Could The Javelin, Shot Put & Discus Be Used By Baseball Pitchers For Torso Strength & Velocity?

A Baseball Pitching Question From A High School Coach Who Is Thinking About "Mixing It Up:" He's Interested In Using The Javelin, Shot Put & Discus To Train His Baseball Pitchers...

Coach Ellis,

I was putting together an arm-strengthening program for next fall and was thinking of incorporating an 8-pound shot put, javelin and discus for the players.

Do you think the shot put and javelin would hurt the player’s arms if they threw them?

We really need to work on elbow extension and torso rotation, and I thought these training devices would be fresh and interesting. What do you think?

Thanks, J.K.

Omaha, Nebraska

From the desk of STEVEN ELLIS, The Complete Pitcher™:

Thanks for the baseball pitching question. I would strongly advise against using any of the above mentioned devices for training baseball pitchers.

In each instance, the implement, whether it be the javelin, shot-put or the discus, all involve different throwing motions than the baseball.

Why re-invent the wheel?

When it comes down to game day, what we’re asking our baseball pitchers to do is throw a 5 ounce baseball 60-feet-6.

That’s it.

The throwing motion for the javelin is very different than the throwing motion of the baseball. The same goes for the discus and the shot-put (and even a football, which is another implement that I don’t recommend baseball pitchers throw if they are serious about fine-tuning their control).

YES, some of the muscles used in throwing a javelin are some of the same as those used in throwing a baseball.

And YES, there are elements of throwing a javelin that hit upon similar biomechanical principals as baseball pitching like trunk flexion and trunk rotation as well as upper-arm-, shoulder- and scapula muscle-movement.

But, again, because it doesn’t involve a baseball – which ultimately is what we’re trying to improve here, I think time spent working on these drills is time wasted.

Part of the problem that you may be hinting at may not have anything to do with the need for you to find new and improved ways to stimulate movements similar to movements of the baseball pitching motion.

Instead, it may involve the amount of time baseball players spend standing around at the baseball field not working on pitching itself or pitching-specific activities that would actually benefit your staff.

I know from some of the baseball teams that I’ve been on that baseball practices can last four or five hours of which pitchers “actual work-time” is less than 30 minutes. The other time is spent shagging fly-balls in the outfield and hitting grounders to infielders—all of which is a poor use of baseball pitcher’s time.

This may be what is making baseball practices seem to drag on for your baseball pitchers.

To work on trunk flexion and trunk rotation, set your team up on an off-season medicine ball workout routine. Maintain the strength and mobility of the torso and trunk in-season by performing half the amount of sets and reps as you did in the off season.

Stick with baseballs for your pitchers and save the track and field implements for the track and field athletes.

Yours in complete baseball pitching success,

Steven Ellis
The Complete Pitcher, Inc.
www.thecompletepitcher.com
www.thecompletepitcher.blogs.com

College Baseball Pitcher Asks My #1 Favorite Post-Pitching-Performance Food

This NAIA College Baseball Pitcher Want To Know More About Lifting Weights, Nutritional Supplements And In-Season Baseball Training For Pitchers

Coach Ellis,

My name is Tyson. I'm a 20-year-old pitcher at the NAIA collegiate level. I've been strictly a pitcher for three years now. My mechanics are sound, I'm in the best shape of my life, I lift and condition hard, eat right, and I'm on a good throwing program that I have confidence in.

But, I'm looking for something to help prevent injury, recover quicker after starts, and hopefully add some lean muscle and a little weight if possible. I'm 6', 175 lbs. with a lean frame. What kind of supplement would you recommend? I've never taken anything besides a little protein, and regular multivitamins and stuff.

Our season doesn't start for another three weeks. Should I be taking anything? Is it okay to start now? How should I be lifting during the season? Do you recommend lifting the day before a start? Later the same day of a start?

I would appreciate any answers to any of my questions if you have time.

Thank you,

Tyson Durm

From the desk of STEVEN ELLIS, The Complete Pitcher™:

Thanks for the baseball pitching question(s). There’s a lot here, so I’ll do my best to touch on each one.

What’s my favorite nutritional supplement for post-game baseball pitching performance recovery?

100% All-Natural Smuckers Peanut Butter on two slices of whole-wheat bread. Add a glass of milk (and maybe a second peanut butter sandwich) and you have a well-balanced, high protein, high carbohydrate meal with a lot of good unsaturated fat (which is important after a strenuous pitching performance).

Like you, I have taken protein shakes, but never really found one that I liked the taste enough to stick with. Plus, in college, it was difficult to travel with it and then find a blender to mix it up.

(In professional baseball, our athletic trainers traveled with blenders, but, again, taste has always been my biggest hang-up with protein shakes.)

Athletes need a well balanced diet containing protein, complex-carbs (oatmeal, whole wheat pastas, whole wheat breads) and good fats (nuts, peanut butter). Your performance on the hill, and your ability to recover from the strenuous activity of pitching requires more nutrients than just the amino acids found in protein—so mix it up and try more balanced food sources that contain all three: healthy unsaturated fats, proteins and complex-carbohydrates.

Do I recommend lifting before the day of a pitching start?

No way!

Weight room training, conditioning and workout programs are more-or-less designed to be used in the off-season; to prepare you for games when the season rolls around. In-season is for pitching and honing your pitching skills on the bump.

Any workout program that is done in-season should just be one to maintain strength for the duration of the season, not continue to build strength—especially on the day before a pitching performance.

If you’re looking for ways to implement a baseball training workout MAINTENANCE program, then aim to do it the day after you pitch in a game, or immediately following a pitching performance.

Yours in complete pitching success,

Steven Ellis
The Complete Pitcher, Inc.
www.thecompletepitcher.com
www.thecompletepitcher.blogs.com

"That's When I Realized How Potentially Dangerous This [Pitching] Phenomenon Has Gotten," Says One Baseball Pitcher

Coach Ellis,

I liked the article on scap loading [Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2005].

I've been to see Bill Thurston, too, and you're right, this "scap loading" stuff is something pitchers have been doing for decades. You can look at pitchers from the 30s and 40s and they do this. Nobody ever told them to do it. That's where I agree that it's dangerous to teach young pitchers to do this. The idea of thrusting your chest out is much better.

I had a high school kid tell me that he had a college coach at a clinic tell him to work on scap loading and he'd get 5 mph. That's when I realized how crazy and potentially dangerous this phenomenon has gotten. I had to set him straight, that yeah, he wants to get that good full-range of motion, but actually, consciously "loading the scap" will only slow him down or put his shoulder in a dangerous position.

Keep up your good work.

Phil

P.S. I don't think Wolforth's program has anything bad in it, per se. Just when kids or coaches interpret it in a way that they see the key to it all being is "loading up the scap." Then, it creates problems. I mean, Billy Wagner has a short-arm action and he throws 100 mph. But, I bet he doesn't think, "Gotta make sure I load my scaps."

From the desk of STEVEN ELLIS, The Complete Pitcher™:

Thanks for the comments, Phil. I couldn't have said it any better. All the best!

Yours in complete pitching success,

Steven Ellis
The Complete Pitcher, Inc.
www.thecompletepitcher.com
www.thecompletepitcher.blogs.com

New "It" Phrase In Baseball Pitching: Scapular Loading (Scapula Load)... But Is It Really New & Necessary?

Scapular loading (or the scapula load phase of pitching) has become the new “it” phrase in the realm of baseball pitching instruction.

Pitching instructors and baseball coaches, alike, are now using the term as frequently as decade-old pitching-mechanic-terms like the “balance point” or the “high-cock-position.”

If you surf the Internet for your baseball pitching instruction, then, you too probably have heard about scapular loading (or the scapula load phase of pitching).

If you haven’t heard about scapula loading, don’t worry—I’ll tell you all about it right here.

Scapular loading (or the scapula load phase of pitching) is a pitching phrase coined by a Connecticut-based baseball-pitching instructor named Paul Nyman.

Nyman, who owns a biomechanical video-motion analysis sports business, noticed that when he slowed down the high-speed film of some professional baseball pitchers to 1,000 frames per second, many pitchers look like they “pinch” their scapular muscles (shoulder blades) during the high-cocking – or loading – phase of their baseball pitching delivery.

From his findings, Nyman suggests that all pitchers should pinch their scapular muscles to tap into the energy that is “stored” in the pectoral (chest) muscles, and he instructs his baseball pitchers to “pull it out” in a kinetic sequence (chaining) of events to transfer that energy to the pitched baseball itself. From this, Nyman concludes that then, and only then will a baseball pitcher be able to access the “stored” energy from the upper back and chest that would have otherwise remained unused.

In other words, during the high-cocking phase of the baseball pitching delivery (when a baseball pitcher’s front foot has landed in-line to his target and his throwing-arm’s elbow on the back side of his body is shoulder-height, fingers on top of the baseball), Nyman says a pitcher should bring his lead- and throwing elbows back behind his back by bringing (pinching) the shoulder blades together.

Sounds simple enough, right?

So you're probably wondering how THAT become the “it” phrase of baseball pitching instruction?

Part of it has to do with the online and offline promotional success of a Houston-based pitching instructor named Ron Wolforth, who has, in essence, turned the concept of scapula load and scapular strengthening into a baseball pitching instructional video and DVD business through an off-season conditioning program called “Back shaping” (or Backshaping).

Now, is it wrong to strengthen you upper back and scapular muscles?

Not at all.

In fact, in the Chicago Cubs Organization, pitchers from minor league A-ball through the Major Leagues perform a scapular- and upper-back-strengthening program twice-a-week in-season and three times a week during the off-season. (That program will be featured on my FREE Baseball Pitching Workouts Web page at www.pitchingworkouts.com very soon.)

Nyman even has his version of scapular strengthening called bow-flex-bow backward chaining. Again, not entirely wrong to focus on strengthening the back and scapular muscles so long as it's done in a balanced way.

But… have Nyman and Wolforth re-invented (and re-named) a pitching concept that has been around as long as baseball pitching itself? Have they both simply taken a common pitching-mechanics-checkpoint, the “chest-thrust phase" of the pitching motion, and changed its name to something a little more “sexy?”

Bill Thurston, a pitching consultant for the American Sports Medicine Institute, would probably think so… as do Dick Mills of Pitching.com, me and any other baseball pitcher who has been instructed by Thurston. (Mills talks about scapular loading on his “The Baseball Pitching Rebel” Weblog.)

Why?

Because all the way back in 1994, when I was a freshman pitcher in high school, I visited Bill Thurston at Amherst College in Mass., for my first pitching lesson, of what would become more than eight pitching lessons over a seven-year time-period.

And in 1994, way before the Wolforths and the Nymans of the world popped-up on the baseball pitching circuit with the phrase “scapular loading,” Thurston was teaching his baseball pitching students to “thrust their chest” during this particular phase of the baseball pitching delivery.

In 1994, Thurston showed my dad and me a baseball pitching video of Roger Clemens at the high-cock phase of his baseball pitching motion "thrusting" his chest to extract every last ounce of baseball pitching velocity he could muster out of his body before he launched the baseball past a hitter for a strike.

Of course, the only way Clemens could thrust his chest, like Thurston taught, was to pinch his shoulder blades. So in 1994, Clemens was doing it, and Thurston was teaching it: some new-age concept, right?

So what’s the problem? After all, aren't Thurston, Nyman and Worforth talking about the same thing? Aren't they just calling it something different?

Nope.

While it's true that SOME “pinch” is natural during the high-cock phase of the baseball pitching delivery (with pitchers that have proper pitching mechanics), I feel that the degree to which Nyman suggests one “load”(30 degrees) is dangerous, and it leaves the front part of a pitcher’s throwing shoulder exposed to an increased risk of severe tendon injury—just like the injuries that can result from an individual performing the bench-press in the weight room (think: frayed-labrum-surgery). By the way, the bench press (and even dumbbell bench press) is an exercise no pitcher should perform.

Just a few weeks ago when my baseball pitching staff returned from winter break, one of my pitchers came into my office excited to tell me about a "new pitching delivery" that he had learned over the break. He took baseball pitching lessons from a “scapular load” pitching instructor in Chicago who taught my pitcher to seperate his hands from his glove (in the set-position) by bringing both elbows back behind his back (scapular load) 30 degrees. This, as opposed to having a nice-and-fluid back-side arm path, the instructor said would give my sophomore pitcher more velocity because it would "better allow my pitcher to transfer the energy from his chest and upper-back into the delivered pitch itself."

Great :-(

As a result, my college pitcher now throws like a catcher (he brings both hands up and scrunches his shoulders to try to get into that "power scapula-loaded position." I'll bet you he’s actually lost 3-4 mph in pitching velocity. (We don't break out the Juggs speed guns or pitching velocity charts until closer to the season.)

Drawing upon my own baseball pitching experience: I used to "thrust" my chest like Thurston taught and consistently threw 94-95 mph (topping out at 96 mph) during my college and professional baseball pitching career. I didn’t even learn about the term scapular loading until 6 months ago.

And even though I thrust my chest and pinched my shoulder blades naturally, as a result of solid pitching mechanics learned directly from Bill Thurston, it wasn’t 30-degree pinch; it was more like a 5 or 10 degree pinch -- a slight pinch.

The new terminology (scapular loading), though sexy, is all that's really "new" about this pitching concept. Chest-thrusting has been around for a while. What's new, however, is the suggested degree to which some pitching instructors suggest one pinches his shoulder blades. If you ask me, 30 degrees is too much and unsafe.

Yours in complete pitching success,

Steven Ellis
The Complete Pitcher, Inc.
www.thecompletepitcher.com
www.thecompletepitcher.blogs.com