Tom Brady’s TB12 Controversial Fitness Method on Curriculum in Florida Schools

The fitness method Brady credits with prolonging his career is part of the physical education curriculum in Pinellas County, Florida

TB12 co-founders Tom Brady and Alex Guerrero celebrate the opening of a TB12 Center in 2019.
TB12 co-founders Tom Brady and Alex Guerrero are pushing their product in Florida schools.
Kevin Mazur/Getty for TB12

For Florida football fans who believe Tom Brady is an NFL god, the separation of church and state in the Sunshine State’s public schools has come to an end.

Brady, who has been in a bad mood for a few weeks now, has something to smile about as the controversial TB12 fitness method that the 45-year-old quarterback credits with prolonging his career is now part of the physical education curriculum in Pinellas County, Florida.

“I feel like everything I’ve learned over the course of 23 years in football has and will allow me to continue to help people in different ways,” Brady said Thursday. “I think starting young is really important.”

Believed by many to be based on pseudoscience dreamed up by Brady’s personal trainer Alex Guerrero, the TB12 method has arrived in gym and health classes in 10 middle and high schools in the 96,000-student district with the seven-time Super Bowl winner’s TB12 Foundation footing the bill for equipment and training district staff members.

Now confined to 10 schools, the TB12 method could expand to more Pinellas County schools as well as other districts if all goes well. “Today we kind of focus on a little bit older client for the most part,” TB12 CEO Grant Shriver told The Associated Press. “This just kind of gives us a little bit of a vision of how we could go approach just more people.”

Second only to Texas in banning school books and also home to a GOP-backed ban on teaching students to “feel guilt” for historical events committed by people of their race, Florida certainly has made some questionable decisions when it comes to its public education system. While allowing Brady’s method, which was also introduced to Massachusetts students in the city of Brockton and is still being practiced in the district by student-athletes under the guidance of contracted TB12 staff as strength and conditioning coaches, into schools may not be the worst thing in the world, it certainly seems like a conflict of interest. After all, the end goal of youths using the method and the products associated with it for free while students would certainly be that they’ll end up paying for said method and products once they reach adulthood.

“I’m sure one of the benefits is to help students get better exercise habits and physical fitness habits,” Karen Rommelfanger, an adjunct professor of neurology and psychiatry at Emory University, told The AP. “But does it also start to enroll another generation of consumers for their product?”

It certainly seems like it.

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