Habits and Hustle
Episode 452: Henry Abbott on Misogi - The Extreme Challenge With a 50% Chance of Failure
Fri, 23 May 2025
Could your brain be the only barrier to achieving incredible feats? In this episode on the Habits and Hustle podcast, I talk with Henry Abbott about Misogi - an annual challenge so intense you believe you have only a 50% chance of completing it. We discuss how these epic challenges can rewire your brain to overcome perceived limitations. We also discuss why movement is crucial for pain management, how our brains (not our bodies) create most of our limitations, and why stepping far outside your comfort zone once a year might be the key to unlocking your hidden potential. Henry Abbott is an award-winning journalist and founder of TrueHoop, a respected basketball media platform. 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: How movement rewires the brain to overcome perceived limitations and pain Misogi and its spread among NBA players The Harvard Fatigue Lab's findings on human physiological limits Finding the balance between boldness and foolishness in physical challenges Thank you to our sponsor: Therasage: Head over to therasage.com and use code Be Bold for 15% off TruNiagen: Head over to truniagen.com and use code HUSTLE20 to get $20 off any purchase over $100. Magic Mind: Head over to www.magicmind.com/jen and use code Jen at checkout. Air Doctor: Go to 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, code Jennifer20 for 20% off. Momentous: Shop this link and use code Jen for 20% off David: Buy 4, get the 5th free at 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
Chapter 1: What is Misogi and how can it challenge you?
Welcome to Fitness Friday. Today I'm joined by journalist Henry Abbott to explore Misogi, which is a powerful practice where you take on a challenge so tough there's only a 50% chance you'll finish. Think underwater 5Ks with rocks. or nine-hour paddleboard treks through sharky waters.
We also talk about the science behind mental limits, Henry's journey through chronic pain, and why pushing to the edge might be exactly what you need to break through. So let's dive in. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to thank our sponsor, Momentus. on NSF certification, which means every single batch is tested for heavy metals, harmful additives, and label accuracy.
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Do you know about Misogi?
I do.
Do you know where it comes from?
Isn't it like, yeah, I do. Do you know?
It comes from this guy. This comes from Marcus.
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Chapter 2: How does pushing boundaries rewire the brain?
very intense and they were going to pack almost nothing and catch what they were going to eat and deal with altitude by just being tough and like 10 minutes in that's a slight exaggeration garth gets altitude sickness has to go home so then but he's been the lead up he's been talking to marcus about how he does all these martial arts and there's this like shinto tradition
of Misogi, where you do, as Garth explained it, which is not totally accurate with the Shinto tradition, but you once a year, you do a challenge that's so intense that you think you're only 50% likely to make it. And so Marcus latched onto it as this idea of a way to get into your capabilities that are beyond what you think they could be. We're held back by our brain a lot of times, right?
A lot of the times, even in like breath holding, you get this panicky feeling you have to breathe long before you need oxygen, right? So you want to defeat that a little bit. And so they've done crazy things. One of the ones was run a 5K on the ocean floor carrying a rock. So if we were partners,
i would drop the rock it's like they do it in like the channel islands so like 10 feet deep under the waves drop the rock on the ground and then you dive down and pick it up and run as far as you can and then drop it and then i swim down pick it up run as far as i can and they do a 5k or they they paddleboarded from the channel islands to santa barbara
which is nine hours of wind and sharks and craziness. Nine hours. Or they climbed the height. Actually, most of them failed this one. They arranged to climb the height of Mount Everest in, I think it's called the U.S. Bancor Tower in L.A. Is that what it's called? Something like that. But a skyscraper.
A skyscraper. What's the point? So this idea, why did he do the idea of doing this Misogi? Yeah. Yeah. It was basically picking one thing a year that you're doing that is something that you think you have a 50% chance of actually completing basically. It's like a super hard challenge.
Yeah.
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Chapter 3: What are the extreme challenges associated with Misogi?
What's the purpose of it?
The purpose of it is to shut your brain up when it tells you you can't do something. The purpose of it is to show your brain. Movement is actually interesting in rewiring your brain in terms of limits and also pain. If you have chronic pain, which is a big topic in the book too, because it's the reason why a lot of us don't move like we want to,
uh i talked to this awesome pain expert rachel zoffness who explains basically like the way that you convince your body it can do something where like it's sending pain signals is carefully progressing through more movement right the movement sends the signal back like no we're okay doing this so in doing a misogi you're you're telling your body like
you might feel like we can't paddleboard for nine hours, but I'm telling you we can. I'm showing you we can. We're going to feel that we can. And once you've finished that, you kind of have this self-regard where you're like, maybe I can do anything.
It's the concept of doing hard things to show and prove to yourself that you can do hard things. So it gives you the confidence to do something again or different.
And they used to have this thing called the Harvard Fatigue Lab around World War II where they would just abuse people and see how much they could,
take right and they found there's almost no physiological limits like people can deal with like insane amounts of heat or cold or you know dehydration or whatever like they just like can't really find the limits are in our brain so i mean this this is where it sounds like kind of trippy but like in writing this and i went to this research like every animal that flies used to not fly which means there was like a first one to fly like
That is trippy, huh?
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Chapter 4: What role does movement play in overcoming pain?
How badass is that?
Right.
And they just like one day an animal was like, hey, I'm going to try to fly. I got this. And then they just started flying.
And I think about the lemmings, right? It's like they're all trying, right? They're all just like, maybe I got it. Maybe I got it. That's so true.
Like maybe one day one of them will. So can one day a human could just try to fly? Why don't you just go outside and try to fly? Have you tried?
People have those skin suits. They're getting closer, you know?
You think so?
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of the Harvard Fatigue Lab's findings?
I mean, I don't know, but I'm not going to tell them they can't, right? I'm going to leave that up to them.
Do you think humans are going to be able to fly one day?
Not soon, but... But if animals can do it. There are things that used to be fish that fly now. You know what I mean?
Like what?
I mean, we all evolved from little sea creatures, I think. That's true. That's true.
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Chapter 6: Can doing hard things improve self-confidence?
Yeah, I guess I just... It's limitless to what we can actually achieve.
And there's this great study about, like, you can see on an MRI in the brain, like, a little thing that happens when a thing starts to fly. Like, when the first dinosaur started to fly, the skull got a little different to accommodate, like, this little new brain activity. I gotta use this for my research. Yeah, yeah, there's an idea.
When a pigeon flies, that same little part of the skull has this little extra activity of whatever they have to do to fly. I'm guessing that the first step in humans flying would be that in our brain. We're flying. This is the to me is like, you can change your brain.
You know, they can put a freaking, I don't know why they chose this thing, but they, like an owl can only survive if it catches mice and stuff, right? And that's why its eyes are like way bigger than ours. Like 30% of their head is eye. And they have better eyes than we do.
But they would put like basically goggles or lenses on the owl so that it was seeing the whole world through a prism and it was like totally screwed up. Now they can't survive, right? But it would take them like two, three days to learn how to catch a mouse looking through that crazy mess. Because they just like learned a new language. They learned a new way to do it, right? Wow.
And that's like only survival will give you that like crazy burst of learning, right? And I feel like this is what the Musogi is touching a little bit is like maybe we can do way more than we thought.
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Chapter 7: How do our mental limits affect physical performance?
So is the idea that this place tells people that they need to choose and pick a Misogi every year so they can then not feel limited by anything and get rid of limited beliefs of themselves?
Great question. So you know how I said this is kind of like learning language. And there's like the two ways, right? There's like drilling with your teacher doing vocab drills. And then there's like, just move to Quito and see if you can speak Spanish, right? So in the lab, you know, you pay them, whatever, that's going to be the vocab part.
That's where they're going to assess you and watch you and coach you. Like the outside the lab part is not part of the paid service, right? This is just like, that's how Marcus lives his life. And a lot of his
friends and some a lot of the nba you know kyle corver was an nba player for a long time he and marcus became like best friends and that's kind of how misogi got out into the world because um there was an outside magazine article about kyle doing his first time with marcus i don't know like 10 15 years ago and so there's like this you know that that knowledge is out there marcus does it all every year he does misogi and i think if you want to you know yeah his recommendation is somewhere out in nature not something you practice
with friends and not something that's like easily measured. So it's fun to have a kind of amorphous like we're going to go from here to there or from that mountain to that mountain or whatever it is. But the problem is, if it's something you practice, then you're going to be thinking the whole time about well, I know I can run this mile pace and this many miles and blah, blah, blah.
He wants you to think like, Kyle Korver had never been on a paddle board before in his life when he first started to paddle from the Channel Islands, which means his brain is massively expansive. Wow.
What am I doing? That's so scary.
It's so scary. At some point someone dropped a chicken burrito in the water and they thought they were going to have shark attack. And then like there was a, I don't know what a sunfish looks like, but I guess it has a fin that looks like a shark. And they all like freaked out because there was this like fin in the water.
So he did a paddleboard without ever doing one before. Yeah. That's so dangerous though too. Isn't there like a, like there's a fine line between being bold and being stupid. Yeah.
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