In Ballistic, Henry Abbott takes a deep dive into the pioneering world of P3, a performance center run by sports scientist Dr. Marcus Elliott, where elite athletes don’t just train—they get analyzed like fighter jets. If you're the kind of person who watches slow-motion replays of dunks or marvels at the efficiency of a perfect stride, this book will speak your language.

Abbott is at his best when he’s narrating the origin story of P3, blending NBA data journalism with the fervor of a lifelong amateur athlete. He brings you into the room with scientists and players, breaking down how things like leaping and landing—ballistic movements, the kind that make your joints nervous—might actually be the secret sauce to staying injury-free. The idea that explosive, high-impact movements can prevent injury seems counterintuitive, and that’s what makes it so compelling.

And the science is compelling. Like, Minority Report-meets-physical-therapy compelling. P3 can predict injuries before they happen, using an arsenal of data and tech that reads like a Marvel origin story for your hamstrings. Abbott builds the case that most injuries aren't bad luck or freak accidents—they’re predictable consequences of how we move, how we train, and what we ignore.

That said, I kept waiting for the book to shift gears into something more actionable. I was hungry for more than insight—I wanted tools. After being dazzled by P3’s ability to pinpoint micro-imbalances and make NBA veterans move like rookies, I was left wondering: what about the rest of us? There’s no appendix with a DIY ballistic warm-up, no flowchart for tweaking your squat mechanics. Maybe that's not Abbott’s mission here, but it left me feeling a bit like someone shown the keys to a Ferrari—only to be told I couldn’t drive it.

Still, there’s no denying that Ballistic changes how you see movement. It reframes injury not as a risk of doing too much, but as the consequence of not doing the right kind of hard. The takeaway? The couch won’t save you—and neither will the elliptical.

If you've ever found yourself rehabbing the same injury over and over, or wondering why your PRs come with a side of physical therapy, this book offers a provocative answer: “You’re training wrong, and your body’s been trying to tell you.”

For me, this was a solid 3-star read: fascinating science, strong narrative drive in the first half, but lacking the practical translation I hoped for. I’d recommend it to coaches, trainers, and sports science fanatics—but if you’re an everyday athlete looking for your next training guide, you may be left with more questions than answers.

Thanks to W. W. Norton & Company for providing me with an Advance Copy for review.

Ballistic is ultimately a story about the science of prevention - prevention of injuries we can experience from movement, that is. Abbott, an NBA data journalist and amateur athlete, follows Dr. Marcus Elliott and the Peak Performance Project (P3) team as they work through some of their innovative methods for identifying and fixing injuries before they happen. This largely focuses on examining leaping and landing - how these movements effect the body, how the body handles impacts, how the body affects the environment prior to or just following these movements, and so on. While most readers won't have access to the same machine learning systems, devices, or spreadsheets at P3, Abbott does still give many examples of how we can move our own bodies - along with artistic renderings - in our own homes. Throughout this book he also draws heavily on elite athletes from a large variety of sports, focusing on their narratives and relationships with injury and recovery.

I'm usually not big on non-fiction sports books, but if you make it about sports medicine then now you've got this clinician and runner's attention! I really enjoyed how Abbott connected the topic to real athletes and real stories, as it would have been all too easy to just focus in on the hard science of sports medicine and treat this topic more like an exercise (pun unintended!) than a learning opportunity. The book also felt appropriately geared to its audience - a general public who nonetheless has preexisting knowledge of sports and the athletes in those sports. The only critical thing I'd want to raise is that the title of the book, and parts of the blurb (depending on which retailer you look at), gives expectations I'm not certain are captured by the book itself. By this I mean it at first appears like it'll be more of a wide scope of research, but in reality it's focused on the P3 team's specific research and practices. This, unfortunately, did make it feel a little like an advertisement at times rather than a full science/medicine book.