The super-fitness regimen of a Super Bowl champion

The diet of Tom Brady, 43, includes dandelions, avocado ice cream and 25 glasses of water a day. And he’s never tasted coffee.

Tom Brady after the Buccaneers’ Super Bowl win. Picture: AFP

While other men of 43 are more likely to be harbouring dodgy knees and strained calf muscles, Tom Brady defied the age barrier at the weekend when he became the oldest quarterback to win a Super Bowl title, a record seventh. To rub salt into the wounds of his opposing quarterback on Monday — Patrick Mahomes, aged 25, who is suffering from “turf toe” – and every couch potato who has abandoned the dream of a sporting career, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ No 12 claims he is faster now than ever.

What’s his secret? Even in the bizarre parallel universe of professional athletes, Brady’s performance program (daily life to you and me) is extreme. His diet is obsessively spartan, beginning with a smoothie and glass of electrolyte water when he wakes at 5.30am. Brady and his supermodel wife, Gisele Bundchen, eat an 80:20 plant-based/animal-based diet, reportedly (and somewhat predictably) insist on everything being organic and shun white flour, anything containing gluten, sugary foods and everything in the nightshade family – tomatoes, potatoes and peppers – which contain low levels of alkaloids believed to promote inflammation.

And he has never tasted coffee.

Also off the menu are foods thought to raise blood-acid levels, including red meat, butter and cheese – but on it are those that are high in alkalinity, including dandelion leaves, endives and artichokes. Brady drinks up to 25 glasses of water a day, much of it the electrolyte-infused variety, and according to his company TB12’s website, he stops eating two to three hours before bed and never eats fruit by itself.

Brady with wife, model Gisele Bundchen. Picture: AFP

As a treat (a treat?) he eats ice cream made from avocado with cacao or a few squares of UnReal chocolate, a vegan, low-sugar, gluten-free brand. On game days it’s a pre-match ritual of a smoothie made with blueberries, banana and hemp seeds and an almond butter and jam sandwich.

His day, like his diet, is micromanaged. After breakfast at 7am, it’s the first conditioning workout of the day at 8am, his trainer Alex Guerrero — Brady refers to him as his “body engineer” – having meticulously plotted his fitness schedule months in advance.

Guerrero is big on “muscle pliability” and every session starts with Brady undergoing a four-minute “deep force” massage that pummels 20 muscle groups for 20 seconds each. The theory, outlined in Brady’s book The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance, is that to keep up athleticism in your forties, your muscles need to be pliable. That is, soft and dense enough to be resilient to tearing.

Bundchen, wife of Tom Brady, with two of Brady’s children at the Super Bowl. Picture: AFP

Standard weight training and conditioning serve only to tighten and stiffen muscles as we age, Brady believes, which is why, come his age, the rest of us are open to injury. We really should take note.

Instead of weights, he flexes with elastic resistance bands for 40 minutes and lifts his own body weight in the form of planks and lunges for added strength. Then it’s more massage using foam rollers and vibrating spheres. These are easily available online (tb12sports.com), proving that pliability is available to all — at a price. Time at the beach and with Bundchen and their children are factored into the timetable, as is an hour to review footage of games he has played to improve his performance.

Then it’s more training, more massage and more post-workout pliability before precision sleeping. Yes, even Brady’s bedtime ritual is subject to the same high levels of scrutiny. To wake up when he does, he is said to hit the sack (no ordinary sack — it’s a Beautyrest Black mattress with a layer of micro-diamond memory foam to prevent his body from overheating) at 8.30pm. Naturally, he sleeps in performance pyjamas: Under Armour’s Athlete Recovery Ultra Comfort sleepwear with a bioceramic print on the inside fabric that is said to harness “the power of beneficial Far Infrared energy” and promote recovery. His bedroom thermostat is set to 15-18C.

John Brewer, professor of sport at the University of Suffolk, says it’s “incredibly rare for an athlete to maintain such high levels of sharpness and to avoid injury for so long” in the way that Brady has and that partly it is down to the way he has carefully engineered his self-preservation. “There’s a big element of him looking after himself extremely well and an element of pure luck, but he’s also found a formula of different strategies that work for him,” Brewer says.

Very few of these strategies may be scientifically sound, he adds, “but there’s an argument that because he believes in them they will help mentally. There are some factors in sports success that cannot be pinned down or proven in a scientific study.”

The Times