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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