baseball conditioning / 73 posts found
Find Your Dog
Everyone, and I mean everyone has a dog in ‘em. You wanna throw hard, you gotta find your dog. Over the past 3 summers we’ve worked with more than 450 players from all over the world in our Summer Training Program. If they stayed 4 weeks, the average guy gained over 4 mph on his fastball. For most of them, it wasn’t about adding anything. It was about using what we call SAVAGE Training to reveal the dog they already had inside them. Some really smart movement scientists label it “self-organization.”…
Anatomy Of Hip-To-Shoulder Separation
Unless you’ve been living in the baseball equivalent of a Himalayan monastery, you’ve heard pitching and hitting coaches avowing the importance of “hip-to-shoulder separation.” I’m not exactly sure when it began, but sometime in the last several years, someone coined the term, and it spread like wildfire. According to advocates of this tenet, pitchers and hitters should rotate the pelvis while the torso remains closed for as long as possible. The resultant…
Impulse And The GMs: The Most Important Contributors To Pitching Velocity
In the spring of 2019, we got a call from Kyle Barker, CEO and founder of Aeronautic an aeronautical engineering company in Little Rock, Arkansas. Kyle’s son, Will had trained with us for several years, and Kyle was one of the closest friends of Minnesota Twins pitching coach Wes Johnson. When Wes was the pitching coach at The University of Arkansas, Wes had a state-of-the-art pitching lab installed. The lab included a mound with force plates embedded. According to Kyle…
It Will Be Hard
Raise your hand if you want to be a major league baseball player. Don’t be shy. If you want it, say it. I understand your reluctance. For most people and most training facilities, if you tell them your dream, they’ll caution you to have a plan B. They don’t want you to have false hope. They want you to be “realistic.” They’ll often refer you to what we call “The Pyramid of Hopelessness,” which highlights the long odds against you. Frankly, we’re…
I Don’t Have To Be Better Than You.
I played college baseball at The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina — The ONLY Military Academy in history to make it to the Division 1 College World Series. They did it in 1990, 4 years after I graduated — they had to get rid of some deadwood like me before they could make their run. We played in the Southern Conference. Still, every year, our schedule featured 10-12 games against powerhouse teams like North Carolina, Clemson, South Carolina, and NC State. By all accounts,…
My Shoulder “Itised”
The other day I was sitting on my couch watching a playoff game, and out of nowhere, my shoulder “itised.” I mean, I was just sitting there minding my business and BAM! The “itis” hit me. Nearly every other day, we get a call from a player or a parent or coach of a player with arm pain that has bee diagnosed as tendonitis. The cycle they report is eerily familiar. The player feels a little pain in their shoulder or elbow after throwing. It’s nothing major -just a pinch…
Why It Doesn’t Take 10,000 Hours
We’ve all heard of the 10,000 hours rule. It was made popular by author and Malcom Gladwell in his 2008 book, Outliers. In this book he alluded to research by Anders Ericcson suggesting that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master a skill. I read the book and it sounded legit. I even wrote about it in the first “book” I ever published. It was an awful piece — more of a manual — called Building the 90 mph Delivery. It sold approximately 4 copies and included…
Is How You Learn A Skill Is More Important Than What You Learn?
Coming from the medical world was certainly a difference-maker in the early success of our students — many of whom were overcoming significant throwing injuries. Our knowledge of anatomy, physiology, kinesiology, biomechanics and the cellular biology of the human body, gave us the tools to help a lot of players. However, while our medical background is definitely an edge in training players, it’s not the biggest separator. The biggest difference-makers for our clients has been the deep dive…
The External vs. Internal Focus Debate In Baseball Skill Acquisition
I heard a lot of talk among coaches at the ABCA Convention in Dallas last month about motor learning and skill acquisition science. That’s a good thing. It’s refreshing to see so many coaches and MLB teams expanding their horizons and pushing toward a more “science-based, data-driven” approach to enhance both in-game performance and player development. When I played, we all wanted to work hard; however, knowing what to work on was always a problem. I can remember going into my mother’s…
