Built From Broken: A Science-Based Guide to Healing Painful Joints, Preventing Injuries, and Rebuilding Your Body
4.6 | 4,674 ratings
Price: 15.75
Last update: 01-18-2026
Top reviews from the United States
- ASThe Smarter Way to Build Strength That LastsBuilt 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. - Gregory BrylskiComprehensive, recommended reading for strength training (experienced, or inexperienced, or injured)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. - KariOCompletr information for healing joint.sIt looks very informative but too complicated for me . It was full of drawings and illustrations.
- MikeWide open reference that lays flat so you can pump up!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.
- Randell TocholkeVery good bookVery good information for someone looking to fix imbalances with corrective exercises
- Kevin HatchResonates with my Fitness JourneyFirst 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.