We’re excited to welcome Ben Hansen, the Vice President of Biomechanics and Innovation at Motus Global, to this week’s podcast. Ben shares insights on mechanical stressors and workload monitoring to help us understand how we can best keep pitchers healthy while still developing them.

A special thanks to this show’s sponsor, Marc Pro. Head to www.MarcPro.com and enter the coupon code CRESSEY at checkout to receive 10% off on your order.

Show Outline

• What led Ben to pursue a career in biomechanics and wearable technology
• How Motus Global strives to impact the game of baseball and how their model for developing healthy arms has shifted over the years
• What peer reviewed research says about the significance of joint torques and how we should interpret these metrics for predicting the risk of injury in baseball players
• What acute and chronic workloads are, and how managing these variables can allow coaches to keep their athletes healthy and high performing
• Why pitchers should have individualized throwing programs to account for the diverse variables that impact a player’s health
• How truly different catch play, flat ground, bullpen, pre-game, and in-game throws are, and how coaches can more accurately account for the stress they impose on pitchers throughout a season
• How rest should be incorporated into a baseball players year and why short breaks during a season of heavy throwing may be doing more harm than good for throwers
• What ballplayers should consider when deciding between continuing to throw into the next season or shutting down to rest
• What role mechanics plays in the health of a throwing arm and how common mechanical tendencies, like the Tommy John Twist and the Inverted W, influence arm stress
• How fatigue is more predictive of injury than mechanics
• Why building a durable work capacity is more important for staying healthy than mastering mechanics
• How reliable using perceived effort is when creating and executing a throwing program
• Why professionals need to rewrite the return to throwing program for common injuries in baseball
• Where more research is needed to further understand how to manage baseball arms

You can follow Ben on Twitter at @BenHansen9 and on Instagram at @MotusGlobal.

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