Many of our finest dodgy athletic therapy trends are popularized by pro athletes looking for the holy grail of perfect eternal performance. A lot of it is nonsense, of course, and some of it is best described as “a grift.” But grifting resides on a spectrum. Athletes might know, intellectually, that this crap doesn’t “work” in the scientific application of that word, but pro sports are a tremendously stressful, all-consuming pursuit, and any mental edge that someone can find, even if it’s transparently a placebo, can help in a world where success is determined by the fluctuations of one’s finger muscles.

Some of these pursuits are transparent lies on the part of the companies who make and shill them. Take, for instance, the Power Balance Bracelet, a bracelet with… a hologram in it that its manufacturers claimed improved balance. The company was forced to pay out a $57 million class-action settlement for making bunk claims about their HoloBracelets, but not before they got Lamar Odom to invest in their company and paid Shaq to cut an ad for them.

Tom Brady, a public lunatic who used to play quarterback for the New England Patriots (and who managed to get vaccinated), has long ascribed to the theories of Alex Guerrero, a “body coach” who once got dinged by the FTC for peddling fake concussion cures. The two of them have gone into business together, promoting the TB12 Method, a training regimen that de-emphasizes traditional strength training in favor of a concept known as “pliability.” Our muscles, you see, get injured more easily when they are stiff like wood. But if you train to make them soft, they will not break. They will, instead, absorb the stress and impact of athletic activity.