We’re excited to welcome Cressey Sports Performance - Florida associate pitching coordinator Matt Ellmyer to this week’s podcast for an in-depth discussion on how we evaluate the most important pitch in baseball: the fastball. Matt discusses the evolution of fastball usage in the game today, and highlights key metrics utilized to measure its effectiveness. Finally, he covers what pitch characteristics beyond just velocity that pitchers can develop to optimize their fastballs.
This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. It’s an all-in-one superfood supplement with 75 whole-food sourced ingredients designed to support your body’s nutrition needs across 5 critical areas of health: 1) energy, 2) immunity, 3) gut health, 4) hormonal support, and 5) healthy aging. Head to www.AthleticGreens.com/cressey and claim my special offer today - 10 FREE travel packs (valued at $79) - with your first purchase. I use this product daily myself and highly recommend it to our athletes as well. I'd encourage you to give it a shot, too - especially with this great offer.
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Today's guest post comes from Cressey Sports Performance - Florida coach, Dylan Lidge.
The ability to access hip extension while the opposite hip flexes is crucial in sprinting, throwing, hitting, and a myriad of other athletic endeavors. To ensure true hip extension, the heel, knee, pelvis, rib cage and head need to be stacked. Here are few dynamic ways to challenge hip extension in a warm-up.
Side-Lying Hip Extension Iso Holds to Wall - You should be able to draw a straight line from the bottom knee to the ear. Keep full foot contact onto the wall. Aim for a 30 second hold.
DB Goblet Hip Flexion End-Range Lift-offs - The goblet load keeps the athlete in a stacked position and is a great way to get the core activated. The athlete should “push the floor” under them and “stay tall” to ensure the glute extends the hip. Aim for a 5 second hold.
Arms Overhead High Knee March with Med Ball - The med ball challenges the athlete to go into hip extension and shoulder flexion without compensating. Control the pace for 15yds.
Split Squat Iso Hold - Back Heel Pressed to Wall - The back heel into the wall helps the athlete utilize their glute and hamstrings for hip extension. Hold for 30 seconds.
2-arm KB Racked High Knee March - Cue the athlete to exhale at the top of each rep. The kettlebells challenge the athlete to establish good core stiffness in a stacked position. Perform 8 reps on each side.
About the Author
Dylan Lidge serves as a Strength and Conditioning Coach at Cressey Sports Performance - Florida. Prior to joining the staff, Dylan completed an internship at CSP-FL in the summer of 2020. He graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a B.S. in Kinesiology. He is currently studying at the University of Illinois-Chicago for his MS in Kinesiology with a concentration in Biomechanics. At UIC he holds a position as a teacher's assistant in an exercise technique course, as well as an instructor for a personal fitness course. In 2019, he interned with the UIC Strength and Conditioning staff assisting with the baseball team. Dylan has coached baseball at the collegiate, high school, and youth levels.
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We’re excited to welcome Duke University head baseball coach Chris Pollard to this week’s podcast for a multi-faceted discussion that covers key coaching lessons, college recruiting advice, and establishing a framework for a championship culture. He also touched on how the transfer portal and Name-Image-Likeness developments are impacting where the college game is headed.
If you like what you hear, we'd be thrilled if you'd consider subscribing to the podcast and leaving us an iTunes review. You can do so HERE.
And, we welcome your suggestions for future guests and questions. Just email elitebaseballpodcast@gmail.com.
Thank you for your continued support!
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We're excited to welcome Examine.com editor Nick Milazzo to this week's podcast. In Nick's role, he scrutinizes research in the realm of health and human performance, specifically involving dietary supplements. Some of the observations in this interview will blow your mind and make you take a close look at the supplements you take and recommend.
In lieu of a sponsor for this podcast, I'm going to encourage you to check out Examine 2.0, the newly launched update to their flagship offering. Examine offers unbiased reviews of supplements with no conflicts of interest, distilling thousands of studies into actionable insights. They also include monthly updates of the latest research, helping you to stay on top of what's new in the industry (and get CEUs in the process). Through 8/25, you can get a big discount as one of my listeners at http://examine.news/cressey.
Podcast Feedback
If you like what you hear, we'd be thrilled if you'd consider subscribing to the podcast and leaving us an iTunes review. You can do so HERE.
And, we welcome your suggestions for future guests and questions. Just email elitebaseballpodcast@gmail.com.
Thank you for your continued support!
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Today's guest post comes from Cressey Sports Performance coach, Ethan Dyer.
The Bear Push-Up is an upper body movement we’ve been using with our athletes who struggle to find effective shoulder internal rotation and traditional protraction during push-ups from the floor or certain cable presses.
Generally, in throwers, we see the gradual loss of gross internal rotation over the course of a career and sometimes over the course of a season. This is largely due to bony adaptations (humeral retroversion), but also due to adaptations to the eccentric stress they encounter at the arm during a throw - especially on the mound. While a loss of external rotation in throwers is typically more problematic than a loss of internal rotation, really any loss of motion should be addressed - and this drill (as part of a comprehensive program) can help offset the gradual loss of IR we might see.
When we place the athlete in a position of flexion at the hip and knee, we’re pulling them away from what we’d traditionally think of as anterior pelvic tilt and gross extension. We’re giving them a better chance to capture some traditional flexion through their upper back in a way that should allow for as much internal rotation and protraction as possible through the press.
There’s even more value here - in wrist extension, some throwers lack the requisite internal rotation through their distal forearm and hand needed to perform effective push-ups from the ground. By using a barbell, we can mitigate this issue while simultaneously biasing additional internal rotation at the shoulders due to the pronated grip.
All of this comes together to make the bear push-up a great choice for throwers who need to drive a little more internal rotation at the shoulder, while getting in some pressing volume with an accessory-type movement. If your push-ups just don’t look right, or they struggle to find good scapular movement around the rib cage even when cued up, give these a shot. Depending on the rest of the day, you’re looking at 2-3 sets of 12-15 or something like 3-5 sets of 6-8.
About the Author
Ethan Dyer serves as a Strength & Conditioning coach at Cressey Sports Performance. He started as a client at CSP and eventually went on to intern at CSP-MA. Following another internship at Indianapolis Fitness and Sports Training, Ethan joined the CSP-MA team. He was a pitcher at the College of the Holy Cross before transferring to Endicott College to complete his undergraduate work with a major in Exercise Science and minor in Psychology. A Certified Strength and Conditioning Coach through the National Strength and Conditioning Association, Ethan has been a volunteer with both the Miracle League and Special Olympics, and has a passion for working with young athletes to help them fall in love with training while avoiding injury. You can follow him on Instagram at @Ethan___Dyer.
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I'm flying solo for this week's podcast, as I wanted to tackle a hot topic in modern professional sports: workload management. Make no mistake about it, though: this topic has a lot of applicability across all levels of baseball, from little league up to MLB. Before we get to it, though, a special thanks to this show's sponsor, Athletic Greens. Head to http://www.athleticgreens.com/cressey and you'll receive a free 10-pack of Athletic Greens travel packets with your first order.
Sponsor Reminder
This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. It’s an all-in-one superfood supplement with 75 whole-food sourced ingredients designed to support your body’s nutrition needs across 5 critical areas of health: 1) energy, 2) immunity, 3) gut health, 4) hormonal support, and 5) healthy aging. Head to www.AthleticGreens.com/cressey and claim my special offer today – 10 FREE travel packs – with your first purchase. I use this product daily myself and highly recommend it to our athletes as well. I’d encourage you to give it a shot, too – especially with this great offer.
Podcast Feedback
If you like what you hear, we'd be thrilled if you'd consider subscribing to the podcast and leaving us an iTunes review. You can do so HERE.
And, we welcome your suggestions for future guests and questions. Just email elitebaseballpodcast@gmail.com.
Thank you for your continued support!
Sign-up Today for our FREE Baseball Newsletter and Receive Instant Access to a 47-minute Presentation from Eric Cressey on Individualizing the Management of Overhead Athletes!
We welcome Los Angeles Angels pitcher Reid Detmers to this week’s podcast. Reid is one of the most talented young pitchers in the game today, and you'll quickly realize in listening to this podcast that it's no accident. He's taken a very calculated developmental path from which many players, coaches, and parents can learn. We discuss his transition from college to pro ball, how his pitch mix has evolved, and - of course - his recent no-hitter.
This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. It’s a NSF-certified all-in-one superfood supplement with 75 whole-food sourced ingredients designed to support your body’s nutrition needs across 5 critical areas of health: 1) energy, 2) immunity, 3) gut health, 4) hormonal support, and 5) healthy aging. Head to www.AthleticGreens.com/cressey and claim my special offer today - 10 FREE travel packs - with your first purchase. I use this product daily myself and highly recommend it to our athletes as well. I'd encourage you to give it a shot, too - especially with this great offer.
Podcast Feedback
If you like what you hear, we'd be thrilled if you'd consider subscribing to the podcast and leaving us an iTunes review. You can do so HERE.
And, we welcome your suggestions for future guests and questions. Just email elitebaseballpodcast@gmail.com.
Thank you for your continued support!
Sign-up Today for our FREE Baseball Newsletter and Receive Instant Access to a 47-minute Presentation from Eric Cressey on Individualizing the Management of Overhead Athletes!
We welcome strength and conditioning coach, author, and speaker Mike Robertson to this week’s podcast. Mike's a long-time friend from whom I've learned a ton, and in this chat, we discuss commonalities across all sports in terms of assessment, programming, and coaching. We talk about training young athletes, developing coaches, and the never-ending pursuit of "better" in a dynamic industry.
This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. It’s a NSF-certified all-in-one superfood supplement with 75 whole-food sourced ingredients designed to support your body’s nutrition needs across 5 critical areas of health: 1) energy, 2) immunity, 3) gut health, 4) hormonal support, and 5) healthy aging. Head to www.AthleticGreens.com/cressey and claim my special offer today - 10 FREE travel packs - with your first purchase. I use this product daily myself and highly recommend it to our athletes as well. I'd encourage you to give it a shot, too - especially with this great offer.
Podcast Feedback
If you like what you hear, we'd be thrilled if you'd consider subscribing to the podcast and leaving us an iTunes review. You can do so HERE.
And, we welcome your suggestions for future guests and questions. Just email elitebaseballpodcast@gmail.com.
Thank you for your continued support!
Sign-up Today for our FREE Baseball Newsletter and Receive Instant Access to a 47-minute Presentation from Eric Cressey on Individualizing the Management of Overhead Athletes!
About 15 years ago, I attended a two-day course with Dr. William Brady, a well respected chiropractor and manual therapist in the Boston area. During the event, he said this:
"Biomechanics is a combination of physics and biology. Put another way, it is the study of load applied to human tissue."
It was the most succinct and encompassing definition of biomechanics that I'd heard, so I frantically scribbled it down in my notes - and I've had it in the back of my mind to this day each time I've evaluated movement.
Assessments are very important. However, they're always limited in their scope, especially when an assessment is scaled back to a quicker "screen."
Just because someone has good passive range of motion on a table doesn't mean that they'll be able to pick that ROM up actively or demonstrate it in a weight-bearing athletic movement at higher speeds with higher forces.
Further, just because they look good at higher speeds with higher forces doesn't mean that there isn't an element of stress in the system that we can't appreciate.
And finally, that stress may be highly variable based on a wide variety of factors, both intrinsic (e.g., accumulated fatigue, growth spurts) and extrinsic (e.g., environmental conditions, terrain).
Tons of athletes can get to positions like this, but how many can do so safely - and repeatedly?
When I talk with athletes and review video, I always make sure that I'm discussing both positions and pressures. Range-of-motion is part of the discussion, but ground reaction forces and how we create stiffness via airflow/intra-abdominal pressure, neuromuscular recruitment, and the fascial system can't be overlooked.
This is why the industry-wide trend toward more comprehensive information gathering is invaluable. We've always had our classic orthopedic posture and ROM tests, usually paired with less-than-functional dynamometer strength measurements and some provocative tests to rule out the bad stuff. Now, though, we've got things like force plates to look at how we interact with the ground. And we've got the Proteus, which I've called a "rotational force plate" to help us determine how those ground reaction forces eventually work their way up the chain.
We've got far more tools for evaluating body composition, sleep quality, heart rate, fatigue status, workload, and much, much more. So, it's a very exciting time - but only if we appreciate that both positions and pressures matter.
Many of these principles are espoused in Mike Reinold and my Functional Stability Training series, so I'd encourage you to check them out if you'd like to dig deeper.
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It's time for this month's installment of my random thoughts on sports performance training. In light of this week's $50 off sale (ending Sunday night) on Mike Boyle's outstanding resource, Complete Youth Training, I thought I'd focus this edition on the training of young athletes.
1. Warm-ups are important in youth sports, too.
If you've read this blog over the years, you've surely appreciate that I'm a big advocate for high quality warm-ups as a means of optimizing subsequent performance and reducing the risk of injury. However, I have to admit that most of my writing in this regard has been focused on more advanced - and older - populations, whether it's in baseball, strength training, or any other athletic discipline. Meanwhile, some of the youth sports warm-ups you'll see are far from comprehensive - and that's if they're actually present at all.
Fortunately, I now have a chance to correct this oversight by highlighting a recent meta-analysis, "Effectiveness of Warm-Up Intervention Programs to Prevent Sports Injuries among Children and Adolescents." You can check out the full text HERE. The brief synopsis of a ton of hard work by Ding et al. is that across 15 meticulously-selected studies of 21,576 total athletes (ages 7-18), a 15-20 minute warm-up reduced injury by 36%.
Beyond the obvious benefits of staying healthy, what's interesting about this outcome to me is that a variety of different warm-up initiatives worked to deliver this injury reduction. In older, more trained populations, more of the benefits are likely coming from increases in body temperature and, in turn, tissue extensibility. Conversely, in a younger, more untrained population we see in this meta-analysis, you're probably getting more chronic protection from injury because the warm-ups are delivering actual training effects: improved balance, added strength, optimized landing mechanics, and a host of other factors.
This makes me think that we can always benefit from "microdosing" important training initiatives with our athletes, and warm-ups are one avenue through which coaches can do so. It's interesting to consider whether the benefits would have been as pronounced if the drills were done at different times, but adaptation is adaptation, and the warm-ups are probably the best way to guarantee accountability in the group environment.
2. Ground-to-Standing Transitions may be the lowest hanging fruit for young athletes.
One of my closest childhood friends grew up on a farm. I'll never forget the first time I went to help him with baling hay; we basically walked/rode around a giant field for six hours, picking up and stacking these on the back of a truck.
I didn't bother to look up the weight of each until now, but apparently it ranges from 40 to 75 pounds. And, it would explain why my entire body was sore for about a week. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that same friend was a good three-sport athlete and state champion in wrestling. Obviously, the farm taught him how to consistently work hard. However, I can't help but think that the fact that most of those physical tasks - from baling hay, to feeding animals, to digging - all involve low to high force transfer - which isn't much different than a lot of athletic endeavors. If you don't live on a farmer, what are some good ways to challenge this dynamic in training beyond just the Turkish Get-up?
As you can see, these patterns can be trained at low and high speeds, with and without external load.
3. Global strength can be a means to accessing other patterns and reducing injury risk.
In another recent study, Relationships between Hip Strength and Pitching Biomechanics in Adolescent Baseball Pitchers, Albiero et al. delivered some interesting findings that aren't altogether surprising. Now, please keep in mind that I don't think that some non-weight-bearing dynamometer strength tests provide the most accurate reflection of functional carryover to performance, but in this particular study, they help to verify things that we probably already know:
a. Improved hip extension strength in throwers (shockingly) improves hip extension in the pitching delivery.
b. More hip extension strength is correlated with increased hip-shoulder separation.
c. Good hip-shoulder separation helps athletes translate pelvis rotational torque to the upper extremity.
d. Not surprisingly, previous research has demonstrated that increased hip-shoulder separation has previously been associated with higher pitching velocity and decreased humeral rotation torque and valgus elbow load.
The take-home message? Young pitchers need to get strong into hip extension to throw hard and stay healthy - and this benefit is likely delivered through hip extension's impact on "setting up" hip-shoulder separation. There's definitely a point of diminishing returns on hip extension ROM/strength and these benefits won't be further conferred on advanced pitchers, though.
Closing Thoughts
I could go on and on about lessons learned in training young athletes (and I might, at a later date), but in the meantime, I'd strongly encourage you to check out Mike Boyle's resource, Complete Youth Training. I loved this product as both a strength and conditioning coach and a parent. Mike did a tremendous job of outlining the problems in the current youth sports landscape while also including practical solutions to these concerns. You can learn more - and get $50 off through Sunday at midnight - HERE.
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