Ballistic: The New Science of Injury-Free Athletic Performance

The biggest victories of medical science—over polio, smallpox, heart attacks, and the like—are stories of prevention. Then there’s sports, where we just run around until something breaks, leading to pain, frustration, and sometimes even expensive surgery. Injuries are a major cause of society’s growing mobility crisis. What if we could predict and prevent them?

Blending cutting-edge science with gripping storytelling, award-winning data journalist and competitive amateur athlete Henry Abbott reveals that we are on the cusp of a new era in sports medicine, built around the science of ballistic movements—leaping and landing—and the unique fingerprint of your body’s physics.

Abbott’s inspiring narrative tells the story of sports scientist Dr. Marcus Elliott and the Peak Performance Project (P3), who use technology to study how athletes move and why they get hurt. Applying machine learning and lessons from biomechanics, medicine, and physiology, doctors at P3 can now detect elevated risk of an ACL tear or a pulled hamstring like an echocardiogram can see warning signs of a heart attack.

Their data-driven findings are full of surprises. Your body’s most important defense against knee and ankle injuries are the little-known muscles in the lower leg and hip area, which typical workouts rarely target. Similarly, the glutes—not the core—do the most to prevent back pain. Transformative benefits flow from training underappreciated kinds of athleticism like rotation, deceleration, and relaxation. Most of all, science shows that the best athletes don’t avoid ballistics—they master them.

Through riveting stories of elite athletes overcoming injuries and pushing themselves to the limit, Abbott presents an evidence-based case for intervening early to protect our bodies. And he suggests that we can all harness the science of ballistic movement not just to run fast or jump high but to move with joy and lead fulfilling athletic lives.