Episode 450: Henry Abbott: The Hip Stability Secret for Aging Well + Why ACL Tears Are 8x More Common in Women

Are your hips stable, mobile, or neither? In this Fitness Friday episode on the Habits and Hustle podcast, I talk with Henry Abbott about his insights from elite sports training facilities that can help people prevent injuries and age better. We discuss simple tests you can do at home, why ACL tears are epidemic among female athletes, and the importance of plyometric training for developing "bouncy" strength. Henry also shares the 13-step warm-up routine used by elite athletes, which can transform how you feel in just 10 minutes. Henry Abbott is an award-winning journalist and founder of TrueHoop, a respected basketball media platform. He previously led ESPN's 60-person NBA digital and print team, which published several groundbreaking articles and won a National Magazine Award. His new book "Ballistic: The New Science of Injury-Free Athletic Performance" explores revolutionary approaches to injury prevention through the science of ballistic movements. What we discuss: Hip mobility vs. stability - everyone fits one category Self-tests: pigeon pose and side plank X Mobile hips need strength, stable hips need yoga ACL tears 8x more common in female athletes True causes of ACL injuries Importance of plyometric training Landing mechanics and hip control 13-step warm-up routine Strategies for aging well through hip health Thank you to our sponsor: Therasage: Head over to therasage.com http://therasage.com/ and use code Be Bold for 15% off TruNiagen: Head over to truniagen.com http://truniagen.com/ and use code HUSTLE20 to get $20 off any purchase over $100. Magic Mind: Head over to www http://www/.magicmind.com http://magicmind.com//jen and use code Jen at checkout. Air Doctor: Go to airdoctorpro.com http://airdoctorpro.com/ and use promo code HUSTLE for up to $300 off and a 3-year warranty on air purifiers. Bio.me: Link to daily prebiotic fiber here https://bio.me/?utm_source=Jennifer, code Jennifer20 for 20% off. Momentous: Shop this link https://www.livemomentous.com/?srsltid=AfmBOorDUIZz3psr1Qsq_n1yE8_6JTq_QUFabOO9lH65HDEXCIoJOPLj and use code Jen for 20% off DavidProtein: Try David today—buy 4, get the 5th free at davidprotein.com/habitsandhustle http://davidprotein.com/habitsandhustle To learn more about Henry Abbott: Website: https://www.henryabbott.com/ https://www.truehoop.com/ X: https://x.com/truehoop?lang=en Find more from Jen: Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagements

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hi guys, this is Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.

• 0:09Jen Cohen?

  Today on Habits and Hustle Fitness Friday, I'm joined by Henry Abbott. He's an award-winning journalist and founder of True Hoop. Henry spent years at ESPN before launching True Hoop, where he built a powerful platform that dives deep into the NBA, business, and the hidden forces shaping pro sports. But in today's episode, we talk all about misogi, a practice where you take on a challenge so intense, you've only got a 50% chance of finishing. We talk wild examples, like underwater 5Ks with rocks and paddle boarding through shark-infested waters, all designed to push the limits of what you think you're capable of. We also talk about science-backed insights from Harvard's Fatigue Lab, plus

• 0:54Jen Cohen?

  his own story of overcoming chronic pain through movement, proving that sometimes the boldest path leads to real transformation.

• 1:10Jen Cohen?

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• 2:10Jen Cohen?

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• 2:36Speaker 02

  We all have weird stuff with our hips, like every single person.

• 2:38Jen Cohen?

  Oh, terrible. That's where my biggest issue is.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so it plays in that space, too.

• 2:44Jen Cohen?

  It does?

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, because so if you think about the egg again, right? And so now you're this free falling egg and ideally you're going to be bouncy because of like a rubber band of your glutes. Right?

• 2:55Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  This is practicing kind of getting the force there, if that makes sense.

• 3:00Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  This is, you know, again, the nerves are going to control all your, there's 600 muscles in the body and they're controlled by the brain, basically. It's going to like, teach them to like, get it snappy or get it better, right? So every single person in the SS at P3 has had hip issues, basically. And they're, but they fit in one or the other category. This is probably the most important thing I will tell you today.

• 3:20Jen Cohen?

  Okay, good. So I should listen? Okay.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. So everybody's hips are either unstable or immobile. And you should know which group you're in and I can tell you how to find out. So actually I asked Marcus at one point, I'm like, well, how do I know if my hips are immobile? And he's like, I think you know.

• 3:38Jen Cohen?

  That's hilarious.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  But just in case you don't, like the way you check that one would be to get into like a pigeon or, you know, pigeon from yoga. Or do you know standing figure four? I don't really want to demonstrate it, but like, okay, so.

• 3:50Jen Cohen?

  Standing figure four.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  So you stand up and then I would take like my right ankle and cross it over my left knee and then sit down.

• 3:58Jen Cohen?

  Yep.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Right? While you're still bouncing on one leg and you know, butt back, chest up, and you want to kind of bounce. If you can really sink into that position or sink into a pigeon, I think we all know if you're not sunk in.

• 4:09Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  If you can sink in, then we're going to say your hips are very likely mobile enough.

• 4:13Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Right? And then for stability, this one's a little hard.

• 4:17Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  If you do a side plank. But the kind of side plank where your body's a complete X. So your leg is elevated, your arm is elevated. And then this is different than any other side plank I know. All ten toes pointing forward. So your body's a big X. If you can lock that out and hold it, then we're gonna say that your hips are stable enough. And what we find, what they find is that basically everyone who lifts weights should do yoga. And everyone who does yoga should lift weights. Because basically, the people with mobile hips make them more mobile with yoga, right? And people with stable hips make them more mobile with weightlifting. But they should switch, right? Because the people with stable hips need to work on mobility, right? And people with mobile hips need to work on stability. Either one could get you needing a hip replacement, right? You wanna have a little bit of both.

• 5:02Jen Cohen?

  So that's interesting. So, and you need to be both, right?

• 5:06Speaker 02

  We need both. We all need both.

• 5:07Jen Cohen?

  You'd be stability and mobility.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is how we're gonna age well, yeah.

• 5:11Jen Cohen?

  And that's so important for aging. So let me just repeat that, because I think that's really important. So to age well, for your body to age well, we need to have hips that are stable and mobile.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 5:22Jen Cohen?

  Right? And the way to check that is to either go into a standing figure four to see if you can sit down, right? Or the pigeon, right? And you'll know if you're mobile or not. And if whatever, and the side plank with your hand out, fingers open.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  And leg up.

• 5:42Jen Cohen?

  And leg up. That in itself is very hard.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  It's so hard.

• 5:46Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, that's really hard.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  This is like 5% of people are gonna pass this test, I think.

• 5:50Jen Cohen?

  Right, so then let's just say 5% of people pass. Then what does the other 95% of people do?

• 5:55Speaker 02

  So, I think if you, so you need work on hip stability. And it's very knowable, right? I, you know, I guarantee that within a mile of here are ten trainers who know how to help you with that. If that's what you're working on, like now you have a target, right? You can do it on YouTube probably, but you want someone to-

• 6:09Jen Cohen?

  But let me just finish that, because whatever, if you, if you cannot do that, right? If you're unable to sink into the figure eight, or, sorry, the pigeon, that means you're immobile. And that means you should be doing less weights, more yoga. And if you are able to do that, but your lips, not lips, your hips are unstable, you know that by doing the plank.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly right.

• 6:33Jen Cohen?

  Because what happens? You just can't lift your leg, or what happens?

• 6:36Speaker 02

  Oh, what happens to me is I just feel weak.

• 6:39Jen Cohen?

  Right. You just can't get up. You can't do it, right?

• 6:41Speaker 02

  I can like, I can, I can cheat it.

• 6:43Jen Cohen?

  And then what? Do you need more weights then? Or do you need more?

• 6:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you're tweaking your routine a little bit, right? I think you, you know, whatever, whatever you're doing to work out. I think a lot of us, you know, when you're 25, you can do it all wrong and it's fine, right?

• 6:54Jen Cohen?

  Right. No, but what I mean is if you're in that side plank,

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:57Jen Cohen?

  how do you know if you're stable or mobile or whatever?

• 7:00Speaker 02

  You're gonna be shaking or collapsing or quitting, you know?

• 7:03Jen Cohen?

  So if you're unstable, then you go to do the yoga or the weights?

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Then if you're, you go do the weights.

• 7:08Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, the weights. You need to be more strong.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're gonna be squatting and, you know, I've, I've always had immobile hips. Like everyone in my fam- no, not my wife's family, but everyone, like my blood relatives.

• 7:19Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  We are the immobile hip crowd.

• 7:21Jen Cohen?

  Right. That's very common for guys, though.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  Oh, totally. We're cool like that.

• 7:25Jen Cohen?

  Right. But I think mostly women maybe have more mobility in their hips and men have less.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's, I mean, there's, there are women who have immobile hips for sure. And there are men who have mobile hips, but like, yeah, you're right. That's definitely, mobility is more likely in women for sure. And so I always thought of very mobile hips as just like way better, right? Like the yoga teacher, I'd be like, oh, man, like she's gonna have, live forever with this, right?

• 7:49Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  But only from this project that I learned, like, no, like a lot of super mobile people need hip replacements because they just don't have the musculature to keep it together, right?

• 7:59Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Think about how we're talking, oh, oh, here's the thing I learned that blew my mind. In my assessment, when they assessed me, I mentioned you're standing on a box and you step off and land on the force plate. Well, when I stepped off, my hips like dipped, right? The foot that's out over the space, that hip just fell. And they stopped the video and they're like, why are you doing that? I'm like, I don't know. I think that was what we do, you know?

• 8:22Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  That's not what we do. Like, you're supposed to keep your hips level, right? It's supposed to be like, when you do most exercises, like the glute on the standing leg should be engaged. And it's supposed to hold that stuff together, right? And then the other one can be mobile and bouncy, right? But, but you're supposed to control your hips. I was walking around with, out of good control of my hips and I felt like that's what I'll- Happens to a lot of these elite yoga athletes is that they're, you know, if they were running down that mountain path or whatever, their hips are gonna be

• 8:53Jen Cohen?

  But they're too flexible.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Flopping around.

• 8:54Jen Cohen?

  Well, I think it's because you could be too mobile. It's like, it's like the Goldilocks thing, right? With anything, right? You could be too mu- it's like you have to be just, just enough.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:04Jen Cohen?

  Just enough stability, just enough mobility, or else if you're too mobile, you become, you can also injure yourself.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  That, this is what I've learned recently, yep.

• 9:11Jen Cohen?

  Is it just weights or yoga? Like, it's, cause I find like, you know, people who do weights are much more stiff, right? Versus people who do more malleable stuff like yoga. What, so getting back to my first question then, what is the top injury for women? And what is a top injury for men?

• 9:27Speaker 02

  I don't honestly know the answer to that. Um, I, I know that this ACL thing is ridiculous rates in female athletes, right? It's eight X men. And so I just, I'm a little bit of a, a women's soccer fan. And I don't know if you know, Emma Hayes is the new coach of the US national team. There's 11 players on the team and she's getting a crew of 50 ready for the World Cup because you can't count on.

• 9:53Jen Cohen?

  Wow.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  There's just so many, and since she got the job just recently, one of their star defender is out for a year with ACL tear. Um, they're, you know, there are several out now. I think there are three players out right now. In the last women's World Cup or in the Olympics, every single team had a player out because of ACL tear. It's just like rampant.

• 10:09Jen Cohen?

  For women?

• 10:10Speaker 02

  For women.

• 10:11Jen Cohen?

  And not, I mean, Kobe Bryant got that. I mean, like for men, like there's a lot of it for men too, right? But just for women, it's just way more, is it because they're more, again, is it because women, not just hips are more mobile? But maybe their ankles are more mobile, so there's more chance of that injury, you know?

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, this is, these are very active questions in science right now. And there's a bunch of theories, you know, there's, could be hormonal explanations, could be, women have wider hips, which permits their knees. There's like this thought that if your knees go in together as you bend your knees, that is an elevated risk of ACL tear. There were so many, is that women have narrower ACLs? There's all these theories, but I'm a little bit struck by, so in this granular movement out of that, my book. Is about, they did a massive study of like every single thing that goes into NBA players who had ACL tears over years. Basically, so if someone has an ACL tear, then they go back and look at that person's assessment and say, how do they move? And by this analysis, it's none of

• 11:12Speaker 02

  those things I just described. Like ACL tears are caused by landing on the outside of your foot and having the weight roll to the inside. Like your shin bone is moving like a big windshield wiper, right? That's number, cause number one. Is that more common in women? We don't haven't studied that yet, right? But I think that would be tip top thing to study, right?

• 11:30Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, you would think.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  And then the second biggest cause is femoral rotation. So this is where, this is gross, but you go with my analogy. You know, when you have the Thanksgiving turkey and you like twist the leg off?

• 11:45Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Well, I'm using my arm, I guess, the upper half of your leg. Some people, when they squat down, your upper leg bone twists inside your leg. And you can imagine that would be extremely stressful, like on your ligaments in your knee, right? So the first problem is managed by stronger muscles in the lower leg, like we've been talking about, right? The second problem is managed by stronger muscles in your hip. Like your hip has, that bone in your upper leg has little knobs on it. And there are muscles that like grab it and hold it in place and keep it from rotating. And you can just strengthen those muscles and make it stronger. And you do that with all sorts

• 12:27Speaker 02

  of difficult work like side planks. But this is why yoga teachers have more, have some, are more prone to some of these problems, right? Is because they're very flexible and you kind of want to be rigid in that particular way. So I think this is the, like, this would be the first place to start for me if I'm talking about like leading injuries for women, right? Is these two things have been studied in men and they have not been studied in women. They're kind of.

• 12:55Jen Cohen?

  That's so weird.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the way men, like P3 is an expensive place for professional athletes to go and mostly like Adidas pays for them to go or their agency or.

• 13:05Jen Cohen?

  How much is it?

• 13:06Speaker 02

  I don't honestly know. It depends what, you know, like, like right now, there's NBA players going there before the draft for seven weeks. So that's going to be a lot. I went for three days, right? That's going to be a four-figure number, right? But they just started having, just in the last year or two, the time I was writing the book, Lea Boston was the number one WNBA overall draft pick and Haley Jones was like, I think, the sixth pick. They were there. That's the first time that the shoe company paid for, for women basketball players to go.

• 13:34Jen Cohen?

  Wow.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  And so there've been a bunch of women through there, but it's only 15% of the thousands of athletes they've had. So, you know, the industry didn't fund that before, right? But it's starting to. And so I think they're trying to find ways that they could just assess, like, a thousand soccer players at once, just to get a big data set to start answering these questions. I think that's what the future will look like. But I think it's important that a lot, you know, without this data set, we're looking at all these things like ligament width and, and it's not, it's not likely the cause, I don't think.

• 14:11Jen Cohen?

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• 15:34Jen Cohen?

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• 15:58Jen Cohen?

  So then how do we train to for that not to happen? How do we train so we don't get ACL injuries? Like so far, what I've gotten from you was we need to strengthen our lower legs.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:10Jen Cohen?

  And plyometrics is super important from all different planes, side to side, up and down, back and forth. Just basic jump roping. How else can we train our bodies to be as powerful and as healthy as we age?

• 16:28Speaker 02

  So one of the answers you won't like, and one of them you will, I think.

• 16:32Jen Cohen?

  Okay, I like that.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  The one that you won't like is that they were going to come soon to a point where there'll be some way to like assess your own biomechanics, right? Like you want to do a workout that's designed for you. Like when they put the exercise on the board and everybody does the same workout.

• 16:48Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  It's, it's like you want someone with expert eyes looking at your body.

• 16:52Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Right. And they're saying, oh, and like, and what happens now is you get hurt first. And then you go to physical therapy and then it's customized for you.

• 16:59Jen Cohen?

  A hundred percent. Like I always have this problem with trainers, right? They're like, okay, grab the heaviest weight and squat deep down. And like, I'm like, my body mechanics doesn't allow for me to do that move. They're like, yeah, that's impossible. I'm like, no, it's not impossible. I will hurt myself. And like people should, people know their bodies better than like a stranger does. And so when they do these generic workouts and think everybody's body can move a certain way, that's just not accurate.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:26Jen Cohen?

  Right?

• 17:27Speaker 02

  I, yes, hundred percent. And, you know, and it's, it's a little sad to me. Like, I, I was doing PT for a while, this place where they had like a, like a, a track and all these, all the sports equipment. Cause I think the idea was they'd have these like elite athletes being explosive in there.

• 17:40Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  But everybody in there is so broken. They never used the track, right?

• 17:43Jen Cohen?

  Of course, that's right. It's exactly it. Like you're starting at like a hundred. It's, you know what I mean? Like, and so that's what I want to talk about. I want to talk about for the average person, you know, someone who's more intermediate or beginner or, you know, whatever in that realm. Not like, not a professional athlete, right? Cause not all of us are going to have the chance to go to P3 and like get these crazy, you know, assessments and then like work that way. But from all of the experience you've had, I want you to be able to tell me and my audience what we can do to strengthen our bodies in the ways that are the most beneficial, in the ways that we get hurt the most in the ACL. Another one is glutes don't fire, really.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. That's a good deal, yeah.

• 18:26Jen Cohen?

  That's a big one. Hip, you know, hip issues, knee issues. Give me some stuff that everyday people can do daily.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. So there are 25 illustrations in the book of like, cause I, I was like, they're obsessed with elite athletes there, right? And, and they will tell you, they're like, Henry was so annoying with asking me so many questions about like the rest of us.

• 18:46Jen Cohen?

  I know. And they're not interested, right?

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Okay. They, he, I mean, they won't say this, they won't admit this, but like they call us normies.

• 18:55Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  What do we do with normies?

• 18:57Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, I'm a normie and so are you. So, yes.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  It's all normie. So I tried to capture as many of the things as I could. And writing about it is a little bit tricky because you really can't really see what you're supposed to do.

• 19:09Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Like, for instance, their warmup is amazing. There are days where I got up and felt like the Tin Man. And, you know, I'm 50 and I would go downstairs and be like, oh my gosh, I think I broke something. But I would just do the warmup. It's 13 steps. I have them memorized. You can do it in, I don't know, 10 minutes. And it's a little bouncy and it's got a little bit of stuff that you don't normally have. And now I've noticed actually a different, you know, races or whatever. I'm like, oh, that person's doing the P3 warmup. Like there's a little cult that we're in now.

• 19:34Jen Cohen?

  Okay. What's the warmup? I want to know.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  So there's a picture, every single step is illustrated in there, but you know, you, it, it's. Walking, you go back and forth at the gym a bunch of times. And first you're walking on your heels, then you're slapping your toes down. And then you're doing two different, no, three different kinds of lunges. There's, is that standing figure four thing? There's, you've probably done the thing a bunch of times where you put your hand on the wall and swing your leg like a hamstring stretch. Then you're on the floor for a bit, rotating your spine various ways. There's a lot of rotation, tons of rotation in all of their recommendations.

• 20:04Jen Cohen?

  Why?

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Because that's another neurological training. You know, there's, this is a mind blowing thing. There's nobody in Major League Baseball who didn't grow up playing baseball. Basketball's full of players who didn't go baseball. But because baseball is hitting and throwing, which are both rotating things. And if you didn't grow up practicing, like you're not as good as people who did. Like just, and so a lot of us, like I didn't grow up with any, I didn't play any baseball.

• 20:30Jen Cohen?

  You're a hundred percent right about that. Go on.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  But I, anyway, you want to rotate. You want, this is going to be part of aging well, right? You want to do things that rotate.