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.