Fans have been enthralled by the home run spike in MLB since the second half of 2015. While many things are being debated, one area seems overlooked – improved training in MLB athletes.
The home run spike in MLB has accompanied a significant increase in the average velocity in pitches thrown. Over the last 15 years, the average velocity of pitches has climbed 3 MPH. The number of pitchers throwing 100+ in a season used to be one or two, and now every team seemingly has one or two pitchers on the MLB roster that can reach back for triple-digit velocity.
While many have theorized that perhaps a change in the ball or the bat has been responsible for the increase in home runs, many MLB players have begun to seek out the assistance of private hitting instructors and specific baseball trainers who are focusing more on smart training to improve baseball play, not just have a player look good in his uniform as many personal trainers that a player could hire at his local gym may provide.
A number of private instructors have really become quite well known through their work with hitter swing path and hitter approach at the plate, but a few places are working on the whole player, from training the body to training the mind to learning the mechanics of the game in such a way to both maximize performance of the game and minimize injury and/or damage from the game. One of the industry leaders in that realm is Driveline Baseball. Driveline’s research associate Michael O’Connell was gracious enough to field a number of questions and provide some excellent insight into exactly what Driveline is doing in their part of training a better baseball player. Because much of the question on training starts at a young age, many of the questions focus on training of high school and younger athletes in this interview.
We will be breaking these down in the following way:
Monday: Training specifically for baseball
Tuesday: Working with pitchers
Wednesday: Weight room work
Thursday: Tailoring a proper swing
Friday: What’s next?
With that, we’ll start with today’s focus on sport-specific training on baseball.
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.
Training Pitchers
Benjamin Chase, Call to the Pen: One of the big issues becoming more prominent since the increase in velocity is Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, which has to do with muscle build up due to overuse in a joint (usually seen in upper chest/shoulder area with pitchers or volleyball players). What (if anything) has Driveline found in training to counter this?
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Michael O’Connell, Driveline Baseball: We have a full time physical therapist, Terry Phillips (DPT), on staff who specializes in nerve issues of the back & neck. So athletes are going to get screened when they get to the gym and he is there to do check in’s throughout an athlete’s stay.
We aren’t quite sure why there is an increase in TOS in the last few years. It’s going to be a combination of a number of things, the best thing we can do is constantly screen and rescreen our athletes to see how our athletes are responding to the programming.
Though there is a good summary of TOS & performance implications that you can read here by Dr. Mike Sonne.
Next: Driveline Baseball Interview, Part 1
Thoughts:
The final piece is a big mystery in the game right now. Thoracic Outlet Syndrome has become a major issue. I covered this last fall here on Call To The Pen, and in the process of doing investigation on this topic, I happened upon talking with an orthopedic surgeon at Mayo Clinic, and he discussed how TOS is seen in volleyball players and also in certain manual laborers who do a lot of over-shoulder swinging with force. The discussion with the orthopedist led to him suggesting that a big thing for pitchers to do to help themselves would be to learn to work at less than maximum effort on each pitch. Of course, that’s easier said than done, but it is definitely something to consider.
We’ll be back with more this week!