Built from Broken: A Science-Based Guide to Healing Painful Joints, Preventing Injuries, and Rebuilding Your Body

This is an amazing book. So much new information backed up by science. It makes so much sense why people suffer from so many injuries and this book provides guilders from not only preventing them but healing from them. I not only have read this book cover to cover but encouraging my adult children to read it and also put in to practice many of the exercise guidelines for my sports playing grandchildren to prevent injures! I can's speak highly enough about this book and the exercise program it details.

First off, kudos to the author for having the wisdom and initiative to take the road less traveled in the fitness world. Both his theoretical perspectives and his concrete applications deeply resonate with my own fitness journey, both as a client and a coach.I've been an athlete my whole life, starting ice hockey and soccer at age 5, playing through high school, getting immersed in endurance and outdoor sports during college, finding and falling deep into the CrossFit world in my early adult years, branching out into more focused gymnastics and mobility and movement-quality based paradigms and eventually transitioning from the hardcore dogma of "constantly varied functional movement at high intensity" to a more mellow, Daoist-like fitness philosophy. And, that philosophy cannot be better summarized than by the words of Lao Tzu himself:"Men are born soft and supple; dead they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail."Such words fly in the face of today's conventional fitness values that seem to always amount to an egotistical ambition to be 1) appealing to the opposite sex and 2) intimidating to one's own sex (assuming the athlete is heterosexual) and that the pursuit of these ambitions requires you to regularly endure PAIN, as in "no pain, no gain."What I like about Scott Hogan and others like him (Jerzy Gregorek, Tim Anderson, Dr Eric Goodman, Ben Patrick) is that they take ego out of the fitness equation by waking people up to a fundamental truth: you are not meant to be in pain. Pain, unlike what the ego tells you, is a sign that you're doing fitness wrong, not right. Hogan's book indeed takes this big picture approach and challenges readers to zoom out and reevaluate why they're really training in the first place. For that alone, I'd say it's worth a read.Another thing I really like about Hogan's work is his emphasis on joint health and range of motion as the non-negotiable foundation of all meaningful health and athleticism. Just stop to think for second: of what use is strength or muscle size if you're unable to simply occupy natural human positions? Any fitness paradigm that does not have mobility and movement quality as its foundation is a house of cards. Strength, power, and speed are all great, but when developed at the expense of natural range of motion, those "gains" eventually become "glitches." Kudos to Hogan for creating a program that will help exercisers of all stripes to repair and rebuild a solid foundation for pursuing their fitness goals. This is a great resource for anyone interested in staying supple and strong for life.

Really good overall reference manual for the aging exercise buff. I think he puts far too much confidence in physical therapists; not all PTs are created equal. I've had more than my share of stinkers who do more harm than good.The book does a good job with most posture, muscle, and tendon issues. It's not comprehensive; there's no discussion on the neck or involvement of nerves (nerve dysfunction can impact both muscle function and mobility)

Interesting read, interesting concepts

Just finished another Built from Broken session and feel great. I've been using the book off and on for a couple of months, on days when the winter weather is too bad for me to actually ride my horse. So, I'm not exactly on schedule, but am gradually progressing through the beginner workouts. My body definitely feels happier, stronger, more balanced, and more capable in spite of injuries over the years. (I probably wouldn't have gotten injured if this book had existed!) Many of these exercises I've never seen before. I like the variety. You will need some simple, inexpensive equipment, but a lot of it I already had because of other books I have tried. I took my paperback of Built from Broken to the office store and had them cut off the spine and three-hole-punch it to stay open in a binder because I kept losing my place going back and forth between the workout exercise list and how to do the exercise. (I probably should have bought the spiral-bound version.) I also marked page numbers on the workout exercise lists and created sticky note tabs to mark each exercise for easy lookup. The author/publisher should create a high-quality, high-contrast, high-resolution printing of this book, with exercises tabbed, workouts tabbed, built-in bookmark ribbons, etc. The font and print quality could be better, and even if a high-quality print/tabbed version were pricey, it would be worth it as a lifetime investment. To give you an idea of how much I like this book, I also have the Kindle version, so I can adapt exercises when traveling or do keyword searches, e.g. "sore shoulder" or "core". Great, helpful book!

I’m a 69 year old martial artist. Having undergone multiple surgeries. I find the information in this book very helpful.

I picked up Built from Broken to help with stiff joints and long-term pain. The book offers a solid foundation on mobility and injury prevention, and I appreciated the focus on root causes rather than just short-term fixes.That said, it’s worth approaching the advice with some caution—especially if you're already injured. I found that trying things gradually and waiting a few days between new exercises helped me avoid flare-ups. Also, the book is a few years old now, and some of the information could use an update to reflect current research and practices.Personally, I did some Google and YouTube research on fascia hopping, and that technique made a big difference for my stiff joints—more than some of the methods covered in the book. So while the book is a decent resource, I’d suggest combining it with newer insights from other sources.