle pliability doesn’t just prevent non-contact ligament and tendon injuries, it eliminates the conditions necessary within the body to even make those injuries possible.
As a former player, a fan, and now a commentator and team owner, it’s been really frustrating to watch so many great competitors suffer these entirely preventable injuries—especially the NBA guys who all seem to be going down in the playoffs. Could you imagine a world where players aren’t tearing their Achilles or calves or ACLs? Where potentially great careers aren’t sidelined for a full year and ultimately shortened? Imagine the quality of the game if we could eliminate these easily fixable injuries before they happen.
Unfortunately, the slowness with which innovative ideas get adopted—not only in sports, but in every area of life—is just human nature. Less than 15% of people are “early adopters.” It takes more than novelty to get most people to try something truly different. In my experience, the status quo has to be completely insufficient. Every known and available option has to come up short. And someone you know and trust has to try it first.
Only then do enough hearts and minds open up for new ideas to break through and for life-changing innovations to create the kind of sea change that people like Alex Guerreo are trying to produce.
APPLICATION
I sincerely hope the questions that fans and media are asking after the Haliburton injury is enough of a signal to everyone in professional sports that the status quo has outlived its usefulness and it’s time to listen to new voices with better ideas about how to achieve and sustain peak performance.
Time will tell if there’s a groundswell of grassroots support in that direction. In the meantime, I’ve decided to take a top-down approach and I’ve begun incorporating Alex’s treatment and training methods into two of the teams I’m involved with, Birmingham City FC and the Las Vegas Raiders. Our belief is that his pliability protocols will allow our players to experience the kind of health and performance benefits that I enjoyed and that many of them have never experienced in their own careers.
Already, we’re seeing dividends at Birmingham City, where last year we had a 92% player availability rate and, not surprisingly, a historic season. If we can do that on a team-wide basis for the Raiders, I’m confident we'll see fewer non-contact injuries and we’ll find consistent success as a result. Because when you're healthy and pain free, you can practice harder and longer, which translates into better, more consistent performance in games.
Whether you’re a consumer or a creator, there is a universe of opportunity and potential benefit at the point just beyond where the old ways stop working. This is true for sports, business, education, politics, entertainment, literally anything you can think of.
When “three yards and a cloud of dust” no longer won games and drafting five 330-pound offensive linemen didn’t help you move the ball on the ground, that opened the door to the offensive creativity of guys like Sean McVay and Kyle Shanahan.
When the laws of physics prevented a fighter plane from outrunning missiles or radar, that’s when stealth technology became science instead of science fiction.
When electric cars and space travel became stale and expensive, that’s when Elon Musk came in and revolutionized both dying industries with ideas that would have gotten him laughed out of the room only years before.
This is what I love so much about true innovators and why we should also work harder to open our eyes and ears to new ideas even when we’re not actively searching for anything. Innovators don’t just push boundaries, they ignore them, they work outside and beyond them. They fix intractable problems with unforeseeable solutions and change people’s lives in the process.
Alex Guerrero’s ideas changed mine. I stayed healthy for over twenty years playing at a high level, and my teammates did too. We won a lot of championships. Through winning, and competing, and doing things the right way—the better way—we made a truly positive impact on the community.
Somewhere out there is someone with an idea that might change your life in similar ways. The only question is, will you be listening when that person starts talking?
