Essentials of Baseball Performance

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At Building Better Athletes, we got our start working with primarily baseball athletes, in particular pitchers.  About half of our population is baseball athletes, we work as the Sports Performance Specialists for an area University pitching staff, and we regularly consult with baseball teams/clubs on proper development and care of baseball athletes.

For anybody who has worked intensively with baseball athletes knows the unique demands baseball presents and conversely how specific and specialized the training for these athletes needs to be.  You can definitely mess up a baseball player by performing wrong things in the weight room.  The interplay and intricacy of throwing/pitching and hitting is very detailed and throwing un-needed stresses or quarks into the interplay is a recipe for disaster.

It's always interesting to see athletes comes to us, whether it be HS or college, and they describe their previous or even current training program to us, and literally it could be considered negligence on behalf of the coach/team.  Many of the things we see, especially depending on the quality of coaching, are probably doing more harm than good and setting many of their athletes up for failure or injury.

Then we ask if their is any individualization in the program or if the coach has ever seen you with your shirt off and evaluated your glenoid-humeral movements, thoracic spine movement, or rib cage/lumbar spine relationship to overhead movement.  To this day, we've never had an athlete tell us yes to either one of those questions and it's funny because this information should be directly used to what the training program should look like.

If an athlete has a depressed scapula, then things like deadlifts, farmer walks, Olympic lifts, and cueing down and back are all wrong.  If an athlete has valgus sign at the elbow, then things like Snatch's, Jerk's, barbell Back Squat, and most OH lifting should be avoided.  If an athlete presents anterior tilt and protraction of their scapula, then benching is a big no-no.  The list goes on and on, yet we never see a HS and even many college programs take any of this into consideration, and it's no wonder their athletes are searching elsewhere because they don't see actual on-field performance enhancement or they got hurt. 

Go Get 'Em!