Andro and ATC...here's great read, can you all help us understand some of this?

The interview with Mike Robertson is the content of which I'm speaking.
http://ericcressey.com/newsletter108html

 

Cressey Article

SoutherNo1:

Hope you and your son are well.

Eric Cressey is a young man with a brilliant mind. I have followed his career for a while now. What I really appreciate about Eric is his attention to prevention before performance. What I mean by this is he identifies areas that are impaired in terms of movement and corrects those before he begins any type of "traditional" strength and conditioning.

With that being said...

What I believe EC is getting at here is the old addage "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". EC promotes looking at the body from an athletic movement standpoint. If something isn't moving athletically, then he suggests you improve that area before moving on. This is the equivalent of the pyramid I shared on an early post...
http://www.athletictrainingandconditioning.com/conditioningphilosophy.html

Another thing that I like about EC is he looks at the whole body vs. just the arm. His comment to the effect of the cuff and labrum issues in pitchers are often the result of some other movement dysfunction is exactly the thought process behind some of the previous posts I've shared. The body was created to work in an efficient and sequential manner. When we allow the efficiency and sequencing to digress, the body begins to attempt to compensate in some other manner.

Think of it this way... how many legos can you stack on top of one another before the stack falls down? Well if you build a wide/stable base, you can stack quite a few ontop of one another. However, if you do not have a stable base and you start connecting the legos "off-center" from one another, more sooner than later the legos will come tumbling down.

So if our building blocks within our bodies are not on a good foundation and they are not optimally placed ontop of each other for proper sequencing, our pitcher's become injured.

One of the things I spoke with you about that EC touches on is the opposite hip. If the opposite hip isn't strong/stable enough then there is a tendency for the hip to go outwards, the knee goes inwards, the trunk tries to compensate and more times than not the end result is a dropped elbow into the danger zone.

The tight shoulder has all kinds of implications. As mentioned in a previous post, there are over 20 muscles that affect the shoulder. Each of them have different lines of pull which means you can have different lines of tightness. Depending on which muscle is tight, your shoulder will behave in a certain inefficient way. What did we say about what inefficiency leads to? It leads to compensation. What does compensation lead to? It leads to potential injury.

For example, let's look at the lat muscle. The lat is an internal rotator of the shoulder. Since we've already determined via earlier posts and http://www.athletictrainingandconditioning.com/Video_Analysis.html a great deal of our pitchers have been instructed to be arm throwers. Arm throwers use the lat muscle a great deal as they try to internally rotate their arm forcefully to propel the ball. Since the lat is used to propel the ball in a concentric (shortening) contraction, it tightens up or becomes shortened over time. If the lat is shortened, the effect on the shoulder is a pitcher can't raise their arm high enough to get the elbow out of the danger zone. Additionally, a tight lat restricts external rotation. Why is external rotation important? External rotation (along with scapular depression) is needed to create kinetic energy (stretching the rubberband to shoot it across the room). So a tight lat can create a potential injury at the elbow and cost velocity all at the same time.

One more example... the thorasic spine (upper back) needs to be mobile. With the our college pitchers in class all day hunched over and our younger pitchers playing video games (or similiar posture producing activity) the thorasic spine forgets how to work with the scapula to create and store the needed kinetic energy to unleash the baseball.

EC speaks about the lower extremities as well. Simply summarized is that since a pitcher's energy is going towards home plate (hopefully in a purposeful direction), the back side of a pitcher's body is needed to control this violent action. Without this "check-rein" the body can sense it doesn't have the capacity to slow itself down. Therefore, it won't create anymore energy than it knows it can handle.

Hope this helps.

Would be happy to speak with anyone via PM or email (mailto:[email protected]) if you have a personal/private question.

Good thread topic SoutherNo1!

 

Outstanding...great job, ATC!

 

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