Following Brady’s seventh Super Bowl title came reports that he had played all of the 2020 season with a torn MCL. A difficult task for anyone let alone a 20-year veteran in his mid 40’s. It’s hard for players to recover quickly from an injury such as a torn MCL, but Brady also did that in G.O.A.T. fashion.
On Wednesday, his royal G.O.A.T.ness appeared on Sirus XM NFL Radio and spoke about his rehab process following his knee surgery earlier in the year.
“Yeah. It was six months today that I had knee surgery. It was a tough offseason, you know, in terms of the rehab. Anytime someone goes through surgery,” Brady said. “The rehab process, there’s nothing easy about it. You have to get through it.”
.@TomBrady talks about his struggles to get back to shape following his surgery to repair his torn MCL – via SiriusXM. pic.twitter.com/zd6GjJSoOl
— Dov Kleiman (@NFL_DovKleiman) August 25, 2021
“But I feel like I’m really just now kind of feeling, not from a rehab standpoint, but a football standpoint, like, my legs are feeling bouncy and ready to go. My arm’s feeling live. You know, I think that’s the hard thing when you miss time and you don’t continue to train the way you’re capable of training, it’s tough because your body just wants to – it feels like, ‘OK, I get time off.’ And then when you get your body going again, it’s hard. Your body’s like, ‘No, no, no, no, no, we’re not working out. We’re chilling.’ And I’m trying to get it going. It just doesn’t want to do it.”
“So, you know,” Brady continued, “I’ve had to push through some different things and even the early part of training camp, just getting my legs under me. Getting my football legs. Again, when it’s 95, you’ve got pads on and a helmet, I mean, and you’re reading coverages, and the mental strain, and the day after day, and the sleep. And then, you know, it’s just a lot of football conditioning that needs to happen. Even for somebody who’s been doing it as long as me, it’s always a challenge. I think that’s why I love the sport.”
“You have to bring it every day. And not only you, but you got to figure out how to get your teammates there with you. And I have a great group of teammates that bring it every day. And I want to be accountable to them and I want to be the best I could be for them. And it motivates me to show up every day and work my tail off.”