By Texas High School Baseball Coaches Association
Win More Games with Less Injuries
Watch as Coach Jason Colleran gives tips on how to win more games with less injuries and breaks down the most common injuries in baseball youth today. Coach states that more than 50% of youth players experience shoulder and elbow pain, baseball has the greatest percentage of injuries for high school sports, and that 60% of these injuries are due to overuse. Colleran explains this means players are already compromised before joining college teams, which emphasizes the importance of understanding the kinesiology of muscles at risk, proper care and training of those muscles, and innovations in protective gear. Preventative care is what keeps players healthy and performing to their full ability.
good morning everyone thank you for being here um baseball’s been a big part of my life uh feel like it got me to where I am today I was sponsored to play growing up because we couldn’t afford it so uh it really means a lot to me to keep athletes healthy I played as long as I could it got me through college and I was always injured and it got me thinking I’m doing everything my coaches tell me everything my strength coaches tell me so why am I injured every season so looking back on that I kind of got to reflect and now I understand why these things are happening so hopefully I can give you some good actionable information to help prevent these injuries so hopefully the athletes you know can last longer and not go through what we’ve all gone through um after I stopped playing baseball I went through a couple specialized skill sets with manual muscle testing so it’s all about neuromuscular and we’ll get to that a lot more with uh the motion capture talk I also learned a lot about the physics of resistance mechanics so I teach in physical therapy clinics I’ve got a lot of pts that have their masters or doctorate a lot of orthopedic surgeons um so to be able to teach them to better help their patients uh it’s an incredible experience so I’ve had a lot of stroke victims will regain function after a decade uh a lot of traumatic brain injuries so I stepped away from baseball for that time because I was so frustrated because again I I felt like I had to outwork everyone and I’m pretty sure I did but I always broke down so helping these rare medical conditions and special cases I started getting more kids coming in that were injured um so at that point you pivoted back to baseball and I thought well you know there’s got to be a way that we can offload stress externally um so this my facility opened it up in uh 2011 or 2012 I was we got about a 12,000 square foot facility so some of those clients um I do a lot of work in clinical setting so again teaching for physical therapists because it’s a skill set that they don’t have so we talk about corrective exercise a lot and I’m going to explain why corrective exercise is kind of a myth and it’s a a neurological issue that we can work on um the young man on the on the Pilates reformer was told that he would never walk again and I got him walking again so that’s actually my brother he was hit head on um on his motorcycle so that was the first time that I was able to apply this skill set and really kind of start out with micro progressions and and get him back to functioning um kid that’s doing some trunk rotation we were able to cancel his Tommy John surgery uh he was you know scheduled for surgery MRI was uh inconclusive surgeons don’t get paid to not do surgery so keep that in mind anytime that uh you know they tell you you need to go under the knife always get a second opinion um he’s been painfree started using the kinetic arm and and he’s fine uh young man that’s coming down with the trunk rotation excuse me we’ll Circle back on this with one of the athletes I’ll show later he won freshman the year in the Gulf South Conference I only took on two clients I just usually don’t have the time um we didn’t do a single bit of stretching we didn’t do a single bit of distance running we didn’t do any heavier Olympic lifting he threw 10 complete Game shutouts no arm injuries at all so we’ll talk a little bit about that too and how some of those things can contribute to the injuries that we’re seeing um pain doesn’t have to be part of the process client the wheelchair um incredible individual very little muscle function um so to be able to help people like this and and you know get people walking again to figure out what’s going on with baseball players it’s I see a lot of the correlation causation so I’d love to share as much of that as possible as I can today and then um Nas Nunes who just went the rule five draft Futures game those are my only two clients um so again we didn’t do any stretching we didn’t do any heavy lifting we definitely didn’t do any Olympic lifting or you know barbell silliness um this is my wife always told me I should be taking pictures we’ve got dozens more I’m just not a not a picture guy to me I’d rather um you know a lot of a lot of people on social media they’ll say like I did this I didn’t I didn’t do this for any of these athletes a lot of them their trainers brought them to me because they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with them so same thing when the pts and the orthopedic surgeons can’t figure out what’s wrong with their patient they’ll send them to me so that’s why I got a lot of these athletes but you’ll see a lot of a lot of title belts I’ve had a lot of world champions in multiple Sports um I’ve fought and competed in submission grappling some Muay thae boxing um for around 15 years so at this point I can say I’ve either had a rehab somebody through just about every injury you can think of um so the current state of baseball we know that over well around 50% of adolescence participating in baseball experience elbow or shoulder paint at some point during competitive season making them not just double but 7. time 7.5 times more likely to have an overuse injury down the road so to me that doesn’t sound like a success baseball is the greatest injuries in High School athletics resulting in surgery 32.3% with 60.3% of these injuries due to overuse and fatigue does that sound like a success to anyone no so by the time you’re already getting these athletes they’re compromised it’s just to what extent so that’s why we’ve really got to be careful with how we’re training them and also injuries to elbow and shoulder comprised of 53 to 63% of all injuries in baseball because of that repetitive microt trauma that repetitive strain so no matter how good your arm CARE program is and we’ll touch on this again later if you have any issue from the ground up you’re always going to exceed the stress threshold of disc connective tissue okay so again you can have the strongest arm in the world if you’ve got dysfunction at the foot the hip or the trunk this is going to go that’s just it um even without paying regularly pitching with fatigue has been associated with 36% greater odds of injury requiring surgery I don’t know how accurate that is but it’s pretty alarming um so again we’re going to talk about some of the training and things that could lead to fatigue and contribute to injuries because again like the two athletes I’ve had and and a lot that I’ve had in the past I’ve had a lot of Major League Baseball clients fly in because they’re two dozen medical professionals on staff can’t figure out what’s wrong with them because they just don’t have that skill set so also from baseball perspectives we saw elbow and shoulder’s were up 44% from just a year ago and they’re also more serious why are they dictating and designing the pitch smart program for these youth baseball players if you can’t prevent preventable injuries with two dozen medical professionals the fanciest most expensive technology that’s a big problem so we’ve got to step back and think what’s all this BS that we can cut out to keep these athletes healthy and again I’ve had several of them travel to my facility it’s not a complex issue but they overthink it a lot of people talk about um you know what is Tom Brady’s trainer doing I was asked that on a podcast one time and right away it clicked I said wait a second it’s not what he’s doing it’s what he’s not doing he’s not doing the heavy Olympic lifts he’s not doing the heavy barbs and we’ll get into why those are going to contribute to injuries um but always I always say question everything so when we talk about stretching some of these positions if I’m going up over here we’re causing impingement at the gleen humeral joint and if you do what you always done you get what you always got got and that’s going to be arms breaking down so I’m not I’m not saying that stretching is bad I’m not damning stretching I’m just saying you know there’s a time and place for it but right before you throw if you’re causing impingement and shutting things down it’s probably not the best thing to do so we’ll go over um some positional isometrics as well so we can actually turn things on and then neurologically prepare them you know for that movement rather than shutting them down and stretching them out um the dead hang stretch we see a lot of guys have that anterior til or that kind of depressed scapula so a lot of them don’t even have full range in gleen humoral flexion so if we’ve already got that muscle tension from PEC mineer pulling this tight and then we’re trying to jam this not only are we causing more impingement from a position you can’t even get to Hanging you know with your full body weight but if we’re doing this with kids think about where those forearm flexors attach right on that medial abond and that’s where we get Lally elbow so we already have a lot of stress from throwing and then we’re stretching and shutting them down right so then from there if we’re doing these hangs especially before they throw we’re already exceeding what that what that tissue can handle in that growth plate and I’ve seen a lot of evul and fractures and again pain does not have to be part of the process so we’ve we’ve just got to do a better job um hamstring stretches after all your are stretching your hamstrings why aren they hang down behind your knees because muscles don’t stretch and muscle tension is a good thing so we’ve got to step back and and change what we’re doing um you know things like the groin stretch and then we’ve got the the sleeper stretch so it’s interesting we’re always trying to stretch into external rotation so with all the stretching external rotation why is nobody’s hand going down and hitting their butt because there’s a limit to what’s efficient so if we get more external rotation naturally you’re going to have less internal rotation so when we talk about you know gleen aeral internal rotation deficit if we’re cranking this into external rotation yeah you’re going to have less internal rotation it’s just the way it works your shoulder is not on a swivel it’s not going to you know spin around 360° and we’ve got to remember that you’ve got a lot of ligaments in there that are holding that in place not to mention the rotator cuff um so it’s very very complex structure so when we’re continuously forcing that into positions that we can’t anatomically get to on our own that’s where things break so it’s also you know end layback right so we know that Peak stress happens at end range so we’ve got to take stress off these tissues every chance we get when we talk about Mobility training um people always want to increase range of motion they say they’re lengthening muscles have you ever seen muscles just hang down because there’s slack no so if we’re not changing the attachment sites but we think we’re making the muscles longer it doesn’t really make sense if you think about it so if you loosen the bolts drive your car fast what happens things are going to fall apart it’s kind of like before you go run sprints you loosen up your shoelaces it doesn’t make sense so remember muscle stabilize joints we’re going to we’re going to touch on that a lot more as well so if we do create any kind of laxity um or hypermobility and then we have to stop and change joints we’ve got to remember the way the structure in the muscular system was designed all right so if we’re trying to increase range have we prepared to train in that new Range do we even have strength to support it so again muscle stabilized joints so when we’re stretching and it can you can cause uh muscle inhibition and destabilize the structure in as little as 15 to 20 seconds so again I’m not stretching I’m just saying the dosage determines the poison and always think what is the goal some some major concerns with it especially from a young age is hypermobility so we’re actually over in College Station uh a couple nights ago had the had the pleasure of working with some high school athletes um some were pretty hypermobile and that’s probably what led to you know the ACL tears and the way they’re trying to train and they’re trying to do heavy lifting in ranges where anatomically they’re just not strong so we’re going to go over that as well is like an active you know Force production curve so we’ve got to think is that range of motion even necessary for that sport or activity in baseball we stretch just as much if not more than any other Sport and when you get injured what do they tell you stretch you bang your head against the wall and get a headache do you keep banging your head against the wall it kind of doesn’t make sense right so again what is the what is the purpose and what is the goal of of this stretching um and has there been an adequate time to develop strength within the new found range I’ve had athletes sent over from one of the top orthopedic surgeons programs um a lot of other pretty well-known physical therapists and when they come to see me they’ve been cleared to throw because they stretched and smashed and beat up you know the range of motion range of motion tells you nothing but range of motion it could be a pathological issue it could be neurological it could be structural and then you got to remember when they’re coming back from an injury neurologically the brain is going to tighten things up for a reason because it knows that going into that new Range that’s a that’s a dangerous position so these guys get cleared to throw they come to see me they still have pain and I asked them do they look at your trunk no do they look at your hip no do they assess foot function or see if your lower leg can even hold a positional contraction no so why are these guys cleared so that’s a big limitation in the skill set that the pts have um so that’s a big problem so a lot of guys will go through and we’ll see they have no active active um you know trunk rotation to their throwing side sometimes it compete to the other side a lot of these guys also have no active internal or external rotation on their Drive leg so with every degree of motion that we lose down here we try to pick it up up the chain and then we get into all this you know tpine Obsession the whole spine’s rotating unless you got a cage in your lumbar spine just say trunk rotation um it sounds cool and trendy but um and then are you sacrificing the muscle strength and contractile velocity for Mobility so again if you’re going passively into a range that you can’t actively get to are you stable there probably not so we’ve got to be really careful with how we’re applying Force when we’re training because we can really prevent injuries with just some simple things as far as range of motion um I want this to be the biggest takeaway if nothing else because when these kids come to you and ask you why aren’t we doing what these people do on social media this is the the best way to to think about it is that muscle stabilized joints so again if we’re destabilizing that structure with beating the crap out of the muscles with a a foam roller lacrosse ball what is the goal remember that muscles tighten up for a reason your brain is not playing a joke on you so it senses there’s instability it’s going to tighten that up it’s a protective mechanism so when we violate that protective mechanism now we’re more more vulnerable to injury also structure dictates function so we’ll have some good pictures of that um and always thinking you know because structure dictates function there’s a lot of ranges that we shouldn’t be training in and applying load uh we also shouldn’t be stretching into those positions as well because once you open up range there is the next joint prepared to handle that range so that’s probably why we see a lot more ACL tears and hamstring injuries um not to mention other areas of the body and then we’ll also talk about trunk rotation and you know the structure of the spine U Mobility without stability equals vulnerability so if we’re forcing Limbs and Joints into these ranges and we don’t even know if we can hold the positional contraction that’s a recipe for a disaster and again I get a lot of athletes sent from orthopedic surgeons physical therapists and they may have stretched and smashed and gotten them that range of motion and we’ll see if they can hold a positional contraction and they have nothing and I went through that after um after an injury and we’ll get into that as well so again having had a rehab somebody through just about injury every injury you can think of it’s It’s given me a lot of insight and a lot of hands-on experience so if we look at um how muscle stabilized joints at end range we have the least amount of force production so that’s why you typically don’t want to go all the way down on a bicep curl or you know all the way down on a pull-up um so as far as you know the sarcom meters or the muscle fibers um but at every joint the further you get from that mid-range so here we could say 90 Dees your Force output goes down so this is a big training consideration with uh you know heavy squats if we know we the weakest at the lowest part of the range we should either offload that or why are we doing those in the first place so if you’re tall guys remember we’ve got these longer levers mechanically we’re just never going to be good at squats and that’s okay so when I hear that uh you know a squad is an assessment why it’s not really required in baseball um and then we’ll also so this is this is it structure dictates function seated 99 hip stretch is the best way to tear your hip lab room let that sink in for a minute why are we doing it in BAS ball when are we doing this we’re not maybe catchers but I’ve had a catcher come in Scotty Madison was on that first slide he played with Bo Jackson Pete Rose Vandy Hall of Famer had uh bilateral knee Replacements they couldn’t get him to full extension I was able to do it in about 20 minutes but the next day they were going to put them under anesthesia rip everything in the way so we’ve also got to think too with these kids how much are we sacrificing their health now just to win those games cuz as you all know once your elbow or shoulder hurts from even playing at the high school level that’s that doesn’t go away that hurts you for the rest of your life so think you know if you’re a dad and you want to play with your kids or you’re training these kids or coaching these kids and someday they might want to throw with their kids or coach and want to be able to throw batting practice just think you know why are we pushing it there so you can see the the hip sockets it’s called the acetabulum we’ve got one that’s facing more to the side kind of lateral and one that’s kind of more anterior and down so when you’ve got especially these these uh popular trendy programs that are telling you you need a certain amount of Mobility I’ve had a $200 million quarterback I’ve had probably a dozen world champions and Bellator UFC submission grappling those guys require a crazy amount of flexibility none of them that have anywhere close to 90 degrees of hip internal rotation I’ve had one guy I’ve been doing this for 22 years one guy and he was a video gamer that never played any sports you try to have that guy run sprints or do something athletic it’s going to be a disaster so so not just the hip socket if we look at the femurs you can see the neck of the femur so you got the ball and then you got the neck that goes down you can see how some of the lengths are different some of the thicknesses are different but then also the angle of it so we’ve got these structural deviations that we need to always remember just because some athletes can get into that position it doesn’t mean that every athlete needs to get into that position because again structure dictates function I was at a certification way back and we’ll touch on this too and they want us to to front squat I said hey uh it’s not happening I said oh well gently force it I said stop gently and force don’t go in the same sense when we’re talking about anatomical function that’s just it’s ignorant it’s dangerous I said unless you get a a chisel and a belt sander you know we chip away some of that bone just to why do we want to get to this position anyway there’s so many other ways we could load for this exercise and then not only that how much compression is there at this joint at these joints and then also we’re just cranking those into end range and remember once those form flexors fatigue elbow stress goes up so if we’re doing this and shutting these kids down and I’ve seen it on a you know there a popular book popular program not knocking the guy but he’s got a front squat on there there’s so many different ways we can apply force with so many different tools we’ve got to get away from some of these things and then the snap it I see some of you guys have pens out go and put a pen in your top P like this very basic structure dictates function humor me for a second show me how you’re going to make contact with a baseball We Can’t Stop The Clowns but we can stop watching the circus all right so when you’ve got these kids that are coming in and then guess what the structure of the spine and those facet joints and the vertebrae you’re just asking for a lateral bulge what happens when you when you give them nerve damage or permanent structural damage again is anybody going to make contact with a baseball like this even if you go like this it’s just not going to happen so a lot of the stuff you see on social media um unfortunately gives people a voice that shouldn’t have one and I think that’s why we’re seeing a lot of injuries um and again once that kid gets injured because you know now he’s done some some damage to radi oler or elbow um then what then he can’t play all because we were chasing this new shiny concept like a fishing lure so we’ve got to remember structure dictates function please always remember that with your athletes here this guy played uh double A with the with the Astros I think it was in Corpus Christie so we’re always told that this is good for balance right good for balance stability good for your feet your lower leg um so I’m asking Shay he’s got great control you know we see a lot of physical therapists do this which is still pretty disappointing but a lot of strength coaches too so when your kids ask you you know why aren’t we doing what we see the influencers doing he doesn’t have a foot he doesn’t have a leg can somebody tell me how that’s going to build stability in your athlete when you can just compensate through the hip again there’s no foot or leg so we can compensate that’s what we do as athletes so we’re doing all this unstable and shaking things and you know having seizures with new pieces of equipment and things like that or thinking that we’re we’re going to build stability on these air bladders you’re not you’re just reinforcing compensation patterns because neurologically the brain knows if those guys aren’t fit to participate and they’re shut down from stress traum or overuse and in baseball it’s typically overuse right and then we put them on an unstable surface instability plus instability is a mess and all you’re doing is magnifying that compensation pattern and when those joints hold more tension and pull tighter you lose more range then you’re trying to beat them up smash them stretch them to get that range back so again there’s no foot or leg and he’s able to do it by compensating through his hip so think about that with you know how we’re training these athletes if there’s not a stable platform for them to adapt to you’re never going to get them more stable there’s another if we’re taking friction away or yeah removing friction from the back leg I’m sure we all wear cleat right well you kind of want to grip the ground you can stop start run faster prevent injury so if we’re trying to get that ground reaction force and push then we can also look at rotation rotation going this way is not going this way and I saw an influencer uh one of their one of their guys posting I really feel that in my back yeah you’re going to feel some hardcore arthritis and you know degenerative joint issues with uh those facet joints and the structure of the vertebrae so think structure dictates function rotation going this way is not rotation going this way I’m not saying it’s not a last second compensation but to train that it’s pretty ignorant we’ve got to do better um and it’s not you guys it’s what you guys are having to fight against you got these kids coming to you we’ve been talking to some coaches getting some great Insight of our kids ask us why we’re not doing this we tell them hey structure dictates function if I mean if you want to break your spine I joke with my athletes um you know when they start getting real into Mobility I say just jump in front of a bus break everything you’ll be the most flexible person in the world because that’s all you want right range of motion so again Mobility without stability vulnerability we’ve got to make sure we have muscle tension so with distance running um a lot of times we hear that to get the lactic acid out we’ve known since the 1930s study done the Harvard fatigue lab it’ll metabolize within about an hour so for your pitchers going back to playing while ftig you know 36 times higher risk of uh overuse injury again I don’t know how they came up with that figure but still alarming and I know firsthand because every season my arm was wrecked because I’d get there and we’d have time two mile runs or we’re having to run before or after so it’s it’s not a complex sport to train for we’re just we’re just overthinking it and a lot of what we see on social media kind of bleeds over and we think well maybe we should try that and they might have pictures with some bigname athletes okay every now and then even a blind squirrel finds a nut you know it’s we don’t hear about all the failures so just because they have a couple successes um we don’t get to hear about all the failures and we’re going to touch more on that um so again throwing while fatigued increases arm stress so if we’re doing a lot of running or conditioning before we want these guys to throw the arm’s going to have to work harder because from the ground up we’re more fatigued um so before the game it’s going to negtive negatively impact their performance and of course increased fatigue so we’re almost setting them up for failure there and the failure may not happen that day but you know what if we have more cumulated stress over time as far as that chronic workload and another another issue you guys have is uh travel ball you know you don’t know how much these kids are playing outside of what you’re doing so it kind of not to say it takes away from some things that you want to do but just something to be mindful about because you know the more fatigued you are the more stressed it’s going to be when you’re throwing um distance running after the long day of practice ice we always talk about recovery now so if they’ve already gone through this game let’s say they pitched or caught and they’re already probably pretty fatigued they’ve got to go get their recovery in so if we’re just sending them out to do some mindless running what is the point we just saw and a lot of you probably already know that the lactic acid metabolized in the body within about an hour and that’s even just sitting there sure you can get it to go away 15 to 20 minutes faster with running but we got to keep these athletes healthy another thing a lot of these guys I get um I get a lot of injured athletes from these top velocity chasing programs all the time uh one or two weeks after they blow out their arm or you know they had to have surgery as a result of that and um and when they get there the assessments are are very poor at best to put it nicely um because again I get these kids a lot I get them you know after they were injured sometimes get them before they’re injured I look at their training program a lot of them you know don’t even have that trunk rotation to their throwing side or they don’t even have retraction they’re in a poor scapular neutral position which again is going to cause impingement um so every step that we’re taking it’s kind of like having a bad alignment on a car we’ve got to check for that but if they do have some kind of asymmetry and they’re going to because it’s baseball and I’d say no human is perfectly symmetrical but the problem with that is rep after rep after rep we’re going to magnify that that compensation or that asymmetry so we’re tightening those joints up more more and then what do we do we stretch and beat the crap out of them and repeat the process so that is force into the nervous system Force into the muscular system and that’s what’s going to drive up the arm stress and lead to injuries uh maxing out in the weight room you guys have probably seen this video of um aunia they ask him you know what’s your max bench and squat he says I don’t do that it’s probably not that good of a baseball player huh if he doesn’t lift heavy um Malachi cloud Lee University in Tennessee I was talking with one of the parents um you can see some of his uh some of his accomplishments there great ball player I heard from some of the other college coaches in that conference you know he was he was uh I think he was runner up for a freshman of the year my client ended up getting it with the 10 complete Game shutouts no injuries at all no problems um so they’re in the weight room they wanted him to max out on a deadlift when in sports do we do this if we lift up one leg what happens now all of a sudden everything changes so we constantly have that pelvic shift we have trunk rotation um it’s a very explosive and dynamic sport so they want him to Max on on a deadlift again the kids got draft interest freshman he tore his labor [Music] him got the MRI torn labam can’t play you know what the coach said bummer what is the point of maxing out okay you want to know what their five rep max is let’s make it easy have them do five reps increase the weight increased the weight uh rip my Peck right off the bone from a strength coach would have never maxed out no point zero point how much do a bat we how much does a ball we so again I’ve been through that too my Peck dripped off for about two years um you know still fought in some tournaments went back to play baseball when my Peck was ripped off and the final final nail in the coffin for me we have to have that reciprocal motion but because my Peck was ripped off Peck major peek minor pulled tight so as this is cycling through I didn’t have that reciprocal motion so my hamstring ripped pretty badly so I go to the pts and they say oh your hamstring was weak incredibly ignorant statement the hamstring was working so hard and pulling so hard that that’s why it ripped we exceeded what that could do because we didn’t have that reciprocal motion um so again had I been doing a lot of a lot of distance running that would have just magnified it um with the Olympic lifting what’s the goal we’ve got to really think what’s the goal and then also on the structure dictates function part you know if we’re trying to get down into a low range why I know that when I started doing heavy lifting in high school again I’ve got longer levers so I got to produce more torque so mechanically at the bottom of a squat I suck and that’s okay it’s just it’s basic resistance mechanics so we’ve got to think about better ways to apply Force um I’ve seen a lot of injuries from the the high schools in our area the strength coaches they’ll have them use a hex bar and jump up and you know try to stop before hitting the ground so force is mass times acceleration if I place a 5B weight on my foot or I drop a 5B weight on my foot it’s the same right no so that mass times acceleration think of that so how many pounds of force if they’re jumping up and trying to stick a landing with 200 lb how much force is that and what are we risking tearing and again why what is the point it’s there’s really there’s really no point as far as the the counterproductive load adaptations the more Force we’re putting into the muscular system guess what it’s going to tighten up as an adaptation because you keep putting that load in as the stimulus all right so if you see little Meat Heads how they’re tight right because they’re always doing their bicep curls so they lose elbow flexion so if we’re doing all this heavy lifting of course the hips are going to tighten up and then we go back to the 9090 again you saw structure dictates function there’s a lot of structural deviations and differences in the shapes of these athletes bones so we just kind of repeat the cycle of you know beating them up more and more and it’s baseball let’s just we got to we got to back off and be a lot more efficient um concerns with velocity Based training again force is mass times acceleration so you know heavy or weighted balls we could be a lot more efficient with them we know that Peak stress happens as we get to and layback or Max external rotation to acceleration right and then we see studies that weighted balls can increase external rotation so if Peak stress is happening in this range back here and then we want to open that up does that sound like a good idea probably not so we’ve got a greater range where stress is higher and again structure dictates function and muscle stabilize joints so if we’re already going into a passive range and the elbow is a hinge joint does flexion extension so as it’s going back and the humorous torqus forward with the mass of this plus the ball and we’ve got that Dynamic valgus if we’re throwing with that yeah we could potentially get some good adaptations but at what cost so that’s what we’ve got to think about personally I think all the best thing we could do with them is just flip them up like this that’s it if we’re doing forearm training you know using a bar we’re missing that point of application of force that we would have with the ball with the baseball so we can flip up something heavy and then just because we don’t want to put any more extra stress on this elbow again does flexion extension so we can fire it down from here and really use our forearm flexors and there is no ver surala stress on that elbow so that’s a good way to get those those positive adaptations and respect the structure all right so again we can keep a lot of lot of stress off the connective tissue um motion capture have you ever seen a mechanic watch your car drive down the street and tell you what’s wrong inside the engine that’s not possible right so motion capture it’s a tool it’ll tell us how things are moving it doesn’t tell us why they’re moving so that’s kind of where I come in or hopefully there’s a we’ve got a great Network too so if you need help please let us know um but it tells you how it’s moving it doesn’t tell you why it’s moving so if they say okay your arm slot dropped is it gleen humeral is it scapular is it lateral flexion um had a kid from VY that was throwing 100 uh from what I hear he’s better than you know feler and and uh lighter back in the day and then he’s with the ram braak struggling to hit 91 92 so he comes in um you know been to the labs he’s had a lot of lat tears a lot of shoulder injuries so he comes in and we’re going over his injury history so I said when’s the last time you rolled your ankle of course he didn’t remember when he did but I said oh yeah it was about two years ago it’s about the time he started having issues so we do a lot of positional tests he can’t hold a single positional contraction with his foot or lower leg motion capture didn’t show that so he’s essentially standing in a sand pit trying to get ground reaction force because he can’t create a rig lever motion capture is not going to tell you things like this again it’s a tool um it’ll show you how things are moving it’s not going to show you why so with the uh Trends and fads we’ve got to get away from Brian can you please play that video here’s one so look at the end where the load ends up right here we’ve got half the load on one side of his neck half the load on the other side why are we EXP floating like that and putting all that stress on his cervical area it’s dangerous it’s ignorant it’s going to hurt these kids to post things like this it’s embarrassing it’s disappointing to baseball it really is so when we’re getting creative like that we’ve got to think what’s I mean if we just think basic resistance mechanics we can look at um you know what is the load what’s the line of force what’s the point of application of force what’s the axis moment arm lever arm so it’s very very complex but we’ve got to stop using these trendy things and trying to be explosive with them because at that end range for his cervical spine when you hurt that kid’s neck he’s probably not going to play baseball and that’s probably a lawsuit waiting to happen but that could be permanent structural damage for the rest of his life this is don’t tell me you train pro athletes when you do like this pardon my French it’s laughable what happens when one of them rolls their ankle or breaks their ankle that’s on you so this is what you coaches are having to fight against so not only that what if a kid falls and breaks his arm I’ve seen athletes get injured there’s no Integrity in this at all if you’re looking at a parent in the eye and telling them you’re going to make their kid better and that kid trusts you that parent trusts you even worse a coach trust this it’s disappointing there’s there’s no reason for this at all if a trainer did this in my facility you better have your stuff and get out the door before I get you out the door it’s it’s negligent it’s ridiculous um so we got to think about you know what these popular programs are doing and then again there’s no accountability biot 10 security big buzz word means everything’s connected there you go uh the more we hear these big words there’s an absence of logic and understanding of resistance mechanics and it’s quite obvious uh we talk about fascia people always want to site you know Tom Myers from Anatomy trains and he says he’s pulling pulling uh back you know top speed and reverse because it doesn’t do half the things that people say it does and also again range motional requirements any anybody who loves to clean to the word fascia it would take well over 2,000 lbs of force that that’s that’s what they’ve stretched with and you don’t even get a 1% change in length and depending on the tissue muscle or tendon a 1% change in length is a strain or a sprain so is that what you’re going for is anybody in here capable of producing over 2,000 lounds of force go with probably not if you put that Force into an athlete what do you think is going to happen something’s going to break so we see that um you know very large forces outside normal physiological range are required to produce even 1% compression 1% Shear in tfl fascia lot and planer fascia so it’s just not going to happen um so I can share this paper with anybody and everybody who’s interested because again if we’re talking about these things it means they don’t understand resistance mechanics and that’s a big problem and that’s why we’re seeing all this creative things that are that are going to injure athletes um baseball Innovations used to be played Without a glove uh so we’re getting a lot of hands breaking a lot of fingers breaking um so they invented the glove and they called it [ __ ] mittens and said it was unmasculine right so we have this Force so this was to solve that problem and absorb the force this is kind of like a like a car shock this would be a compression force so having these kids come in injured with the skill set knowing every superficial muscular attachment uh structure function even the physical six resistance mechanics having these kids come in I thought okay I’ve I’ve got to do something because I know we can offload stress externally again that’s a passive range we know where Peak stress is the highest and that’s how I come up with the kinetic arm so we’ve got a muscle on our lower body called the Sartorius and I’m talking with one of those influencers um you know I was kind of mentioning earlier um I asked him do you know where that attaches no asked him if he knew where other muscles attached no so again it’s just a reminder um that a lot of what’s doing been been going on doesn’t need to happen so with this we can we go back into that passive range now we can offload stress in that passive range we can also also uh off stress from that posterior shoulder so what the kinetic arm does it’s not going to let the arm lag behind and then if you have that anterior tilt now we’re getting posterior impingement with this posterior chromin on that humoral head so it’s going to create more of a distraction Force so it’s going to cause biceps seniz and a SLAP tear so now we can use has an active constraint and prevent that not to mention reducing that Dynamic valgus got a lot of great research uh University Texas at Tyler that an athlete with a SLAP tear put it on them is able to finish out the season painfree I’m not saying put this on your injured athletes I’m just saying it’s a great tool you can use it for uh you know chronic workload management um definitely for injury prevention if you want to get the safe and sustainable velocity increases if your kids are set on Chuck and weighted balls it’s a great way you can offload stress and uh potentially get that you know positive adaptation without as much risk um so and then long toss as well it’s a great way to train the body from the ground up so they can throw harder and not wreck the arm uh the pro guys that use it they say when they use it in in between starts it cuts their recovery time almost in half um we’ve got coaches that use it to throw batting practice 300 balls every other day 75y Old Coach nowhere in pain um so it’s a great tool so to keep your athletes healthy and again you don’t know what they’re doing in travel ball you don’t know what they’re doing on their own with their friends you don’t know what they’re doing um at some of these facilities um then you’ll see Britney D’s nameing on there too with the American baseball biomechanics uh Society so I’d love to keep in touch um we can do a followup after this they said there’s another room we can go to so if you guys have time I’d love to show you some of the positional isometrics so instead of a reverse throw where our shoulders already in a compromised position and again forces mass times acceleration we’re exploding from here we still have stress that’s a distraction Force at the shoulder and the elbow right we already have enough stress arms are break it down already we don’t need to do that if we retract abduct and apply Force there and we’ll go over the sequence and how much force to produce and then how neurologically we can get um you know the post activation potentiation and we’ll we’ll save the the big words for for down there I don’t use those to try to impress people um again that’s a lack of Education when you hear things like that um but keep in touch with love to help out any way we can um thank you guys very much for your time and if you have any questions I’d love to love to follow up and answer them in the other room