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I guess I'm joining in the discount madness this holiday season, even if I didn't have to do any planning! Here are some options for your holiday shopping at EricCressey.com:
1. Whip: What it is and How You Get it - This was a presentation I did a while back at Ron Wolforth's Pitching Coaches Bootcamp, and it's now available for sale individually. In the presentation, I talk about factors the influence whether you increase throwing velocity and how strength and conditioning programs can have a dramatic impact - either positive or negative - on whether one develops the whip needed to throw harder. You can either watch this online or get it as a DVD.
2. 20% off all Physical Products at MikeReinold.com - This sale includes Functional Stability Training and Optimal Shoulder Performance, along with many of Mike Reinold's other products. Just enter the coupon code BLACKFRIDAY2012 at checkout to get the discount.
3. 15% of all Products at RobertsonTrainingSystems.com - This sale includes Assess and Correct, Building the Efficient Athlete, and Magnificent Mobility, along with many other products from Mike Robertson. The discount will automatically be applied at checkout.
We don't put products on sale very often, so be sure to take advantage of these offers before they expire at the end of the day on Monday!
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| Back in December, I was honored to be included as one of several speakers who presented at Ron Wolforth's 2009 Ultimate Pitching Coaches Bootcamp. As was the case in previous years, it was a great event that brought together a lot of forward-thinking minds from various roles in the pitching world. Today, I'm happy to announce that I've arranged for a sweet deal on the DVDs of the event for my readers only.
Since I was a presenter and Ron's a good friend of mine, he agreed to let me make the DVDs available to my readers at $50 off the normal purchase price. All you need to do is click through the following link, and the discount will automatically be applied at checkout:
https://m130.infusionsoft.com/go/UPCBC2009/EC/
My presentation, Whip: What it is and how to get it, lasted 75 minutes and covered:
-The stretch-shortening cycle: what it means to pitchers and how to get the most out of it
-How different pitchers throw hard via different mechanical, flexibility, and strength/power factors
-How to identify and address mobility and stability deficits in pitchers
I also gave a 30-minute hands-on session on foam rolling for pitchers.
In addition, there were several other fantastic, informative - and sometimes controversial - presentations from Phil Donley, Neiman Nix, Wes Johnson, Brent Strom, Flint Wallace, Aaron Weintraub, and, of course, Ron Wolforth. I love the fact that this event always covers everything from physical therapy/injury prevention, to physical preparation, to mental preparation, to mechanics, to structuring practices, to pitch sequencing.
Fortunately, the 150 coaches in attendance aren't the only ones who will get to experience this event, as the entire weekend was recorded.
So, whether you coach, rehabilitate, or train baseball athletes, this is a great resource that you'll find yourself looking back to for years to come. I know I put a ton of time into my presentation and did my best to load as much information into it as possible - so you have my word that it'll be worth it.
Here's the link again:
https://m130.infusionsoft.com/go/UPCBC2009/EC/ |
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| Today, we've got another great guest post from Matt Blake.
"If I embark on a voyage of exploration, and I set as my goals the willingness to follow any lead, pursue any interesting observation, overcome any difficulties, and I end up in some exotic locale that might be very different from my predictions before setting out, have I changed my destination in any way? I would say not; the sine qua non of science is not the conclusions we reach but the process we use to arrive at them, and that is the polestar by which we navigate."
-PZ Myers, Biologist, University of Minnesota
One might ask why the heck a pitching coach is leading off his article on a fitness expert's blog with a quote from a biologist, and how it would have any relevance to the topic at hand. Where could this possibly be going?
Well, I recently attended the American Baseball Coaches Association "Hot Stove" Pitching Discussion in Dallas, Texas on January 10th with about 200-300 coaches from all over the country. And, I would say that this notion was the overriding theme to take away from the event.
This "Hot Stove" pitching discussion was part of the bigger national convention that takes place every year. This event provided an outstanding forum for people to hear some leading thinkers in baseball discuss pitching in an informal public setting. Some of the notable attendees of this event were Tom House, Alan Jaeger, Brent Strom, and Derek Johnson. For those of you who are unfamiliar with these names, I'll give you a brief description of each.
Tom House is a former major leaguer, former major league pitching coach, and is regarded as one of the great modern day pitching gurus and currently coaches at the University of Southern California.
Alan Jaeger runs Jaegersports.com and has an outstanding understanding of long toss, arm care and how it should be applied to your player's development.
Brent Strom is a former major leaguer, is an instructor in the St. Louis Cardinals system, and teams up with Ron Wolforth to run the Ultimate Pitching Coaches Bootcamp every year. They also run some outstanding Elite Pitcher Bootcamps during the summer. These two presented early in the weekend and are proponents of the "Blending" and "Chunking" theories and advocate for training pitchers through the use of athletic and aggressive throwing drills.
Derek Johnson is currently the Pitching Coach at Vanderbilt University and is regarded as one of the premier pitching coaches in the country. Producing ten drafted pitchers (including three first-rounders) over the last three years will usually do that.
Honestly, this is just a handful of people in a room that included dozens of D1/D2/D3 pitching coaches, as well as numerous outstanding high school coaches, but these guys really stand out with their contributions to the pitching community's knowledge base.
Tom House did his part by speaking to the crowd about the importance of being able to accept new ideas that run counter to your current train of thought. He brought up an interesting point regarding the need to be strong enough to change your positions and adapt your training methods as the information presented to you deems necessary. This is not too far from what you see happening on the strength and conditioning front every day. If I remember correctly, it wasn't too long ago that Mike Boyle questioned the value of the almighty squat. Who would have thunk it? This is a great example of a man following a process of logical thought to create his own philosophy even if it runs counter to much of the traditional thought. You don't need to agree with him on this, as we still use a lot of squatting variations at Cressey Performance, but based on his interpretation of the research, this is what he thought gave him the best value in the risk/reward category for his athletes.
On the baseball side, this idea was none more evident than when Tom House was challenged about the effectiveness of the towel drill and admitted he was wrong about this drill in its original form. This drill has been a staple in many pitching coaches' dry work for years. In coming to understand where the towel drill was lacking, Tom has recently changed the weight of the implement in the drill from 2 oz to 5/6/7oz depending on the training intentions. This essentially changed the deceleration demands to be more similar to a baseball and worked to counter the argument at hand, by letting everyone know, that as science has progressed he has needed to adapt his training methods.
One of the other important topics that House brought up was the need to understand the science behind the overhead throw. If we expect to train players at the highest level, we need to know what is actually happening in the body. By incorporating information relating to a player's "Kinematic Sequence," one is more apt to see where players are either efficient or inefficient in creating energy and delivering force to the ball. Understanding the sequencing of the body's rotations is essential to getting the timing of the delivery right and avoiding stressful mechanic flaws.
The way he phrased it may or may not have gone over a lot of coaches' heads and split the camp into science-based vs. common sense/feel coaches. But, I obviously believe Tom is right on this point or I wouldn't spend my waking life in Eric's facility. On the flip side, I can also understand where coaches who do not naturally gravitate to the analytical style would find other ways to communicate this information than the technical jargon House used. At the end of the day, your players either understand what you're saying or they don't. If they don't, you need to come back to their level of thought before they tune you out.
Along these lines, one of the points I strongly agree with Tom on is the need to look at the golf industry and how advanced their level of instruction is in the private sector. Greg Rose and the people of the Titleist Performance Institute are doing some great things on the technology front, as far as analyzing swings and doing physical assessments to improve golf technique. Obviously, this is a different beast with the way their market dynamics have been established, but there is enough money within the baseball industry to start dedicating some of our resources to making sure we have the best information available to the general public. The rate at which players are getting injured because people are simply uninformed is not okay in this supposed "Information Age."
One of the refreshing things to see is that people are at least beginning to recognize that we can't be so rigid in our approach to training pitchers. We are just now leaving an era where we thought we had all the answers and we could box up our pitchers to 90 degree angles and call it a day. Funny that injuries are up at nearly every level of the game from little league to the Pros, so obviously something isn't working. With that said, I'll leave you with one last short story that Tom House provided us at the convention. It has do with a time when he was coaching Nolan Ryan on the Texas Rangers. Nolan credits a lot of his success later on in his career due to the physical shape Coach House got him in. Obviously, this is a second-hand retelling of a story, so I'll leave it up to Tom to come over to Ericcressey.com and correct me in the comments section, but I think you'll get the gist.
As many of you know, Coach House is famous for really being a pioneer on the biomechanical analysis front. One day, House was attempting to talk to Nolan Ryan about his famously high leg kick, by letting him know that it might make more sense to bring his leg kick down a bit and get himself a little more under control. In Nolan Ryan's Texan drawl, he calmly responded, "Tom, with all due respect sir... I understand you know a lot about the game, but if there's one thing I know.... It's that the higher I lift my leg here, the harder I'm gonna throw this baseball. So you can go ahead and stick that in your computer of yours." And if that doesn't bring this discussion full circle, I'm not quite sure what will.
In the end, I think as important as it is to follow the research, it is just as important to let the common sense/feel aspects drive the questions being researched. Obviously, science is continuously digging deeper, but if we don't listen to our athletes, we may be digging in the wrong places. Like I've said before, the athlete throws the baseball, so giving them the necessary information and letting them find their own signature style with it is essential to their development.
Matt Blake can be reached at mablak07@gmail.com.
Related Posts
A New Model for Training Between Starts: Part 1
Philosophizing from Goliath's Shoulders
A Baseball Training Interview with Eric Cressey
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used by Cressey Performance Pitchers after they Throw!
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| It's been a while since my last dose of Friday Randomness, but when you're got so much intern hazing going on, it's hard to even imagine topping that kind of content!
1. I recently contributed to another T-Muscle feature; check out Advice You Don't Want to Hear: Volume 2 for a little dose of tough love. I'm the last one down.
2. I have to say, I'm pretty proud of myself. My fiancee's been out of town since Monday morning, and while the fridge is just about empty and I'm down to one pair of clean underwear, the place didn't burn down, and I didn't put an eye out.
3. Here's a quick takeaway from a great Elbow Biomechanics talk by Mike Reinold earlier this week...
Obviously, in dealing with loads of baseball guys, I see a lot of elbow issues come through my door. The overwhelming majority of those folks are medial elbow pain, but we also see a fair amount of lateral elbow pain - even though we program for these individuals very similarly, as their inefficiencies are pretty much identical. I've seen it in practice, but never actually gotten the numbers on the forces involved.
The same medial tensile force that can wreak havoc with an ulnar collateral ligament or ulnar nerve also applies approximately 500N on the radioulnar joint during the late cocking (maximum external rotation) phase of throwing; that's about one-third of the total stress on the elbow. This lateral area also takes on about 800N of force at the moment arm deceleration begins (elbow extended out in front). As always, a picture is worth a thousand words:
I always knew it was going on, and always worked to prevent problems in the area, but suffice it to say that it was nice to get some numbers on this. If you see these issues, you've obviously got to look at mechanics, but more importantly, tissue quality, all the common flexibility deficits we see in pitchers, and overall strength of the rotator cuff, scapular stabilizers, core, lower body, and muscles acting at the elbow to provide valgus stability. For more information, I highly recommend you check out the 2008 Ultimate Pitching Coaches Boot Camp DVD set.
4. Bill, Mike, and I film our new DVD next weekend out in Indianapolis, so I'm going to end this one here and get to work on finishing up the script. Stay tuned on this front; we are excited about how thorough this is.
Have a great weekend!
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