baseball conditioning / 52 posts found
What Makes The Florida Baseball Ranch® The Right Fit For You?
Last week one of the Physical Therapists in our clinic, Sullivan Rehab Services, was on vacation so I subbed, in seeing patients from 7 am to 12 pm a few days to cover it. About two years ago, our CFO/COO, Amy Marsh, made the brilliant business decision to fire me from the clinic. I still loved treating patients but she knew where my passion was. Besides, we were getting so busy training baseball players that there was barely enough time to be in both places. Working in the clinic last week reminded me of something that makes the Florida Baseball […]
Negro League Hero Shut In By Parkinson’s Finds His Way Back Through Baseball
A few years ago I was seeing a 75-year-old physical therapy patient with Parkinson’s and early Alzheimer’s. We’ll call him Bob. I performed the visit in his home since he was completely bedridden and homebound. According to his family, he hadn’t been able to stand, walk, or talk for over a year. Parkinson’s causes an erosion of motor skills, and Alzheimer’s degrades cognitive abilities, so Bob had a bad combination. As he lay in the hospital bed in his living room I could tell he was a big guy, about 6’3″…maybe 220 lbs. When I interviewed his daughter, she reported […]
The Most Menacing Career Killer
You’re a college or a high school pitcher, and you want to move to the next level. Your goals are clear. Your dreams are important, worthy, and attainable. It’s not a question of will. You’re willing to work hard. Heck, you want it so badly, you’re ready to do whatever it takes to get it done. But you have an enemy, a fierce and insidious enemy that if not identified, combated and corralled will contort your training and your pitching career into an unrecognizable mess. The enemy I’m talking about is noise. Noise has killed more velocity, corrupted more command […]
Changing The Future Of USA Baseball Forever: You’re Welcome America
I’m an idea man. I was talking with a member of the USA Baseball staff last week and I told him I had an idea that would change the future of USA baseball forever. In a world where just about everyone claims to have found newest gadget or gizmo that is “the secret” to baseball development, this idea involves two relatively inexpensive products that are already on the market. Have you ever watched a 12–year old baseball game on a 200-225-foot field? It’s a beautiful thing. Pitchers are only 46-50 feet away, so they know that if the hump it […]
The Year My Dad Died And I Rode The Pine For An Entire Season
When I was 13 years old, my family and I moved from Klamath Falls, Oregon to Sumter, South Carolina. The sons of a career Air Force enlisted man, my two brothers and I were no strangers uprooting and starting over. Entering the 9th grade at Sumter High School, I had never attended the same school 2 years in a row. Thankfully, I was always pretty good at football, basketball, and baseball so finding friends and assimilating came easy. After completing my freshman year I decided to try out for the local American Legion baseball team, the Sumter P-15s. In those […]
A New Way Of Looking At Mechanical Efficiency in Pitching
Much of the training at The Florida Baseball Ranch® is based on the Dynamic Systems Theory. Within that system we try to avoid the inefficient verbal cueing that often corrupts the learning process. In our approach, we try to use motor learning strategies that create an environment for self-organization to occur. We use these motor learning precepts to nudge the athlete subconsciously toward more efficient movement patterns. One of the most important strategies involves stabilizing the attractors. In every human movement, there are components that must be stable and other parts that can be variable. The stable components are known […]
The Enemy of Your Success Is…
You have a dream. You want to play in college. You want to get drafted. You want to play in the pros. You can do it. We truly believe anyone can learn to throw 90+mph and play in college… get drafted… and play in the pros. Why are we so sure? Because God doesn’t make junk and human tissue doesn’t have a free will. If we add a training stimulus, your body cannot decide not to participate. It must respond the the stimulus we impart. The key is to add the right training stimulus at the right time and at […]
Finding, Evaluating and Applying Baseball Research (Part 3): Guest Blog By Dr. Ed Fehringer and Jordan Rassmann
We presented a series of questions about baseball related research to a highly regarded Omaha, NE orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Ed Fehringer: 1. Why do we need good research in baseball? 2. Why is it important for a coach/instructor to be able to review, understand and critique research. 3. How do I find relevant research (online search hacks)? 4. What are the parts/design of a typical study? 5. How do I evaluate the quality of a study? 6. What are the dangers of only reading the abstract. 7. What are the typical statistical tools used and what do they mean? 8. […]
Finding, Evaluating and Applying Baseball Research (Part 2): Guest Blog By Dr. Ed Fehringer
We came up with several questions about baseball related research and presented them to Dr. Ed Fehringer, a highly regarded Orthopedic Surgeon and researcher. We included his answers to the first three in our last article. Here, we’ll cover the next three. Our R&D Coordinator, Jordan Rassmann will handle question 7 in a couple of days. He’ll discuss the most commonly used statistical tools and he promises to make it surer easy to understand. Dr. Fehringer will wrap it up in a few days with the answers to question s 8-11. Here are the questions. The answers to 4-6 […]
Finding, Evaluating and Applying Baseball Research (Part 1): Guest Blog By Dr. Ed Fehringer
A few days ago, I had a spirited twitter discussion about conducting and evaluating research in the baseball training and coaching industries. That exchange spurred me to reach out to my friend, Dr. Ed Fehringer, a highly regarded Omaha, Nebraska orthopedic surgeon who specializes in shoulder and elbow surgery. Dr. Fehringer has been involved in several published clinical studies and he his one of the editors of Rockwood and Masten’s The Shoulder — widely regarded as the penultimate shoulder resource for students and clinicians in orthopedic community. I asked Dr. Fehringer to write a guide for baseball coaches and instructors […]