How Tom Brady Has Gotten Faster, Smarter, and Better

Tom Brady must be faster, smarter, and better than ever before. How else can you explain a 43-year-old leading his team to win the Super Bowl against Patrick Mahomes, an opponent 18 years younger and considered to be far and away the best quarterback in professional football?

Prior to the game, Brady had two advantages: his experience playing in the Super Bowl and his memory and vast institutional knowledge of NFL defenses and formations. Brady, well known for his adherence to a strict regimen of physical and mental exercises to keep him young (which you can read about in his book, The TB12 Method), goes beyond the typical strength conditioning used by most NFL players. In addition to a strong and accurate arm, quarterbacks need quick recognition, recall, mental agility, and the ability to hold many pieces of information in mind simultaneously—the definition of working memory skills—for efficient decision making.

Beyond the typical film study to prepare for opponents, Brady uses a rigorous online brain training tool to improve his working memory skills. Of course, this tool, TB12 BrainHQ, is part of the TB12 Method. It’s demanding. I tried it. And it appears to work!

For most of us, working memory skills begin to deteriorate around the age of 35. Most adults of Brady’s age routinely notice glitches, such as walking to the refrigerator to get something and then staring blankly, trying to remember why they went there. Or they start to say something and quickly forget what it was. More akin to Brady’s assessing a defensive formation as he prepares to run a play, adults see or hear something that reminds them of a previous experience, but they aren’t sure what that experience was.

Brady states that he is able to recognize defenses, movements of players, and different types of formations more quickly as a result of his brain training. He asserts that brain training provides him with a split second longer in order to make decisions about what to do on any particular play. In The TB12 Method, he argues that online, computerized brain training is one of the core reasons for his ongoing success.

Before starting yourself or your kids on a regimen of brain training, it’s important to know about its pluses and minuses. Yes, it’s easily accessible on your phone or screen, costs only a fraction of other interventions, is modestly engaging (at least at the beginning)—and Tom Brady recommends it! However, it’s a lot of work. I’ve been “working out” on TB12 BrainHQ, and I’m exhausted after about 30 minutes. It takes a commitment of your time, you need to be fully focused, and it might take you away from other activities that are more productive in enhancing your health.

Source: Cian Leach/Unsplash

And what about its effectiveness? Some leading researchers in the field suggest that brain training helps you improve in the training tasks themselves but that this improvement doesn’t necessarily generalize to applying these skills in day-to-day life. Others assert that there are “dozens of randomized, controlled trials published in peer-reviewed journals that document specific benefits of defined types of cognitive training.”

Maybe the better question would be how to make these technologies more effective at enhancing real-world skills. The best studies are structured to have many controls in place, assess only one small, “independent” variable, and often use limited laboratory measures to measure change. Given the complexity of how humans use their working memory skills, measuring the impact of brain training may be overly restrictive, as many factors will play a role in improving the use of these skills in the real world.
As much as it would be a boon to Boomers and Gen Xers to stay young and vibrant (like Tom Brady) through daily brain training, there’s more to staying on top of your game than playing a game on your phone. I imagine Brady would be indignant if all his success were attributed to his brain training regimen. And he’d be right.

Brain training alone (and apparently the influence of Bill Belichick) does not explain Brady’s success. But it may be a part of Brady’s beautiful mind, which provides him with an edge on some of his quarterbacking contemporaries whose skills have deteriorated as they approach their 40s.