Strength in Numbers #103 – The Great Debate Part II
In the world of baseball, pitching biomechanics is often portrayed as a holy grail—a set of perfect movements and mechanics that, if achieved, can guarantee success on the mound and the anecdote to stave off your friendly local surgeon.
Coaches, players, and fans alike often seek the elusive notion of “perfect” pitching mechanics. However, the idea of a universally flawless pitching motion is an illusion.
Check out Part 1 here and get ready to dive into Part 2 of the Great Debate.
In the second part of the Great Debate, we will disprove the idea of perfect pitching biomechanics and discuss how to customize strength and coordination techniques to fit all types of deliveries.
The Certified Pitching Biomechanics course is based on strength and coordination training. It emphasizes the importance of building maximum strength before focusing on movement and measuring arm strength before analyzing 3D motion capture data.
Essentially, this hierarchy prevents the “death by the cure” scenario when a coach goes in and changes a delivery, and the athlete experiences injury due to making a change.
We need to fact-check the arm first, and you cannot progress into mechanical changes if the athlete has a weak arm, especially if they are performing well and pain-free.
Even if you believe you made a change that made the delivery more “smooth,” “effortless,” “efficient,” “timed up,” or any other loose descriptor not backed by quantified numbers, you will not do your athletes any benefit if they still have a wet noodle for an arm.
The Complexity of Pitching Biomechanics
Pitching biomechanics is a complex interaction of various body segments and movements that are modified by body segment parameters, body weight, height, injury histories, differing length-tension relationships around joints, peak strength, muscular power, strength endurance, contractile speed, and course, psychology, but these are just a few items that are integrated into why an athlete has a certain “motor preference.”
In the Certified Pitching Biomechanics course, we talk about the danger of altering motor preferences, a way of life that the athlete has had in understanding the environment, their bodies, and the competitive results they need to achieve in organizing themselves, joint by joint, from the ground to the fingertips to the catcher’s mitt.
Developing biomechanical models with the idea of a single perfect model that fits all pitchers is unrealistic and, even more worrisome, they rely on normative ranges for athletes who are anything but normal.
Check out the video below to see what I mean.
How would you handle the delivery seen in this video?
The majority would have the athlete run the other way. In doing so, the motor preference is confused, the athlete may never be who they came to be, and the fear of injury because of movement somehow presides over the confidence in throwing arm strength, which can handle the deliveries that are self-selected.
When changing an athlete’s delivery, you also run the risk of the other side of the coin – increasing throwing arm fatigue. I am working with a few players who were asked to shorten their arm strokes.
A few TJ surgeries later, using the ArmCare.com platform, it was realized that these athletes have very low grip strength and weak internal rotation strength. Then to add more fuel to the fire, high-intensity reverse throws shortened the arm path, but it increased layback speed that the arm couldn’t handle, while the player development staff members all believed the athletes looked “much more efficient.”
How to Handle Variability Among Successful Pitchers
If there were a single model of perfect pitching biomechanics, we would expect all successful pitchers to exhibit the same mechanics. However, a closer look at elite pitchers reveals a wide range of styles and variations.
From Randy Johnson’s unorthodox delivery to Greg Maddux’s precise control, successful pitchers have achieved greatness despite having unique pitching motions.
Now diving deeper into those deliveries, as I showed last week, Maddux pitches with a dropped elbow at weight-bearing foot flat, and Johnson had a lower arm slot that some thought he dropped his elbow through release.
Although people say Maddux threw light, it’s not true, as the old radar guns have him consistently throwing 92-93 by today’s standards. Given the lighter weight of Maddux, his relative strength potential has a greater opportunity to be high (over 70% body weight which is the minimum for our ArmScore). It’s the same with Randy. Even though he was tall, he was lean and had a low BMI.
If you keep pushing your ArmScore value up, athletes will have greater arm strength to body-weight ratios and can handle much more load and fatigue less.
In an absolute sense, boosting maximum strength per unit of MPH, known as the Strength-Velocity Ratio, will also give the athlete greater capacity and use more muscle-driven processes to generate velocity than the range of motion that may come from a greater stretch of passive constraints (joint capsule, ligaments, etc.).
Intuitively, you don’t want your fastball velocity to go up and your strength to go down; that’s the kiss of death, but how do you know if you don’t test strength at all and chase layback range of motion and arm speed?
DEFINING EFFICIENCY
With arm strength and joint mobility dialed in, you can start to look at the optimization factors of the delivery and truly define efficiency with Biomechanical Efficiency Ratios.
If you took the Certified Pitching Biomechanics Course, you would know precisely the kinematic variables (lower elbow under 90 degrees at stride foot contact being one of them – ala Greg Maddux) to reduce relative elbow joint torque per unit of velocity.
Biomechanical efficiency puts everyone on more of an equal playing field to determine if they can do more with less.
If you want to dive deep into this subject, especially if you are leaning more on the fence toward biomechanics first and strength second, you need to understand the parameters that can impact throwing hard, and that can modify in lowering elbow joint loads while maintaining velocity.
You can access a recent research article on this subject here. To read the full paper, you will have to contact me, and I will gladly give it to you.
The article is an excellent background for the Certified Pitching Biomechanist Course, as students learn the practical approaches in strength and coordination training upon the computational models to improve biomechanical efficiency.
There are many approaches, especially regarding the lower loading and bracing strategies, that every pitcher must display.
We go into how these features can be adjusted to improve arm timing without consciously shortening the arm path and trying to speed up the arm to get into position. Once again, think about the arm, with the elbow as the hinge. With a weak arm, you are actively accelerating back the catapult or potentially increasing arm flyout as trunk rotation also speeds up because of the speed of hand separation.
EMPHASIZING INDIVIDUAL OPTIMIZATION
Pitching coaches and trainers should prioritize optimizing individual mechanics rather than imposing a rigid model. A pitcher’s mechanics should be fine-tuned to enhance their strengths, address weaknesses, and minimize injury risk. This personalized approach acknowledges that what works for one pitcher may not work for another, promoting a focus on individual development and improvement.
We are getting warmer, and the third part next week is going to focus on a more thorough process for evaluating athletes that will communicate where biomechanics should fit in the player development continuum from mental performance to ball flight and not the other way around. The pathway that will be laid out provides initial insights into drill selection that will not conflict with performance and durability goals.
Now that you have read two thorough articles, out of curiosity, have any of the previous 4000 words convinced you to think more deeply about the mechanisms of pitching injuries rather than blaming throwing velocity and bad biomechanics upon the greatest pitchers of all time?
If you are still stuck on the fence about arm strength versus mechanics, you will get further information next weekend!
Stay tuned, and if you want to learn more about the science of Biomechanical Efficiency Grading in optimizing the delivery – please email me at Ryan@ArmCare.com.
