Episode 450: Henry Abbott: The Hip Stability Secret for Aging Well + Why ACL Tears Are 8x More Common in Women

Hi, guys, it's Tony Robbins.

You're listening to Habits and Hustle, Gresham.

Today, on Habits and Hustle Fitness Friday, I'm joined by Henry Abbott.

He's an award-winning journalist and founder of TrueHoop.

Henry spent years at ESPN before launching TrueHoop, where he built a powerful platform that dives deep into the NBA, business, and the hidden forces shaping pro sports.

But in today's episode, we talk all about Masogi, a practice where you take on a challenge so intense, you've only got a 50% chance of finishing.

We talk wild examples like underwater 5Ks with rocks and paddleboarding through shark-infested waters, all designed to push the limits of what you think you're capable of.

We also talk about science-backed insights from Harvard's fatigue lab, plus his own story of overcoming chronic pain through movement, proving that sometimes the boldest path leads to real transformation.

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We all have weird stuff with our hips.

Like every single person.

Oh, terrible.

Meat.

That's where my biggest issue is.

Yeah.

And so it plays in that space too.

It does.

Yeah, because so if you think about the egg again, right?

And so now you're this free-falling egg, and ideally, you're going to be bouncy because of like a rubber band of your glutes, right?

Right.

This is practicing kind of getting the force there, if that makes sense.

Okay.

It's just, you know, again, the nerves are going to control all your, there's 600 muscles in the body and they're controlled by the brain, basically.

And it's going to like teach them to get it snappy better.

So every single person they assess at P3 has had hip issues, basically, and they're, but they fit in one or the other category.

This is probably the most important thing I will tell you today.

Yeah.

Okay.

So.

Everybody's hips are either unstable or immobile, and you should know which group you're in.

And I can tell tell you how to find out.

So actually, I asked Marcus at one point, I'm like, well, how do I know if my hips are immobile?

And he's like, I think you know.

That's hilarious.

But just in case you don't, like the way you check that one would be to get into like a pidgin or, you know, pidgin from yoga or do you know standing figure four?

I don't really want to demonstrate it, but like, okay, so standing figure four.

So you stand up.

And then I would take like my right ankle and cross it over my left knee and then sit down.

Yep.

Right.

While you're bouncing on one leg and you know, butt back, chest up, and you want to kind of bounce.

If you can really sink into that position or sink into a pigeon, I think we all know if you're not sunk in.

Yeah.

If you can sink in, then we're going to say your hips are very likely mobile enough.

Okay.

Right.

And then for stability, this one's a little hard.

Yeah.

If you do a side plank, but the kind of side plank where your body's a complete X.

So your leg is elevated, your arm is elevated.

And then this is different than any other side plank I know.

All 10 toes pointing forward.

So your body's a big X.

If you can lock that out and hold it, then we're going to say that your hips are stable enough.

And what we find,

what they find is that basically everyone who lifts weights should do yoga.

And everyone who does yoga should lift weights.

Because basically, the people with mobile hips make them more mobile with yoga, right?

And people with stable hips make them more mobile with weightlifting.

But they should switch, right?

Because the people with stable hips need to work on mobility, right?

And people with mobile hips need to work on stability.

Either one could get you needing a hip replacement, right?

You want to have a little bit of both.

So that's interesting.

So, and you need to be both, right?

You need both.

We all need both.

You need stability and mobility.

Yeah, this is how we're going to age well.

Yeah.

And that's so important for aging.

So let me just repeat that because I think that's really important.

So to age well, for your body to age well, we need to have hips that are stable and mobile.

Totally.

Right.

And the way to check that is to either go into a standing figure four to see if you can sit sit down, right?

Or the pigeon,

right?

And you'll know if you're mobile or not.

And if whatever, and the side plank with your hand out, fingers open and leg up.

And leg up.

That in itself is very hard.

It's so hard.

Yeah, that's really hard.

This is like 5% of people are going to pass this test, I think.

Right.

So then let's just say 5% of people pass.

Then what does the other 95% of people do?

So I think if you, so you need work on hip stability.

And it's very knowable, right?

I, you know, I guarantee that within a mile of here are 10 trainers to know how to help you with that.

If that's what you're working on, right?

Now you have a target, right?

You can do it on YouTube, probably, but you want someone to.

But let me just finish that because whatever, if you, if, if you cannot do that, right?

If you're, if you're unable to sink into the figure eight or sorry, the, the, the pigeon, that means you're immobile.

And that means you should be doing less weights, more yoga.

And if you are able to do that, but your lips, not lips, your hips are unstable, you know that by doing the the plank yeah exactly right because what happens you just can't lift your leg or what happens oh what happens to me is i just feel weak right you just can't get up you can't do it right i mean i can like i can i can and then what do you need more weights then or do you need so you're tweaking your routine a little bit right i think you you know whatever how whatever you're doing to work out i think a lot of us you know when you're 25 you can do it all wrong and it's fine right right no but what i mean is if you're in that side plane yeah how do you know if you're stable or mobile or whatever?

You're going to be shaking or collapsing or quitting.

So if you're unstable, then you go to do the yoga or the weights.

You go do the weights.

Yeah, the weights.

You need to be more strong.

Yeah, you're going to be squatting.

I've always had immobile hips.

Like everyone in my family, not my wife's family, but everyone like my blood relatives.

We are the immobile hip.

crowd.

Right.

That's quite common for guys, though.

Oh, totally.

We're cool like that.

Right.

But I think mostly women maybe have more mobility in their hips and men have less.

Yeah.

That's, I mean, there's, there are women who have immobile hips for sure, and there are men who have mobile hips.

But like, yeah, you're right.

That's definitely mobility is more likely in women for sure.

And so I always thought of very mobile hips as just like way better, right?

Like the yoga teacher, I'd be like, oh, man, like she's going to have live forever with this, right?

Right.

But only from this project that I learned, like, no, like a lot of super mobile people need hip replacements because they just don't have the musculature to keep it together, right?

Yeah.

Think about how we're talking about, oh, oh, here's the thing I learned that blew my mind.

In my assessment, when they assessed me, I mentioned you're standing on a box and you step off and land on the force plate.

Well, when I stepped off, my hips like dipped, right?

The foot that's out over the space, that hip just fell.

And they stopped the video and they're like, why are you doing that?

And I'm like, I don't know.

I just thought that was what we do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's not what we do.

Like, you're supposed to keep your hips level, right?

It's supposed to be like when you do most exercises, like the the glute on the standing legs should be engaged and it's supposed to hold that stuff together, right?

And then the other one can be mobile and bouncy, right?

But right, but you're supposed to control your hips.

I was walking around without good control of my hips.

And I feel like that's what happens to a lot of these elite yoga athletes is that they're, you know, if they were running down that mountain path or whatever, their hips are going to be too flexible.

Hopping around.

Well, I think it's because you could be too mobile.

It's like, it's like the Goldilocks thing, right?

With anything, right?

You could be too much.

It's like you have to be just enough.

Just enough stability, just enough mobility, or else if you're too mobile,

you can also injure yourself.

This is what I've learned recently.

Yep.

Is it just weights or yoga?

Like, it's because I find like, you know, people who do weights are much more stiff, right?

Versus people who do more malleable stuff like yoga.

So getting back to my first question then, what is the top injury for women and what is the top injury for men?

I don't honestly know the answer to that.

I know that this ACL thing is ridiculous rates in female athletes, right?

It's 8X men.

And so

I just, I'm a little bit of a women's soccer fan.

And I don't know if you know Emma Hayes is the new coach of the U.S.

national team.

There are 11 players on the team, and she's getting a crew of 50 ready for the World Cup because you can't count on.

Wow.

There's just so many.

And since she got the job, just recently, one of their star defender is out for a year with ACL tear.

There are several out now.

I think there are three players out right now.

In the last Women's World Cup or in the Olympics, every single team had a player out because of ACL tear.

It's just like rampant.

For women.

For women.

And not, I mean, Hoey Bryan got that.

I mean, like for men, like there's a lot of them for men too, right?

But just for women, it's just way more.

Is it because they're more, again, is it because women, not just hips are more mobile, but maybe their ankles are more mobile.

So there's more chance of that injury, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, these are very active questions in science right now and there's a bunch of theories you know there's could be hormonal explanations could be yeah women have wider hips which permits their knees there's like this thought that if your knees go in together as you bend your knees that is an elevated risk of acl tear there were so many theories women have narrower acls there's all these theories but i'm a little bit struck by so at in this granular movement data that my book is about, they did a massive study of like every single thing that goes into NBA players who had ACL tears over years.

Basically, so if someone has an ACL tear, then they go back and look at that person's assessment and say, How do they move?

And by this analysis, it's none of those things I just described.

Like ACL tears are caused by landing on the outside of your foot and having the weight roll to the inside, like your shin bone is moving like a big windshield wiper, right?

That's number cause number one.

Is that more common in women?

We haven't studied that yet, right?

But I think that would be a tip-top thing to study, right?

Yeah, you would think.

And then the second biggest cause is

femoral rotation.

So this is where, then you know, this is gross, but you go with my analogy.

You know, when you have the Thanksgiving turkey and you like twist the leg off, yeah.

Well, I'm using my arm, I guess, the upper half of your leg.

Some people, when they squat down, your upper leg bone twists inside your leg.

And you can imagine that would be extremely stressful, like on on on your ligaments in your knee right so the first problem is managed by stronger muscles in the lower leg like we've been talking about right the second problem is managed by stronger muscles in your hip like there your hip has that bone in your upper leg has uh little knobs on it and there are muscles that like grab it and hold it in place and keep it from rotating and you can just strengthen those muscles and make it stronger and you do that with all sorts of difficult work like side planks but um this is why yoga teachers have more, have some, are more important to some of these problems, right?

It's because they're very flexible and you kind of want to be rigid in that particular way.

So

I think this is the

like, this would be the first place to start for me if I were talking about like leading injuries for women, right?

Is these two things have been studied in men and they have not been studied in women.

They're kind of...

That's so weird.

Yeah.

So the way men, like P3 is an expensive place for professional athletes to go and mostly like Adidas pays for them to go or their agency or

how much is it?

I don't honestly know.

It depends what, you know, like right now there's NBA players going there before the draft for seven weeks.

So that's going to be a lot.

I went for three days, right?

That's going to be a four-figure number, right?

But they just started having just in the last year or two, the time I was writing the book, Aaliyah Boston was the number one WNBA overall draft pick and Haley Jones was like, I think the sixth pick.

They were there.

They're the first time that the shoe company paid for for women basketball players to go.

Wow.

And so there have been a bunch of women through there, but it's only 15% of the thousands of athletes they've had.

So you know, the industry didn't fund that before, right?

But it's starting to.

And so I think they're trying to find ways that they could just assess like a thousand soccer players at once just to get a big data set to start answering these questions.

I think that's what the future will look like.

But I think it's important that a lot, you know, without this data set, we're looking at all these things like ligament width and

it's not likely the cause, I don't think.

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So, then, how do we train for that not to happen?

How do we train so we don't get ACL injuries?

Like so far, what I've gotten from you was we need to strengthen our lower legs.

Yeah.

And plyometrics is super important from all different planes, side to side, up and down, back and forth, just basic jump roping.

How else can we train our bodies to be as powerful and as healthy as we age?

So one of the answers you won't like, and one of them you will, I think.

Okay.

The one that you won't like is that they

we're going to come soon to a point where there will be some way to like assess your own biomechanics, right?

Like, you want to do a workout that's designed for you.

Like, when they put the exercise on the board and everybody does the same workout, yeah, it's it's like you want someone with expert eyes looking at your body, yeah, right, and they're saying, oh, and then like, and what happens now is you get hurt first and then you go to physical therapy and then it's customized for you.

100%.

Like, I always have this problem with trainers, right?

They're like, okay, grab the heaviest weight and squat deep down.

And like, I'm like, my body mechanics doesn't allow for me to do that move.

They're like, yeah, that's impossible.

I'm like, no, it's not impossible.

I will hurt myself.

And like, people should, people know their bodies better than like a stranger does.

And so when they do these generic workouts and think everybody's body can move a certain way, that's just not accurate.

Right.

Right.

Yes, 100%.

And, you know, and it's, it's a little sad to me.

Like, I, I was doing PT for a while at this place where they had like a, like a, a track and all these, all the sports equipment.

Cause I think the idea was they'd have these like elite athletes being explosive in there.

Yeah.

But everybody in there is so broken.

They never used the track, right?

Of course.

That's right.

It's exactly it.

Like you're starting at like 100.

That's, you know what I mean?

Like from it's, and so that's what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about for the average person, you know, someone who's more intermediate or beginner or, you know, whatever in that realm, not like, not a professional athlete, right?

Because not all of us are going to have the chance to go to P3 and like get these crazy, you know, assessments and then like work that way.

But from all of the experience you've had, I want you to be able to tell me and my audience what we can do to strengthen our bodies in the ways that are the most beneficial, in the ways that we get hurt the most.

In the ACL, another one is glutes don't fire, really.

You know, that's a big one.

You know, hip issues, knee issues.

give me some stuff that everyday people can do daily yeah so there are 25 illustrations in the book of like because i i was like they're obsessed with elite athletes there right and and they will tell you they're like henry was so annoying with asking me so many questions about like the rest of us i know and they're not interested right like okay they he i mean they won't say this they won't admit this but like they call us normies yeah what do we do with normies yeah

i'm a normie and so are you so yeah

So I tried to capture as many of the things as I could.

And writing about it is a little bit tricky because you need to really see what you're supposed to do.

Right.

But like, for instance, their warm-up is amazing.

There are days where I got up and felt like the tin man.

And, you know, I'm 50 and I would go downstairs and be like, oh my gosh, I think I broke something.

But I would just do the warm-up.

It's 13 steps.

I have them memorized.

You can do it in, I don't know, 10 minutes.

And it's a little bouncy and it's got a little bit of stuff that you don't normally have.

And now I've noticed actually at different, you know races or whatever i'm like oh that person's doing the p3 warm-up like there's a little cult that works really okay what's the warm-up i want to know so if there's a picture every single step is illustrated in there but you know you it it's walking you go back and forth at the gym a bunch of times and first you're walking on your heels then you're slapping your toes down and then you're doing two different no three different kinds of lunges There's is that standing figure four thing.

There's, you've probably done the thing a bunch of times where you put your hand on the wall and swing your leg like a hamstring stretch.

Then you're on the floor for a bit, rotating your spine various various ways.

There's a lot of rotation, tons of rotation, and all of their recommendations.

Why?

Because that's another neurological training.

You know, there's, this is a mind-blowing thing.

There's nobody in Major League Baseball who didn't grow up playing baseball.

Basketball is full of players who didn't grow up, but because baseball is hitting and throwing, which are both rotating things.

And if you didn't grow up practicing, like you're not as good as people who did.

Like just

and so a lot of us, like I didn't grow up with any, I didn't play any baseball.

You're 100% right about that.

Go on.

But I, anyway, you want to rotate.

You want, this is going to be part of aging well, right?

You want to do things that rotate.