Training MLB Pitchers: Part 2 of Driveline Baseball Interview

Training Pitchers

Benjamin Chase, Call to the Pen: To pitching, obviously increased velocity is one thing many note in training with Driveline, but what work is done with athletes to ensure health of the pitcher’s arm and body?

Michael O’Connell, Driveline Baseball: This is kinda of funny because the base of what we do if for arm health first, it tends to have a side effect of velocity increase.

The base of our program is proper warm up and recovery. To us that means band work, wrist weights and plyo balls to warm up and then doing our post throwing recovery exercises after throwing. All off this is focused around building work capacity and good movement patterns.

All of that is focused around trying to keep guys healthy, when colleges ask us how they can start with Driveline we tell them to start with our warm-up and recovery routine. We’ve have many do that for a whole year before they do any velocity work like pulldowns. This also goes for athletes in gym, no one can pulldown or do high intent work unless we make sure that they’re doing all the other things.

We also integrate manual therapy very closely with our training at our facility. Whether it’s soft tissue work from one of our trainers or being screened by our physical therapist. We try to keep a tight loop of who is receiving treatment and what areas he is receiving treatment on so we can make any adjustments we may need to make.

The skill based throwing training that we do would be our constraint drills with the plyocare balls and then added work with weighted balls. We don’t teach pitching mechanics in the traditional sense, because we don’t use many verbal cues. We see the drills we teach as the main drivers of teaching good pitching mechanics. While our coaches can work with an athlete to see what works best for him instead of telling him where his body should be. So it’s more of a two way street with athlete feedback, we can check in on the general movements and make sure they are doing the drills correctly and the athlete can figure out his best intent to move well and throw hard.

We’ve seen good results from just doing plyo care constraint drills, but they work much better when they’re paired with high-intent training such as pull-downs. So the the throwing focused training we do can be split into two parts: Grooving good mechanical patterns with plyo care balls, and high intent work with weighted ball running throws or mound work.