Weekly 3-2-1

There has never been a more dangerous time for Youth Pitchers arms.

Unfortunately, it's not just youth arms, it’s pitchers everywhere that are struggling with this. 

And the issue stems from a place that's pretty disappointing, and something that can't be deciphered by even the most attentive parents. 

Coaches who know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to provide the best possible product and protection for whatever coaching they are doing.

The examples are endless, but the biggest plagues today come from Velocity training and Weighted ball training specifically. 

At this point, pretty much everyone in the game knows that offering weighted ball and velocity training is going to help make pitchers better, but how do they manage the newfound velocity? How do they make the players bodies capable of handling the newfound stressors and workload that is accompanied with the training methodologies that these coaches employ so aggressively. 

It is funny, when i began weighted ball training in 2014 with Driveline Baseball, everyone said “weighted balls don't work, you can't train velocity”, that lasted about 2-3 years, and Driveline essentially made it obvious that both of those statements were incorrect.

Then it was “weighted ball training makes you not throw strikes” which also took about 2-3 years to be obselete.

We are now on to the next phase: “Weighted balls directly cause arm injuries and are unsafe.”

Meanwhile, everyone loves to cite this study 

But no one likes to actually read said study, they just like to repeat its claims that weighted balls increase injury, which they can *If you incorrectly prescribe volume and intensity*

Which when you think about it, is pretty much exactly what happens when you do anything. 

In the study they have test subjects throw a very high volume of high intensity throws, which on its own would be incredibly taxing. 

And to follow this up, they add in way more frequency of max intent throwing than anyone with a clue does. They have you rip roughly 40-50 max effort throws, which range up to 2 pounds in weight, three times a week. This means that in between sessions, you don’t have any more than 1 day of rest. 

So yeah, the test subjects on that did get injured. Much like if you had your teenager throw max effort 50 pitch bullpens M-W-F they would also get injured. 

So its not really astonishing. 

But it is also worth noting that in the past some programs (Like Driveline) did test 3x a week. 

In fact, they did so and found that their injury rates were way better than the general baseball population, and in fact they were better than the other facilities that noted themselves as “Competitors’

So how is that possible? I'll tell you.

When I was at Driveline (In 2016,2017 and 2020), everyone knew the place for the emphasis it put on max effort weighted ball throwing. Oftentimes our programs included running throws at 100% intensity. 

These got the headlines and grabbed attention on social media, but max effort throws of any kind totaled about 5% of our total training workload. 

So what is the other 95%? Soft tissue management, mechanical work, strength work, rehab and prehab work, arm care routines, recovery.

Not to count nutritional work or prioritizing hydration and sleep, or workload management.

I was in the facility about 5 hours every day, 6 days a week. I was lucky to throw the ball at max effort for 15-20 minutes twice a week.

When you choose a coach, you don’t just sign up for the 5%. If your coach isn't actively giving you direction for the 95% of your training, he is actively being disrespectful to your career. 

It's not good enough to just be a nice dude and care about your players, you have to actually do the work and research and have the knowledge to properly instruct the weekly schedule of all of your athletes. 

There's tons of free information out there, all you need to do is look for it,pay attention to detail and think critically.

Good Luck

John