Strength in Numbers #112
The road to athletic excellence is paved with dedication, discipline, and well-structured training. Optimizing training programs is paramount for athletes, especially those involved in sports like baseball or softball that heavily rely on the throwing arm.
This Strength in Numbers is inspired by one of my pro athletes, a player who is invested in his career physically, emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually. He might be one of the most resilient players in the game who has overcome heartache and setbacks, only to be enlightened, and is a leader to young players in his community.
We had a brief text exchange about the last newsletter on ECON training and broached the subject of the Minimal Effective Dose (MED), as he is figuring it all out for his throwing arm strength, fatigue resistance, and recovery.
In a nutshell, the MED is just as it reads, identifying the minimal amount of work you can do to get the maximum return. In professional baseball, I always found it ridiculous that athletes had to train their throwing arm daily.
Imagine you are a reliever. You throw at maximum capacity 4-5 times in 7 days, and you have clinicians cranking on your arm all the time, and then you have post-throwing arm care, some upwards of 10 exercises, 2 sets, and 12 reps per set.
Does this seem minimal? There’s no wonder this cohort of pitchers has recently eclipsed the starters as the most injured in professional baseball.
Understanding FITT to be FIT
This is an error in the FITT principles, which we learn in our first year of kinesiology, and lest we forget.
FITT stands for:
- Frequency,
- Intensity,
- Type,
- and Time.
When you write a program, you need to consider progressions in how often the athlete trains, the intensity they train at, the type of exercise, and the time of each rep and session.
If you have taken our courses and are dual certified, you will better understand how I look at training the throwing arm, and the ArmCare Elite group will get even deeper into the weeds in September.
So, how do I know what the minimally effective dosage is? Quite simply, you need to evaluate throwing arm strength data.
A few simple rules when evaluating arm strength data:
- Weakness – In this bucket, athletes need intensification, and I DO NOT MEAN INCREASING VOLUME. Hence, stick to ECON principles.
- Fatigue – In this bucket, athletes need moderation. This means reducing volume and not intensity.
- Inhibited recovery – In this bucket, the athlete must reduce intensity, not volume.
- Fatigue+Inhibited recovery – In this bucket, you must reduce both volume and intensity.
Test and Training Incompatibility
As high-performance specialists, we are responsible for athletes’ health and performance.
And, if the athlete is getting injured, it is your fault. There’s no bad luck.
Your neck is on the line whenever your athlete has setbacks or injuries. There’s a reason why injured athletes seek me out – no one wants to be responsible for the potential of career-ending surgery, and many do not have the focus to ensure their programs are constantly changing due to unforeseen circumstances.
In all accounts, you must work with evidence. You need a data-led approach, regardless of no injury history or significant injury history. This prevents you from making errors in your FITT principles and determines the minimally effective dose.
Here’s what’s wrong with most monitoring strategies in baseball and why MED programming is near impossible:
- Athletes are tested for maximum strength and trained for endurance,
- Athletes are tested only in a recovered state,
- Teams are understaffed to consistently test athletes, slow to provide data and insights, and generally leave evaluations to 3 times per year (report, mid-season, and exit),
- Teams are reactive in testing after injuries and miss the ability to gauge health and performance declines.
To simplify it, train for the test, develop a player-led approach where the athletes can inform you of the changes in their arm strength, and ensure you make pivots.
This is hard for many, as they want to be in control and can be quite irritated by the fact that they will have to change their plans according to the athlete instead of the athlete working with their plans.
If you consider yourself a guide rather than the commander, you will be better off making the athlete the hero, providing insights into where you need to go.
If you need a little bit more context on the traits of good coaches versus bad ones, please watch this podcast.
Pointers in Establishing MED
Aside from the obvious being increased strength, recovery, and reduced fatigue, there are a few other things you can check off to know that you have hit a MED.
- Minimal Pain and Soreness – The athlete doesn’t require the same amount of treatment
- Neuromechanical Efficiency – The athlete doesn’t show significant strength loss post-game, and they do not have a decline in throwing strikes.
- Release Point Consistency – The athlete does not show a change in release point that may infer further biomechanical evaluation.
- Absence of the 2+2 Rule – The athlete does not show more than a two mph loss in fastball velocity within and across games, and they do not fall outside the two mph range. For example, a starter that throws a fastball at 96-98 mph and averages 97.5 can maintain a two-mph range over the course of the game and does not dip to an average of 95.4, 2mph below the average velocity.
When you see these elements shift, reconsider your FITT Principles.
If you really want to know more about the structure of programming with finite detail, I encourage you to become dual-certified. I will walk you through my personal case studies, things that worked and didn’t work, and get in the weeds of programming and how to create floors and ceilings with MED training.
MED training is good for the throwing arm, but doing the bare minimum in education should never be your mentality.
