From Tom’s Routine to Yours: Inside the Brady Protocol
Playing 23 seasons in the NFL is almost absurd. Winning a Super Bowl at 43 makes it even harder to fathom. Tom Brady credits consistent bodywork as an important part of the recovery routine that helped him keep playing.
You don’t need an NFL schedule to want less soreness after a workout or more ease in your everyday movements. The Brady Protocol brings techniques from Tom’s bodywork routine to a 30-minute deep tissue recovery session on the Aescape table, developed with him and his team.
Expect fast, firm, repetitive work across your calves, hamstrings, glutes, and back, with pressure you control throughout. The goal is to help you feel looser, lighter, and ready to move.
Recovery Shouldn’t Be Just for Pros
For Tom, recovery was part of the routine that made the next day’s work possible. His ambition with Aescape was to make that kind of bodywork available to more people. The partnership brought together his team’s hands-on experience and Aescape’s ability to deliver a session you can book, repeat, and adjust to your comfort.
The challenge was translating that work to the table while preserving the techniques that defined it. That meant building a session with Tom and his team involved in the strokes themselves, as well as how they fit together.
Built with Tom, Stroke by Stroke
Development began with a three-day workshop with Tom’s team, followed by working sessions nearly every two weeks for six months. His team helped build every new stroke. Tom approved the individual strokes and then the complete sequence, with over 17 rounds of testing across the teams before the protocol was ready.
That sequence matters because a session is more than a collection of techniques. It also has a pace, an order, and time devoted to each area. In the Brady Protocol, those choices come together in a focused session with less gradual warm-up and more repeated work in each region.
30 Minutes of Focused Work
You lie face down while the table works the back of your body. The session draws on sports and deep tissue massage, focusing on areas that can feel tight or sore after training and in the days between workouts.
Work moves up the body, covering the outer, middle, and inner lines of each region. In areas such as the glutes, the sequence includes strokes that travel across muscle fibers and compressions that hold pressure in place. These are different ways of working an area within the same session.
Purposeful Pressure, on Your Terms
Many Aescape sessions begin with lighter, slower work and gradually build. The Brady Protocol moves into firm, repetitive work sooner, spending less time easing in and more time repeating strokes in the areas it covers. That pace is a defining part of the experience.
Firm doesn’t mean you have to tolerate the highest setting. You control the pressure in real time and can dial it up (or down) whenever you need to. You can expect a strong, deep sensation during the session. If you ever feel sharp discomfort, listen to your body and turn the intensity down. Choose a comfortable pressure level that allows you to stay relaxed throughout the session.
If you’re looking for faster, focused bodywork after exercise, this is the approach to consider. If you prefer a gentler session with a gradual build, another Aescape program may be a better fit.
Looser, Lighter, Ready to Move
Tom calls the goal “pliability,” meaning feeling less tight and more ready to move. For you, the useful question is whether your body feels more at ease after the session and in the day that follows.
Reducing post-workout soreness and the feeling of fatigue is one reason people turn to massage for recovery. A systematic review with meta-analysis found benefits for both outcomes (Dupuy et al., 2018). That research supports the use of massage in recovery; it does not establish a guaranteed result or timeline for the Brady Protocol.
There’s also room to unwind. A separate review reported improvements in relaxation and several measures of psychological well-being following massage (Dakić et al., 2023). The practical aim is a session that helps you take a break from tension as well as work on the areas that feel tight.
The value is how you feel between workouts and during the movements that fill your day. Pay attention to that experience rather than treating more pressure or more sessions as the measure of success.
Start with a Session. Build from There.
For your first session, start with pressure you can comfortably tolerate and adjust as you go. The session’s pace is part of its design; your pressure setting is yours to choose.
Afterward, notice how you feel that day and the next. Are you less stiff, less sore, or more comfortable moving? Some tenderness can occur, but soreness is not the goal. If the work leaves you overly tender, reduce the pressure next time. If you don’t notice a benefit, don’t assume a higher setting is the answer.
If the session suits you, make space for it in your recovery routine. Start by learning what works for your body rather than committing to a fixed number of sessions.
You already make time to move. Give recovery a place in your routine, too. Start with 30 minutes and experience the Brady Protocol for yourself.
Find an Aescape location near you to schedule your session.
References
Dupuy et al. (2018). An evidence-based approach for choosing post-exercise recovery techniques to reduce markers of muscle damage, soreness, fatigue, and inflammation: A systematic review with meta-analysis. Frontiers in Physiology, 9, 403.
Dakić et al. (2023). The effects of massage therapy on sport and exercise performance: A systematic review. Sports, 11(6), 110.
