Tom Brady may well be the greatest NFL player of all time. He already possesses or shares a host of quarterback records – career wins, Super Bowl wins, career playoff touchdowns – and if he continues to play as long as he has hinted, he may finish his career owning them all.

But while Brady has it all, his attempt to pass on his performance secrets in his book, The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance, falls flat and contains all sorts of dubious claims. The overall message of the book should be commended — the importance of nutrition, rest, mental exercise and injury prevention — but the roadmap to get there isn’t, to say the least, universally endorsed. Bomani Jones, in a recent episode of his ESPN Radio show The Right Time, called it a “multilevel marketing scheme, without the multilevels.”

Of course, this isn’t just about Brady, it’s also about the difficulty of using anything that a professional athlete does for individual performance gain. Likely the things that make Brady look great, perform better and remain injury-free, can’t be packaged up and universally used.

“The gist of this is that if I were to write a book on how to play quarterback at the highest level, people would rightly laugh,” says Keith Baar, a muscle physiology researcher at the University of California, Davis. “Everyone thinks that they are an expert in fitness if they are fit.”

Let’s take a closer look at some of Brady’s claims in The TB12 Method.

1) What Brady says: “These days, even if I get an adequate amount of sun, I won’t get a sunburn, which I credit to the amount of water I drink.”

What the doctor says: Though Brady refrains from giving specific advice about sun exposure, the passage suggests that hydration is a replacement for sun protection. Dr Sarah Arron, a dermatologist and leader of UCSF’s high risk skin cancer program, believes that the young Brady could very well have experienced more sunburns than the 40-year old Brady, but not for the reason he contends.

“Young children – like the young, fair-skinned Tom Brady mentioned in the book –are more sensitive to the sun but after years of exposure the skin can harden or become more resistant to sunburn,” says Arron. “But it’s a fallacy to believe that if you don’t get sunburn you aren’t damaging the DNA in the skin.” The UV light responsible for burns (UVB) isn’t the same as the one that can lead to skin damage and cancer (UVA), making sunburn a poor indicator for long-term harm.

Arron stresses that a resistance to sunburn has nothing to do with how much water you drink, rather the skin hardening that can come with age and repeated sun exposure. Her assertion is that everyone, especially young athletes that frequently practice and play in the sun, should protect their skin against too much sun exposure.

2) What Brady says: “Alkaline or neutral ash helps the body thrive, whereas eating too many acidifying foods leads to a condition called acidosis, which makes the body more prone to infections, colds, flu, low energy, fatigue, sore muscles, joint pain, hip fractures, bone spurs, poor concentration, and mood swings.”

What the scientist says: “What you eat doesn’t affect blood pH,” says Stacy Sims, an exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist. “But the foods he promotes to eat on an more alkaline diet are beneficial to overall health because they are primarily veggies, fruits, and low processed foods.” Sims explains that while the body’s pH can drop – a condition termed metabolic acidosis that’s brought on by illness or breathing difficulty – it can’t be corrected by nutrition.

3) What Brady says: “I also want to make sure my body remains in a state of recovery even at night. I do this by wearing bioceramic-infused functional apparel and sleepwear. The advantages? It increases energy, promotes recovery, and improves performance. If my opponents aren’t wearing what I wear, I’m getting the edge on them even when I’m sleeping.”

What the scientist says: While seemingly an encouragement to go out and invest $200 on the Under Armour/TB12 pajamas, there is some evidence, albeit inconclusive about bioceramic infused sleepwear and performance, that the technology might have a positive effect. Bioceramics, a compound that can absorb the body’s heat and reflect back something called far infrared energy, have been shown to have therapeutic effects on aspects of health. The 2012 Harvard led review study cited as evidence by Under Armour concludes: “If it can be proved that … FIR (far infrared energy) has real and significant biological effects, then the possible future applications are wide ranging.”

Tom Brady is now in his 18th season - the average player lasts around two-and-a-half. Photograph: Reinhold Matay/USA Today Sports

Stanford sleep researcher Cheri Mah believes that Brady is on the right track with his approach (nine hours of sleep per night) to sleep and recovery. “Striving for nine hours of sleep/night for elite athletes is within the expert recommendations (eight to 10 hours).

“Brady has previously commented on how he is diligent with the timing of his sleep (going to bed at 8.30pm) and optimizing his sleep quality with his sleep environment.”

4) What Brady says: “Our muscle cells can either resemble soft soap bubbles or hard glass bubbles. When you’re dehydrated, your muscle cells are more likely to take on the look and consistency of hard glass bubbles. You can drink a gallon of water, but unless it has electrolytes in it, the water molecules won’t be able to pass into and out of the fluid compartments in your body. The more electrolytes your body has, the more easily water is able to penetrate your muscles.”

What the scientist says: “The dissemination he has put in his book is a misstep and myth spun on true physiology,” says Sims. “Sodium and potassium (electrolytes) are required to transport water into cells, but it is all cells, not just muscle cells. Intestinal cells have additional requirements to get fluid across, glucose (sugar) is needed as well as sodium.”

5) What Brady says: “Keeping my muscles pliable and soft keeps me from injury. With pliability acting as a form of the body’s defense system against external forces, I believe many of those ‘inevitable’ injuries could be avoided. A simple way to think about it is that strength training, playing sports, and working out create denser muscles. And the denser muscles are, the more pliability they need.”

What the scientist says: The general principle, “that stiffness promotes injury” is correct says Keith Baar, a muscle physiology researcher at the University of California, Davis. “However, the stiffness that promotes injury is found within the tendon more than the muscle. If the stiffness of the tendon is greater than the muscle is strong you will pull the muscle as you sprint, jump or brake.”

The fast movements found in light weight strength training and playing sports do stiffen the tendons. “The problem for athletes is that the increase in stiffness to improve performance does increase the risk for injury,” emphasizes Baar. “For a veteran athlete, staying injury free is the key, at a different point of a career, a player may focus more on performance.”

6) What Brady says: “Chronically inflamed muscles are working in a suboptimal state and are more resistant to lengthening and softening.”

What the scientist says: “I think that this statement is confusing swelling with inflammation. Swelling is when there is an increase in fluid in the muscle. Inflammation is when the immune system is more active and produces signals that can cause swelling, but it can have other important functions as well,” says Baar.

The effects of these inflammatory signals can vary, stresses Baar, making inflammation hard to generalize as “bad”. Some inflammatory products are absolutely essential to improving muscle function, while others can cause muscles to waste away and atrophy.