Posts Tagged baseball
Appropriate Energy System Development
(Alternate title: Why running long distances is a bad idea for baseball pitchers.)
As high school tryouts commence and spring training games begin, pitchers all over the nation are running poles after they throw their long toss or their bullpens. Coaches are making their kids run 30 minutes at the end of tryouts just to gauge “fitness” and weed out the bad apples, assuming the ones who can’t display shows of endurance over long runs are not fit to play baseball. This practice has got to stop.
The common arguments on both sides of the aisle are:
- Pro-long distance running: It builds endurance for pitchers and helps them to pitch longer into games!
- Anti-long distance running: When’s the last time you ran the ball across the plate?
While the second argument is a bit more funny, it doesn’t address the logical fallacies of the first argument. As such, this ends up being a circular argument and neither side gets much done.
At best, long distance running is mildly useful to the completely untrained athlete (and remember what I said about untrained athletes in my post about P90x – anything works, but that doesn’t make it a good idea) to extremely detrimental for advanced athletes. The most likely result of running long distances is simply wasting the athlete’s time when he can be doing more sport-specific work or training in more efficient ways.
Eric Cressey wrote a post about this subject, but I’d like to go more in-depth on the topic he covered with this statement:
Reason #6: Inappropriate Intensities
In what was – at least in my eyes – a landmark study, McCarthy et al. (1995) looked at “compatibility” of concurrent strength training and endurance training. Traditionally, the attenuation of strength and power gains has been a big issue when endurance exercise is added to a strength training program. As I noted in Cardio Confusion, these researchers found that strength and power loss was only an issue when the intensity of the endurance exercise was greater than 75% of heart-rate reserve (HRR) (4). I can guarantee you that the majority of pitchers who are running distances are doing so at well over 75% HRR.
As I’ll note in my recommendations at the conclusion of this article, I strongly feel that the secret is to stay well above (circa-maximal sprinting, in other words) or below (70% HRR, to play it safe) when implementing any kind of running. The secret is to avoid that middle area where you don’t go slow and don’t go fast; that’s where athletes get SLOW! And, ideally, the lower-intensity exercise would be some modality that provides more mobility benefits.
“Inappropriate intensity” is the exact phrase I use all the time with my pitchers (and coaches I talk to) in explaining to them that long-distance running is a giant waste of time for them. The metabolic energy systems can be viewed as a spectrum: On one end, we have aerobic training that utilizes triglycerides and oxygen to fuel a workout that is long in duration. On the other end, we have two types of anaerobic training that utilizes creatine phosphate or glycolysis to regenerate/recycle ATP (adenosine triphosphate). ATP is the very source of energy – remember that!
For very intense and short duration efforts – 40 yard dash, throwing a fastball, a set of 5 squats – ATP is recycled by creatine phosphate. This is commonly called “anaerobic” work. But remember, there are two types of anaerobic “training.” For efforts that are intense but slightly longer in duration – 400m dash, a set of 20 squats – glycogen molecules are broken down into glucose (glycogenolysis) and eventually turned into ATP for energy. For efforts low in intensity and long in duration – long-distance running/jogging/cycling – ATP is produced through a complicated series of events called the Krebs cycle which essentially transforms fatty acids into ATP with the use of oxygen.
Whew! If you made it this far, you can already probably tell that aerobic training is not specific to baseball pitchers (or hitters, actually) at all. All efforts in baseball involve short bursts of intense effort – throwing a fastball, swinging a bat, stealing a base, bolting after a line drive hit in the gap, fielding a one-hop sharp grounder, throwing to first base, picking a ball out of the dirt, sprinting to cover home plate… you get the idea.
Interestingly enough, training a baseball player’s energy systems are very similar to training a sprinter’s energy systems – we use plyometric jump boxes, short ladder sprints, interval training (on the AirDyne, Concept2 rower, or just sprint intervals), and our favorite new toy, the weight sled:
So believe it or not, training to reduce your 60 yard dash time, 20 yard shuttle time, and jack up your vertical leap (3 out of 4 of the metrics on the SPARQ Baseball test, by the way) will go a long way in making you a better baseball player… and could increase your VO2max better than long-distance running could!
“What,” you say? “You just said that training anaerobically was the best way to train a baseball player… how could that increase an aerobic metric like VO2max?”
Enter… the Tabata Training Method. In a groundbreaking study published in 1996, a Japanese exercise scientist named Dr. Izumi Tabata concluded that “…moderate-intensity aerobic training that improves the maximal aerobic power does not change anaerobic capacity and that adequate high-intensity intermittent training may improve both anaerobic and aerobic energy supplying systems significantly, probably through imposing intensive stimuli on both systems.”
This meant that running long-distances with moderate intensity didn’t help anaerobic efforts, but interval training (20 seconds max effort, 10 seconds rest for 4 minutes as Dr. Tabata defined it) not only improved both energy systems, but that interval training was better at improving VO2max than simply training with moderate intensity efforts!
We’ll talk more about Tabata methods and interval training in a future post, but what you need to know is that long-distance running isn’t going to help you last longer on the mound because “endurance” is specific to the task. Maybe those guys saying “you don’t run the ball across the plate” had something after all…
P90x for Baseball?
In an excellent (and controversial) post about Crossfit for baseball athletes, Eric Cressey talked about why Crossfit’s Workout of the Day is a poor way to train for baseball for many reasons. One such reason was:
3) I have huge concerns about poor exercise technique in conditions of fatigue in anyone, but these situations concern me even more in a population like baseball players that has a remarkably high injury rate as-is. The fact that 57% of pitchers suffer some sort of shoulder injury during each season says something. Just think of what that rate is when you factor in problems in other areas, too! The primary goal should not be entertainment or variety (or “muscle confusion,” for all the morons in pro baseball who call P90X their “hardcore” off-season program). Rather, the goals should be a) keeping guys on the field and b) safe performance enhancement strategies (in that order).
Not only is this an excellent point, but the bolded section (emphasis mine) deserves an in-depth look as well.
P90x is a popular training system sold on infomercials and targets the young adult population from ages 18-30, who unsurprisingly have a lot of dispensable income and are predisposed to watching a lot of television. P90x’s secret?
The secret behind the P90X system is an advanced training technique called Muscle Confusion™, which accelerates the results process by constantly introducing new moves and routines so your body never plateaus, and you never get bored!
Let’s just get this out of the way: This statement is stupid.
Problem One: Constantly introducing new moves and routines on a daily basis ensures that you are unable to accurately track your progress throughout the program.
For those unaware of what P90x looks like, here’s a sample infomercial with their exercises:
You’ll notice a lot of light DB and bodyweight exercises done in rapid succession with a clock timing you.
Problem Two: P90x incorporates little – if any – heavy resistance training to build strength. Contrary to popular belief, strength is not some nebulous word that you throw around and occasionally combine with the word “core.” Strength is binary – it is the answer to the question “Did I move this heavy object that weighs X pounds?” You cannot build strength effectively without the ability to appropriately load an exercise that works your body’s musculature with compound movements. This typically ends up involving barbells and exercises like the squat, deadlift, bench press, press, and rows.
I happen to have a copy of the training schedule (given to me by a friend who failed to complete the program), and while I won’t reproduce it in its entirety, suffice to say that you are “training” six days a week with a single rest day that involves some light yoga and/or stretching.
Problem Three: Any exercise program that has you training hard for six days in a row will eventually lead to overtraining, a phenomenon I discussed in an earlier blog post.
Let’s get to baseball-specific problems with P90x, shall we?
P90x works your body in segments – isolating body parts over given days. Day 1 might be a “Chest and Back” workout while Day 5 is a “Shoulders and Arms” workout. The problem with this approach is that baseball (and every other sport out there, really) is not an isolation-based sport. Training your body to work via isolated movements will have little – if any – carryover to athletic competition. Strength, conditioning, and overall fitness is best built through compound movements that are capable of moving heavy weight through multi-joint activities – just like you would in any sport!
Problem Four: Isolation-based training – which P90x is – has little carryover to athletic competition.
While P90x can lead to building instabilities and promote dysfunction through isolated movements, I’m not terribly worried about the injury factor that it can absolutely lead to in baseball players (particularly pitchers). Why? Because P90x uses movements that necessitate low resistances, and so not much is getting done.
I can already see your responses: “But Kyle,” you say, “my completely sedentary and untrained friend did P90x Lean and got in much better shape over 90 days! Take that!”
There’s an easy response to this – and one that I hope everyone who reads my blog understands and memorizes. They are the three tenets of exercise science, and they are:
1. Everything works.
2. Some things work better than others.
3. Nothing works forever.
P90x for completely untrained individuals fall directly under the first bullet point. Training 3-4 times a week while focusing on squats, deadlifts, chin-ups, rows, explosive movements, and a focus on mobility fall directly under the second bullet point. And Olympic athletes who are trying to increase their Clean and Jerk from 212 kg to 214 kg in the matter of four years fall under the third bullet point.
If you take a completely sedentary individual and have them run 2 miles a day, every other day, their one-rep max (1RM) squat will go up. Does this mean running is the best way to increase your squat? No. It means that for individuals who don’t train and who have bodies completely unadapted to stress that anything will work.
While I’m not a fan of cookie-cutter workouts for baseball athletes, if you absolutely must get a program from someone – and you’re an untrained novice – do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe and Lon Kilgore. It’s a must-own for anyone who takes strength training seriously anyway, so you might as well pick it up and follow the program. If you’re a baseball pitcher, I’d advise against overhead pressing and possibly switching the low-bar back squat for front squats or the high-bar back squat, but those are modifications you can make after you read the book and start to understand the basics of exercise science.
Friends don’t let friends do P90x. Just say no, kids.
Video: Should Pitchers Overhead Press?
Another great video by Eric Cressey about pressing for overhead throwing athletes – this time, he focuses on overhead pressing. Short and to the point – definitely check it out.
Is Resistance Band Work Overrated?
Resistance band work (also known as “tubing”) seemingly makes up the core component of any pitcher’s exercise routine – from the high school athlete right up to the professional big league hurler. Programs like ASMI’s Thrower’s Ten get tons of praise for preventing and rehabbing throwing-related injuries to the shoulder and elbow. It’s often called a “strengthening” program to help your rotator cuff withstand the high forces involved in throwing a baseball, and more importantly, decelerating the pitching arm muscles in a safe manner.
But is resistance band work overrated? That’s a really scary question to ask, and many people (perhaps including you) will have the same kneejerk response: Heck no! I want to make it clear that I believe that resistance band work makes up a lot of what we do at Driveline Baseball – especially with regards to scapular stabilization and mobilization work. An exercise that every athlete does on my program are band pull-aparts:
Eric Cressey recently posted a very interesting article that served as the catalyst for my post – Clearing up the Rotator Cuff Controversy. In it, he said:
1. The true function of the rotator cuff is to stabilize the humeral head on the glenoid (shoulder socket). While external rotation is important for deceleration of the crazy internal rotation velocity seen with throwing, it’s stabilization that we’re really after. As you can see, the humeral head is too large to allow for great surface area contact with the glenoid.
My feeling is that the bigger muscles – particularly scapular stabilizers, the core, and the lower half - will decelerate the crazy velocities we see as long as mechanics are effective and the deceleration arc is long enough.
2. The shoulder internally rotates at over 7,000°/s during acceleration; that’s the fastest motion in all of sports. There’s no way that the rotator cuff muscles alone with their small cross-sectional area can decelerate it. And, to take it a step further, there isn’t much that some rubber tubing is going to do to help the cause…
(emphasis mine)
I absolutely agree with Eric, especially the bolded parts. The rotator cuff is very important, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. That’s why it astounds me when my clients come to me saying that they do a lot of light dumbbell work and pull tons of resistance bands every day, but haven’t done a squat or deadlift in their entire life! Pitchers need to build maximum strength in their lower half and their back; while they can skimp out on pressing movements (and likely should avoid straight bar pressing or overhead presses of any kind during the season), they need to prioritize squats, deadlifts, rows, and pulling variants to develop musculature that will help support the deceleration phase of pitching in addition to adding a few miles per hour onto that fastball!
So, in short, yes, I do think that resistance band / rotator cuff work is overrated. While baseball is coming around to the idea that maximum strength training (with appropriate modifications, of course) is useful, youth athletes typically suffer from their high school coaches’ ignorance of the benefits of training for strength and power. Too many HS athletes go into the season with instructions to pull tubes, throw light medicine balls, and run long distances, and when they break down in-season or even get injured, the coaches just say that they didn’t work hard enough on conditioning!
I’ll say it again: Maximum strength training MUST be prioritized in the months leading up to the baseball season, and pitchers should seek to maintain strength levels as best as possible in-season while switching over to a more injury-preventative program to reduce stress and load during competition.
Compound Movements: Use Them!
In your strength training regimen – be it off-season or in-season – you should be prioritizing compound movements. This means full-body exercises that utilize a lot of muscle mass in your prime movers. Good examples include the squat, deadlift, clean, snatch, bench press, press, pull-ups, chin-ups, rows, and many others.
I would like to make it clear that these compound movements should absolutely not be done with machines. By using machines instead of free weights (barbells, dumbbells, plates, kettlebells, etc), you are giving your stabilizer muscles nothing to do; the machine controls the plane of movement rather than your bones, ligaments, tendons, and muscles. Additionally, you get less central nervous system (CNS) response from this type of work. Even worse: These machine-based “exercises” barely transfer over to athletic competition.
Useless.
Staying away from machines is a good first step. However, there are plenty of “bros” in the gym who are doing equally silly things with dumbbells or barbells in order to pump up their “beach” muscles. Exercises like curls, leg extensions, lateral raises, and tricep kickbacks have no place in an athlete’s training program (with few exceptions for intermediate-to-advanced lifters). They simply do not stimulate enough muscle to gain appreciable strength, and the muscles they do work are worked in isolation, rather than an integrated movement.
Does this look like an isolated movement?
Baseball does not use isolated movements in competition. In fact, very few sports do. Effective athletes learn to use their entire body efficiently to produce the most force possible to throw the ball harder, to hit a ball farther, to hit an opposing lineman harder, to jump higher for a rebound, and so forth. Isolating muscle groups has very little carryover to athletic competition – as such, these exercises should be used sparingly or omitted entirely.
Though I said I wouldn’t give out programs or workouts for free, I’ll show you what the offseason training for one of my clients (a HS Varsity infielder) has been over the past few weeks to show you that I practice what I preach:
- Monday: Back squat (3×5), DB Neutral-Grip Bench Press (3×5), Deadlift (1×5), Chin-Ups (3 sets to failure)
- Tuesday: Batting cage session
- Wednesday: DE Box squat (8×3), DB Push Press (3×5), Power Clean (5×3), Push-Ups (3 sets to failure), Light medball work
- Thursday: Volume medball work, Batting cage session
- Friday: Back squat (3×5), DB Neutral-Grip Bench Press (3×5), DB One-Arm Rows (2×10), One-Arm Suitcase Deadlift (2×5), Pull-Ups (3 sets to failure)
- Saturday: Skills day – grounders, flyballs, drills, etc. Agility/sprint training.
- Sunday: Light medball work and light long toss
On Wednesdays we’ll occasionally substitute the snatch for the clean depending on his progression, and we occasionally do full cleans with a jerk or substitute thrusters for more power output. The above program should be seen as a template that is flexible, but the overall message should not be lost – train for strength and power. It’s also worth noting that we do a comprehensive dynamic warmup with foam rolling (self-myofascial release) and mobility exercises before every workout, and some static stretching after it.
As we get closer to tryouts and the season, he’ll cut out Wednesday’s lifting session in favor of more sprint-based training, skills training, and a long run (2+ miles). I’m not a big fan of distance running for baseball players, but long-range cardio fitness has carryover to athletic competition, and his coach does like to make his players run long distances at practice, so he should be prepared for it – however dumb it may be.
Keeping Strength in the Strength Program
Bill Starr wrote an excellent article about prioritizing strength training in our sports. It’s a quick six-page read, yet it contains insightful wisdom that I wholly agree with and preach on a daily basis. Strength training is not easy, nor is it comfortable, but as Bill said himself in the paper, “Whenever you make a strength program easier, you will get weaker.”
Merry Christmas, everyone! With the HS season coming up soon, I hope you’re all on a good strength training program and have started to stretch your arms out! If not, get on that before the new year starts!
Overtraining: A Serious Problem
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Conditioning month is meant to bring out the best in the high school athlete. It’s a punishing routine, often run twice per day at obscene hours (5 AM morning session, 6 PM evening session) where the men are separated from the boys. The morning session involves running 2 miles to “warm up,” followed by intense 100 meter sprints and other plyometric work. Puking is common and is taken as a sign that the workout is hard enough and the coach is doing his job.
In the evening, the players convene for skill work – the soccer players run hours of foot skill drills, exhausted from the morning session, while the football players practice hitting and tackling if they’re not in the weight room performing quarter-squats with 600 pounds on their back. Basketball players are running ladders, suicides, testing their vertical leap, and jumping over plyometric hurdles – all the while feeling a burning sensation in their shins but unwilling to speak up to the coach about it. Because after all, no one wants to think that you’re not tough enough, right?
Wrong.
High school coaches are singlehandedly responsible for dogging their athletes and pushing them well past their physical, mental, and psychological limitations. The ones who succeed on these absurd five-day-a-week programs with four or more hours of intense work are the genetic freaks, the ones who are truly the outliers. The ones who fail and suffer injuries are deemed “weak” and not worthy of making the team. The rest plod through it, nursing their “soreness” (in actuality, these are injuries), icing their bodies, and sleeping for hours on end, hoping the pain will go away in time for the season to start. Athletes lose 30 pounds in a month, slash their 40 yard dash time, and increase the weights on their squats that closely resemble a bad leg press rather than a true full squat. Progress was made – the ends justify the means.
Wrong.
High school athletes are often rank novices – they are thoroughly unadapted to stress and can be pushed to their limit every time they train because they have no previous experience! Novices do not get stronger when they train, they get stronger when they recover. Overtraining is when you push an individual past his limitations and do not respect the time it takes to recovery from a workout that disrupts homeostasis. Overloading is when you design a program that disrupts homeostasis – good programs overload, but do not overtrain.
An example of an excellent novice program is that of Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength – the novice lifter works every other day, increasing the weight on all of his lifts (Back Squat, Press, Bench Press, Deadlift, Power Clean) every session. This is the linear progression model. The athlete gets one day off between workouts and two on the weekends, though adding a “metabolic conditioning” workout on one of those days is not a terrible idea (as long as there is one day of recovery before the next heavy lifting day).
Training for Novices (aka High School Athletes)
The ideal novice training cycle looks something like this:
- Load phase. This leads to exhaustion and a disruption in homeostasis.
- Recovery phase. This allows the body to recover and rest.
- Supercompensation phase. This is where the body gets stronger and adapts to the stresses placed on it in the Load phase.
The first step is then repeated. However, if the load phase is started too late after supercompensation, then the effects are mitigated and the athlete may return to the base level of fitness. Confused? This excellent graph from Footballdrills.com should help:
More after the jump…
Are all novices the same?
In the world of exercise physiology and science, there are four levels of training – Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, and Elite. These levels represent the trainee’s ability to recover from workouts and adapt to the stress levels imposed on them by their training. Everyone who starts on a good strength training protocol will be a novice, even if they’ve bench pressed and curled a lot in their past. The amount of stress needed to produce an adaptation for a novice trainee is small enough that they can recover from in it 48 hours. They progress from workout to workout and require very basic programming.
Nearly everyone that I train has been a novice, and as such, they are all put on very similar programming. All novice trainees at Driveline Baseball will follow a program similar to Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength program with concessions and adaptations for baseball players (example: substituting dumbbell bench press for barbell bench press).
The front squat: Commonly used at Driveline Baseball.
All trainees will definitely perform some variant of the following exercises: Squat, Overhead Press, Bench Press, Deadlift, Row, and Chin-Ups/Pull-Ups. As an example of a squat variant, most of the pitchers will use the front squat, as this is a lot easier on the shoulders than the traditional back squat. Additionally, all trainees will perform some sort of Rate of Force Development exercise – speed squats, deadlifts, power cleans, power snatches, medball cleans, medball slams, and so forth.
In personal training, it’s very important to fit the programming to the individual. However, it’s also important to note that all novices are virtually the same when it comes to programming needs – they all require basic compound-lift-centric programming that they can recover from within 48 hours. Novices can recover quickly and make rapid gains, and to waste this precious time in the training cycle would be a grave error.
Concessions for individuals can be made based on sport-specific and anatomical needs – substituting the front squat for the back squat, for example – but trainers should never lose focus on the end goal: Rapid gains throughout the compound lifts that make up the majority of the program.
So, to answer this blog post’s question – Are all novices the same? – the answer is “Yes. For the most part.”
Measuring Hip Internal Rotation
A big thanks goes out to Eric Cressey, who answered my question about how to measure Hip Internal Rotation using a goniometer.
We use the goniometer all the time at Driveline Baseball and we look forward to more accurately measuring HIR to check for imbalances in our athletes!
New Equipment at Our Facility!
I’m happy to announce that we just added a full massage table and some more corrective exercise equipment to our Seattle facility for our baseball athletes! It will now be much easier to measure internal/external rotation of the hips and shoulders to check for rotation deficits and to provide corrective exercises and techniques to help address those problems.
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