In their outstanding book, Made to Stick, authors Chip and Dan Heath emphasize that a new idea will always be more readily accepted if it is incorporated into an individual’s existing schema. In an example I’ve used before here at EricCressey.com, if I give you the letters TICDGFASOH and then ask you to list all the letters I included to me 20 minutes later without writing them down, most of you won’t be able to accomplish the task correctly.

However, if I reordered those letters as CATDOGFISH, you’d accomplish the task easily. You know the words DOG, CAT, and FISH – so it would fit into your existing schema. I work to apply this same logic to how I educate my baseball players. With that in mind, here are five analogies I like to use as part of the long-term baseball development process.

1. Arm care is just like making bank deposits and withdrawals.

To me, every action you make with your arm either takes you closer to or further away from arm health.  Every time you do your arm care drills, get in a strength training session, do some soft tissue work, or get your arm stretched out (when appropriate), you’re making a deposit in your bank account. Each time you make a throw – especially off a mound – you’re making a withdrawal. If withdrawals exceed deposits over the course of a year, you’re likely going to go bankrupt (get injured).

2. Bad scapular positioning or scapulohumeral rhythm is like starting behind the starting line – or you’re backpedaling when the starting gun fires.

I’ve discussed the importance of scapular positioning and scapulohumeral rhythmic for throwers in the past – especially in our new resource, Functional Stability Training of the Upper Body. Here’s a video to bring you up to speed:

In this video, I talk about “ball and socket congruency.” In other words, the ball can’t ride up, and the socket can’t stay too low. I like to refer to neutral scapular resting position as the starting line. If you sit in too much downward rotation, you’re effectively setting up behind the starting line. In the photo below, the black line is where the medial border of his scapula should be at rest, and the red line is where it actually is.

Other folks may actually start in the correct position, but begin what should be upward rotation with an aberrant movement – such as a “yank” toward the midline (rhomboid dominance) or into scapular depression (lat dominance). These are the exact opposites of what you want to occur – which is upward rotation, or running toward the finish line.

3. Doing arm care drills with a faulty core recruitment pattern is like shooting a cannon from a canoe.

I always talk about how the spine and rib cage “deliver” the shoulder blade. You can do all the arm care drills in the world, but if you don’t know how to keep a stable core in place, you’ll never really put your shoulder girdle (or elbow, for that matter) in an ideal position to throw – and you certainly won’t effectively transfer force from your lower body. Here’s what a lot of athletes look like with their overhead reaching pattern:

Instead of getting good shoulder flexion and scapular upward rotation, they just go into lumbar (lower back) extension. When you see an aberrant movement pattern like this, you realize that it’s no surprise that some of the same underlying movement inefficiencies can contribute to upper extremity, core, and lower extremity injuries alike. It’s really just a matter of where an athlete breaks down first.

4. Committing to a college really early is like proposing to the first girl you ever date – and then letting her “shop around” for other dudes while you stay faithful.

This observation has less to do with the actual training process, but more to do with long-term management of an athlete. Why in the world does a freshman in high school need to be verbally committing to a college – especially when he can’t sign on the dotted line to officially commit until his senior year? If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s that we always look back on what we did 2-3 years earlier and laugh, as we realize how misdirected we were. I do it at age 33, and you can just imagine how much faster an impressionable teenage athlete can acquire new views on the world.

It’s fine to take your time and see what’s out there – and any coach that pressures a freshman or sophomore to commit so young is probably not a person for whom you’d like to play. And, 99% of the time, that offer is still going to be on the table 6-18 months down the road in spite of the false deadlines they throw on you.

Finally, as an “in the know” friend reminded me the other day, don’t forget that even if you verbally commit to a school, they’re still out there trying to “date” other athletes. If they can find someone who they think is a better prospect than you are, they’ll drop you like yesterday’s newspaper. The ethical coaches don’t do this, but it is nonetheless still a sad part of college sports. With that in mind, it’s okay to go on “dates” with different schools and take your time in finding the one that’s right for you.

Side note: if you’re looking to be a more informed consumer with respect to the college recruiting process, give this a read: 25 Questions to Ask During the College Recruiting Process.

5. Stretching a loose shoulder is like picking a scab; it feels good for a bit, but only makes things uglier over the long haul.

There are a lot of hypermobile (lose-jointed) pitchers out there. It’s often a big part of what makes them successful, but it comes at a cost: increased injury risk, if they don’t stay on top of their stability training.

 

What they often lose sight of, though, is the fact that it’s just as important to avoid creating instability as it is to train for stability. In other words, continually stretching a hypermobile joint is likely even worse than just leaving out your strength work. The former reduces passive stability, whereas the latter just doesn’t improve active stability.

The problem is that a lot of loose-jointed players feel “tight” – and it’s usually because they lay down trigger points to make up for their lack of stability. The stretching feels good in the short term, but the trigger point comes back stronger and stronger each time – until you’re eventually dealing with a torn anterior (shoulder) capsule or ulnar collateral ligament. Eventually, reducing the passive stability leads to a pathology – just like picking that scab eventually leads to an infection or scar.

Speaking of training baseball players, we recently announced that registration is open for our Elite Baseball Development summer program at Cressey Sports Performance. For more information, click here.

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