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

Built from Broken completely transformed the way I think about fitness, pain, and recovery. Scott Hogan explains the science behind rebuilding your body in a way that’s easy to understand and apply. His approach focuses on smart training, not just harder workouts. This isn’t just a fitness book; it’s a manual for reclaiming your body and confidence. This book completely changed how I approach training. Scott Hogan breaks down how to build a body that’s not just strong, but sustainable for the long term. His insights into recovery, mobility, and muscle balance made me realize how much potential I was leaving on the table by ignoring the basics. I’ve been lifting and training for years, and this book still taught me things I’d never considered. The guidance feels practical, science-based, and surprisingly motivating. It’s a must-read for anyone who wants to train smarter, stay healthy, and keep performing at their best for years to come.

I'm over 65, and bought this book when a 20-something 'trainer' nearly broke my back with barbell squats. I wanted to know what when wrong, and so purchased a lot of training books to study the issue. Guess what, 90% of training books are based on unfounded science and 'trainers' who are already fit, but don't really know what they're doing. So, this book goes into how muscle and connective tissue is generated, inflammation after injury, nutrition recommendations for repairing injured connective tissue, what exercises you shouldn't do (i.e., remarkably benches, barbell squats, and other heavy exercises), etc., all for someone who is looking at just building strength over a longer term (not necessarily for 'muscle beach' type people. There's even a long-term plan for training. Are all the exercises given described correctly - no, world's greatest stretch is actually an advanced exercise for someone older like myself; and one should actually consult the Stuart McGill's back training book for how and why to do bird dog, cat-cow, bridges, etc. exercises for the back - especially if one is building back from a back injury. But overall, this is probably the best training book of the over 15 books I've purchased. I wish I had read this before I started training after a slight layoff. I was already fit, but not trained properly - so this book would have helped me a lot - especially the advice not to listen to any 20-somthing trainer who doesn't read, and says the exercises are obvious.

It looks very informative but too complicated for me . It was full of drawings and illustrations.

Great information incorporated into a "wire bound, lay flat" design! This very affordable modification compared to the original bound format is so much easier to reference during a workout! I added tab markers to mine so that I can focus more easily on my proper technique without having to put a weight on a page to keep it open. Plus, the wire binding (not really metal, but instead, a durable plastic) allows a more compact reference in your gym bag when you need the book to be already referenced to an exact page/exercise.

Very good information for someone looking to fix imbalances with corrective exercises

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.

I finally reached a tipping point playing whack-a-mole with injuries here and there. I knew something was fundamentally wrong with my approach to fitness and injury prevention and my increasingly sedentary lifestyle. This book provides a clear and comprehensive overview of the most common causes of injury and the cellular biology of connective tissue healing (and how we can work with it to optimize healing and fortify our joints), along with a catalogue of movements and exercises together with a training routine that is easy to follow. I no longer have to frantically scrape the web for fragmented fitness information and can now turn to this book as a lifelong reference. It has fundamentally changed the way I think about my body.

When we are serious about the body response with movement - injury - return to exercise or just learning many and varied technical aspects of structure and form, this book has loads of photos and references that help explain the reasons behind the injuries and how to recover with confidence. Worth referring to over and over.

Ich habe eine umfassende Sport-Lektüre-Sammlung und dieses Buch zählt zu denen, von denen ich noch am meisten Neues lernen konnte. Den Ausführungen des Autors zufolge, habe ich vorher bereits das meiste richtig gemacht. Manche Dinge ist man sich aber nicht immer bewusst und sollte sich regelmäßig aktiv damit beschäftigen. Ich habe schon genug Menschen getroffen, die dieses Buch dringend lesen und einiges darin umsetzen sollten. Es ist tatsächlich auch eines der wenigen Bücher, die ich schon häufiger weiter empfohlen habe. Nicht jeder bräuchte ein Buchtipp für Kraftsport oder eine bestimmte Sportart - aber sehr viele Menschen haben irgendwelche körperlichen Beschwerden. Daher ist das Buch für eine breite Masse an Menschen geeignet. Sehr positiv bewerte ich auch die einfach gehaltene englische Sprache mit wenigen unnötigen Fachbegriffen. Daher lässt sich das Buch sehr flüssig lesen und gut verstehen.

ものすごくいい本。 あまり広く知られたくない。 でも早く邦訳を。 トレーニングで競技のパフォーマンスを高めて記録を伸ばすことよりも大切なこと。 それは怪我をしないこと。 パフォーマンスの高低にかかわらず、「良くない動き」というものがある。 特定の関節に負荷がかかる、ケガを誘発する動きである。 こうした動きを抱えていれば、どんなに鍛えて能力を向上させても、それは同時に故障やリタイヤの時期を早めていることになってしまう。 パフォーマンスが上がれば、身体への負担も大きくなるからである。 今は関節を保護するギヤなども発達しているので、悪化を遅らせることはできるかもしれない。 あるいは医療も進歩しているので、外科手術などによって再び競技に復帰できるかもしれない。 しかし、それらもけっして根本的解決にはならないだろう。 解決法はたった一つ、動き方そのものを変えるしかないのだ。 このことは、ともすると重要性を実感しづらい。 動き方を変えても、それがパフォーマンスに直結するとは限らないからだ。 しかし、運動すればするほど健康や日常生活を害しかねない現在の状況において、本書のような視点は貴重ではないだろうか。 特に、部活動など教育分野におけるスポーツ活動においては、今後こうした知識はいっそう不可欠になると思われる。 また、そうした裾野が広がることによって、日本におけるトップアスリートの競技寿命が延びるかも知れない。 才能豊かなトップ選手でも、若い頃からの運動履歴によって、何かしらの障害を抱えていたりするものである。 むしろ、そうした世界の方が問題は深刻かもしれない。 本書で具体的に説かれるのは、自重やゴムチューブ、ダンベル等を用いたエクササイズ、ストレッチの類である。 そうした動きの中で、自分の身体に染み付いた動作を改善していくのである。 詳しくは本書を参照されたい。 また、運動には代謝を高める効果があるので、ケガの回復も促進できるのだという。 既に非可逆的な障害を負ってしまったアスリートには効果がないかもしれないが、まだ痛みが慢性化しきっていない人にとって、本書は福音になると思われる。

If you really want to feel and look better, this book will show you how to do it! Thank you