Strength in Numbers #20
As an athlete, I never took time away from training.
I had a thorough program where I threw year-round. Then at times, I would grind through two-a-day sessions with split routines, anterior chain lower body in the morning, upper body posterior chain at night, followed by the opposite the following day,…
Ryan Crotin, PhD CSCS RSCC, Executive Vice President
Strength in Numbers #19
Recently, I was a guest on a podcast by Inform Performance, hosted by Ben Ashworth and Dr. Andy McDonald, covering a wide array of information related to assessing baseball health and performance. Click here to have a listen.
We talked about many things, but a major focus was on training, the most…
Strength in Numbers #18
Approximately 16 million baseball players compete on American soil, and by the time high school rolls around, many of them have college scholarships and professional baseball in mind. To help better support these players, we need to be interested in draft research and understand what makes an athlete a future MLB…
Strength in Numbers #17
I have been observing arm care programs for quite some time and have not seen a comprehensive approach to conditioning the throwing arm for high-intensity stress.
For the most part, training programs would involve light dumbbells and cuff weights, which provide little to no muscle irradiation. As a result, the activation of…
Strength in Numbers #16
A few days ago, I had the chance to be on a zoom meeting with some extraordinary gentlemen in the world of baseball performance.
I recommend following each of them for their contributions and insight into the sport of baseball, here's a quick introduction:
Dr. David Szymanski is a Full Professor,…
Strength in Numbers #15
A few weeks ago, Kyle Matsel, a physical therapist and leading researcher into arm care training trends, came on our podcast to discuss his research and what is wrong with the current training approaches.
He mentioned that currently, training without assessment may be causing further injury, as the biggest culprit mentioned in…
Strength in Numbers #14
Weighted ball training was heavily researched in the 1990s and early 2000s by Coop DeRenne, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Here's a list of his research publications .
However, even before the research, legends in throwing training such as Mike Marshall and Tom House integrated…
Muscle irradiation is likely a new term for you, but with an old definition, and we’re going to make a case of why it is the most important feature in weighted ball training. It started back in the early 1900s with Sir Charles Sherrington, a Hall of Famer in neurophysiology, who used the word…
Strength in Numbers #13
Baseball players need strong glutes to throw hard and avoid injury while pitching, but it’s not just the backside that needs beefing up. The hip adductors also play an essential role in stabilizing the hip during the explosive drive off the mound. If you don’t currently involve hip adduction exercises in…
Strength in Numbers #12
As we've discussed before, good hip-shoulder separation is a crucial component for better pitching , but there's more to it than just increasing the stretch. In this article, we'll cover the three important things to help maximize hip-shoulder separation:
(1) Tissue Extensibility
(2) Speed of Stretch
(3) Separation Time.
These key features…