I got a kick out of this man Elliot  running around calling everyone a “beautiful rotational athlete.” Interesting guy.

Now, I DO think he knows what he is doing, but he acts like his new program is a whirlwind of modern science – it isn’t. Good trainers have been doing for years what he is now introducing as revolutionary, and the training isn’t nearly as complex as he makes it out to be…case in point: he pulls out a chart of Dustin Ackley’s power curve, then a minute later shows one of their players doing lateral hops.  Wow! All that technology boils down to…..lateral hopping. Lateral hopping is a good plyometric for pitchers but lets, please, not act like it’s never been done before. That could have been prescribed without dropping a dime on sophisticated software.

And take a look around this “bare” weight room. Little equipment? Hardly; they just removed the superfluous machines that no good trainer would keep around. The good things (and heavy, at that) are still there – squat racks and a lot of dumbbells. And the pulley systems are pretty expensive, despite being minimalistic, so I don’t like them pretending like it’s the gym Rocky trained in.

But Hooray for the Mariners, they do seem to have found someone who at least knows something, even if he is playing it up a bit too much.

First, get some blood flowing. 5 minutes of moving around at a good pace to build some muscle and joint warmth will improve all of the stretches.

I am listing these exercises in the most fluid and logical sequence, so do them in this order and they will flow together nicely.

1. IT Band

IT Band Stretch

The IT band is an aponeurosis, or flat tendon band, that stretches from the lateral hip to the knee. This is tight on many athletes, and can restrict the thigh in multiple planes of movement, as well as cause knee problems.

To stretch, straighten one leg and cross the other in front. Lean into a wall while keeping the stretching leg straight, and you will feel a stretch down the outside of the leg.

2. Hip External Rotators

Hip External Rotator Stretch - Finish Position

If you don’t know why you should be stretching these, check out my article on hip flexibility. This hits the external rotators hard.

Keep your feet flat, toes facing forward. Bottom of the feet never leave the ground. Bring your knees toward the midline of you bottom as far as you can, and hold.

3. Sleeper Stretch

Sleeper Stretch

From the external rotator stretch, roll right onto your side into the sleeper stretch. If you haven’t read my article on performing this properly, make sure you do…

4. Thoracic Spine Mobility

From the sleeper stretch position, stay on your side and pull your hips up to 90 degrees.

5. No Money

Sit up and cross your legs indian-style. This will help open up your hips as you perform the No Money, which stretches the chest and activates the scapulas.

Start

Pin your elbows to your side, and open your arms up as far as they will go, keeping your elbows at 90. Hold at the finish position.

Finish

6. Sumo Squat

Sumo Squat

Stand up. What you started while sitting indian-style will improve as you perform the sumo squat. Widen your feet beyond shoulder-width and squat, getting your thighs parallel with the floor. If you can do this easily, widen your feet for your next two repetitions (more on sets and reps at the end). This doesn’t feel good, but opens up your hips laterally.

7. Warrior Lunge

Warrior Lunge

Move to a box, bench or whatever, and put one foot on it, keeping one foot on the ground. With arms overhead, lean in as far as you can to stretch your hip flexors.

8. Quad-Lunge

Quad Lunge. Notice the Knee is Behind the Hip

Kneel in a lunge position behind said box or object, and position your back knee BEHIND your back hip. Pull your back foot to your butt and lean forward into the stretch. This is the mack daddy of quad and hip flexor stretches.

9. Spiderman with/hamstring kickback

Big Step to Hand then reach to floor with forearm

Kick your knee back to straighten, and lift your front toe

Move into a pushup position, and bring your right foot up next to your right hand. Lean into the floor with your right forearm parallel to the ground. Next, plant your right hand OUTSIDE your right foot, and kick your right knee backward while lifting your right toe off the ground. The goal is to straighten the right leg. Return foot when done, and repeat on left side.

10. Calf and Soleus

Stay in pushup position, and cross the right foot over the left, and shift weight back while keeping leg straight to stretch the left calf. Then, slightly bend the left leg and continue stretching, to hit the soleus muscle and ankle.

11. Shoulder Joint / Lats

From pushup position, go to your knees. Lay your forearms on the floor in front of you, parallel to each other. Keep the forearms completely on the floor and push your hips and weight back. You will feel a good stretch through your armpit region. Arise when finished.

12. Triceps / Lats

Triceps / Lat Stretch

Make your arm into a chicken wing above your head, and pull your elbow across the midline of your body. You’ve done this since middle school gym class.

13. Shoulder stretches

Arm Across. This gets the posterior deltoid and rotator cuff muscles.

Arm behind, pull at the elbow in line with the forearm. This gets the middle deltoid

Arm back and down. This hits the anterior deltoid. Gently pull the arm down straight from the wrist and keep your posture tall and upright.

14. Forearm flexors and extensors

Flexors: Point fingers to sky and pull palm and fingers back.

Extensors: Point fingers down and press the hand down toward the bottom of the forearm.

Note the author's disgusting range of motion. Actual stretching results may vary.

So there ya have it. Run through those stretches and you will be loose and ready to go. Every exercise should be done 2-3 times with a 20-30 second hold in the stretched or finish position. Problem areas might need more attention, and very loose areas may not need as much.

There is research out there saying that static stretching reduces a muscle’s capacity for contraction immediately after, but the harm done from inflexibility, especially in pitchers, is much more serious than that concern, which is negligible at best. A good dynamic warm up with CNS activation after stretching should wake your muscles up just fine. I usually run through this stretching routine 1-1.5 hours before a start, then start my dynamic warm up 35-40 minutes before a game.  If you’re a reliever, then doing this before the game starts or early on in the bullpen is probably the way to go. This same routine can be done after an outing as well, either in whole or in part with emphasis on your tightest joints.

Working at a serious baseball academy is giving me the opportunity to run these things through a gauntlet of tests, and I already have high school, college and pro guys lined up as willing participants. Phantom won best in show at the Dallas ABCA convention this past January, so there is a lot of buzz about them in the baseball world right now.

So, If you haven’t heard of Phantom yet, here is what I have in my possession:

• Weighted Full Arm Sleeves
• Weighted Forearm Sleeves
• Weighted Calf Sleeves

From L to R: Full Arm, Forearm, Calf Sleeve

Now, what is a weighted sleeve, and what does it do?

As a strength coach, pitching instructor and pitcher, I like the premise of this product. It is different than other velocity training modalities because of a few factors:

• The weight isn’t overly heavy (1/4 to 1/2 lb max), so throwing mechanics are unlikely to be affected.
• The weight STAYS WITH YOU during follow through, providing an increased muscle stimulus to the decelerating muscles of the throwing arm. This is a big advantage over weighted ball training, which provide only concentric (acceleration) loading of the arm, and no eccentric (deceleration) loading.
• The weights are distributed evenly over the arm, and are centered around the elbow, thus decreasing torque compared to a weighted ball, which would have all the weight at the fingertips.

Throwing is one of the best uses for the weighted full arm and forearm sleeves. The forearm sleeves would be perfect for hitting, and the calf sleeves for any number of lower body sprinting, jumping, plyometric, or baseball mechanics drills using the lower half.  I’m going to be working as well to see what kind of arm care exercises and mechanics drills might be enhanced by a weighted sleeve. Blackburns and scapula stabilization exercises quickly come to mind.

Full arm sleeve (note the author's pasty white arm)

A First Glance

Construction

-All black neoprene construction, with flat-seamed stitching. The stitching looks very sturdy, and overall they look like the will hold up well.  We shall put this to the test…

-Each sleeve has two elastic velcro bands used for tightening.

Fit and Sizing

Prior to trying these on, I took the time to measure my arm. I have big forearms and wide palms, which makes me a little weird with things like this. I size out to be an XL in all three sleeves. The Large forearm sleeve would not even make it past my hands, and the Large full arm sleeve made it halfway up my arm before it became too small.  My arm is sized as follows:

• Hands: 4″ from pinky to index finger
• Forearms: 13″ circumference
• Biceps: 14 3/4 circumference
• Calves: 15 3/4 circumference

You can talk to the people at Phantom about sizing, but from my own fit testing, if your forearms are 12″ or greater, go for XL. The XL forearm and full sleeve were snug but not constrictive. The XL calf sleeve fit perfect as perfect can be.

The Weights

The weights are slid into place in sewn-in pockets on the interior of each sleeve. They are made of a grey rubber which appears to be mixed with some kind of additive, maybe a metal powder, to give it extra mass.  The weight will flex and move with you, which is a good thing.

What Lies Ahead

These sleeves are going to take some serious punishment in our cages and on our mounds here at the BATT Academy in Glen Burnie, MD. There is much more to come on these products, and time will tell whether or not they can deliver on all of the hype. Because the premise behind them is good, my hunch is that they will, but we shall let the results speak for themselves. Stay tuned, as we will have a bunch of videos and write ups, and we will see what kind of velocity increases we can get out of some of our pitchers.

Step 1: Identify The Clutter

Ask yourself these questions:

• What have I been doing?
• Why have I been doing it?
• Have I gotten the results I had been training for?
• How do I currently feel?

This seems really basic and obvious, but you would be surprised how few people actually take the time to examine their daily routines (after all, a routine is by definition minimally variable).  Those who are hungry for new results overhaul their lives when things stop progressing.  As time passes and an athlete gets closer or farther from their season, training methodology must change.  If one never takes time to make sure his goals and training are congruent, then hard work will be in vain – working hard AND SMART is what world-class athletes do.

Step 2: Compare to the Past

• How do I feel compared to when I used to do things differently? Do I feel better or worse?
• Has my body changed in positive ways?
• Have I performed better as a result of new techniques?

Step 3: Test New Variables

Nothing works for everyone, and results vary from person to person.  If you feel more fatigue, aren’t enhancing your performance, or have reached a plateau, then shame on you if you don’t try something new.  Your body will always become more efficient at any given exercise or program over time, resulting in diminishing returns.  Ever see those folks who go to the gym and perform the same routine for years? Of course you have; those are the folks who never get new results.

Even when you are being diligent with a set routine of arm care given to you by a therapist, team, or strength coach, for example, your body will still adapt to it over time.  How do you combat this? You ask? Changing your angle of pull is one of the easiest ways.

Take Blackburns, for example.  The 6 exercise Blackburn series is an incredible routine to increase scapular stability.  Yet, you’ll plateau at these just like any other exercise.  By changing the angle of pull, you can created a new stimulus for your muscles with a very simple tweak.

Y Raise on a Flat Bench

Y Raise on a 45 Degree Bench

Performing Blackburns, for example, at a 45 degree angle will change the muscle recruitment on the rotator cuff when compared with performing them on a flat bench, thus giving your muscles a new stimulus.  More scapular depression is achieved and the rhomboids are more strongly recruited when you use a steeper angle for prone rotator cuff and stabilizer work.  You could use any angle from 0-45, but any higher than that would start getting away from the rotator cuff and the scapula stabilizers that we want to hit using Blackburns.  Simple tweaks like these can be the push you need to get through a plateau and keep making progress.

There are lots of ways to vary your training which I will highlight in more depth in an upcoming article.

Step 4: Throw Out That Which Isn’t Working

I’ll give you an example of a recent change I made using steps 1-4, just on the hunch that it might be holding me back: I had been using 4lb weights for my standing and prone shoulder circuit for the past 2 years now, but I had only moved up to that weight when a friend of mine told me that 4lb was the “healthy pro” standard for his organization.  I was happily using 2lb weights (and throwing harder than I ever had), until he told me that 2lbs was the weight only rehab guys were using for their shoulder work.  So, I graduated to the heavier weight, and never threw as hard again as I did that fall.  Was it the extra 2lbs? I couldn’t say.

So just recently, suffering through a few week bout of dead-arm, I decided to go lighter.  I am plenty strong in my shoulder, with no popping, clicking or instability to speak of (it didn’t used to be that way), so I figured I could maintain that level of strength by changing my rep and weight scheme.

I used to do this:

• (3x/week) 2×12-15 with 4lb

Now I do this:

• (3x/week)  1×5 w/5lb ; 2×15 w/2lb

Why did I do this? The short set of 5 reps with the 5lb weights will make sure I maintain maximal strength, but don’t tire myself out, while the 2 sets of 15 will give me a lower workload while still giving my muscles endurance and therapeutic work.  I never felt fatigued using 4lb weights, but my velocity wasn’t as high as I felt it should be, so I made a choice to change it up and see how it goes, to see if there was something actually holding me back. So far, I still feel strong, stable, bounce back quickly and feel fresh. Cool.

Step 5: Restock Your Shelves With Fresh Methods

If you’re plateaued, fatigued, or underperforming, get some fresh training in your life!  As we have been discussing, you can get new stimuli to your muscles in a variety of ways…

If you’re fatigued, plateaued or underperforming (or suspect you might be):

• Change training volume
• Change weight
• Change both
• Try new variations
• Switch exercises altogether
• Try a week of active rest (if you’ve been going very hard for at least a few weeks)
• Enter a new training phase (more on periodization here)
• Get more sleep
• Re-examine your nutrition

If your performance is increasing:

Keep doing what you’re doing!  But, don’t forget to be introspective about it and be open to new methods because nothing works forever!

In an upcoming article I’ll share with you some easy tweaks for your shoulder work, forearm work and the sleeper stretch.

I was intrigued.  There was no price, so I asked the purveyor how many yen he charged for such a cuddly health booster.  Sadly, the 39 dollars they were asking for the bottle was just too blubbery for my budget. I flopped back onto my belly and paddled away.

Yet, here I sit, wondering about the seal that got away.  The potency of the tiny capsules was high, 500mg of DHA, DPA and EPA in each, and there were 300 for 39 bucks.  I could get my usual high dose with about 10 caps per day, which would make the bottle only marginally more expensive, on a monthly basis, than my pint bottle of fish oil.  Plus, I’ve never had seal burps before…how fun!

"We need to make sure we use every last bit of him, just like the natives would"

Thing is, the price is almost right and the product is healthy, exotic, illegal and a little taboo. I’m also not all that sensitive of a fellow.  Now, I wouldn’t club a seal myself, but if it comes not only pre-clubbed but pre-cleaned and prepackaged as well, then I get the full eskimo experience with none of the muscle fatigue, cleanup or regret.

I did a little internet research, and not only is selling marine mammal products illegal in the US, but it’s highly unsympathetic.  Those poor, easily caught creatures are in desperate need of our help, apparently.  Plus, for every seal that we wring into a bottle, one more killer whale is going hungry.  I flashback to my dear Mom’s words at the dinner table…”finish your baby seal, there are hungry orcas off the coast of Africa who would love that seal.”

It’s a tough call.  I need Omega-3’s, and I like exotic food as much as I like eating healthy.  If that bottle was priced at 29 dollars I would likely be throwing back caps like feeding time at SeaWorld.  Yet, I think for now, I am priced out of the harp seal market.  Anyone wanna go halfsies with me? If so, I’m willing to concede the most playful 150 capsules to you. Club, er, hit me up if you want in.

This is a drill that I have been doing for about 9 years now.  I learned it from my friend Duane Rhine, who taught me the curveball that got me into college.  My hammer was the only reason my 78-81 arm ever saw the mound as a freshman, and this drill helps tremendously to get the spin and consistent release down.

The point of the bucket? Well, that’s your “strike” release point.  Don’t expect the ball to break at such low velocity; just work on getting tight spin from your grip and follow through. Learn to nail that bucket on a consistent basis and you will have no trouble spotting up that curve in game situations.  It’s all about repetition with proper mechanics.

So, as I pondered what to write for the big 100, I wondered how many of you out there know anything about me on a personal level.  I don’t write this blog as a tribute to myself, but rather just as a training resource, using applicable experiences that I might have as helpful examples.  I also wondered if anyone out there cares (the answer is probably no).  Yet, I’m gonna force feed you a little taste of what it’s like to be this internet magnate that I am, as seen through an interview with me. Now’s your chance to learn the answers to questions about me that you neither asked nor care about. Enjoy!

*Editor’s Note: After re-reading this, I’m convinced that this is my finest post to date among posts that have no value to my readers*

1. Dan, your majesty, how do you start your day each morning?

Well, I wake up really groggy, and I usually find that I look ridiculous when I finally meander over to the mirror.  I then make a huge pot of oatmeal, check my email and stare, in a stupor, for about 15 minutes at my computer as I listen to music and sort out my life.

2. Interesting. So you enjoy music?

Well, I have no TV in my house, so I listen to upwards of 8 hours of Pandora or Grooveshark radio a day.  I now know the words to a ton of songs that I don’t even like, which is just fantastic.

3. Who plays on your Pandora stations?

My top four are Lupe Fiasco, Common, Dispatch and Matisyahu.  That’s a pretty good variety for the intelligent rap and reggae kick I’ve been on recently. Matisyahu is good, but he sings OY OY OY YO YO YO way, way too much.  Cool story, though.

4. What food could you not live without right now?

That would have to be almond butter.  I eat a 16oz jar of the stuff in about 3 days, and had I less restraint I could certainly polish one off in an afternoon.  Trader Joe’s roasted crunchy variety is the shiznit.  Not only is it fattening, but expensive, too!

5. This is quite a boring interview.  Soooooo, any interesting life stories recently?

Well, my current living situation is interesting.  I live with an asian guy, a jamaican guy, a black guy and a white guy.  We have a mix of straight and gay. It’s an interesting melting pot of cultures and orientations.  But, they’re all really nice people so it’s worked out.

6. Wow. That’s interesting.  Sounds like a refugee camp.

Yeah, it sort of is.  I just live day by day – living in Baltimore is wacky.  I got into an argument with a neighbor lady the other day shoveling snow, which was irritating. She was convinced that the snow I was throwing into the street was going to get plowed back onto her car, despite being farther uphill than I was.  They don’t plow uphill, and physics eluded this rude strumpet. She said that this wasn’t her first snowstorm, to which I replied that it wasn’t my first rodeo either.  She didn’t get it.

7. What’s something most people don’t know about you?

Hmm.  I’ll tell anyone pretty much anything, but if I had to pick one thing, it would be that I hate brushing my teeth and I hate showering. I put them off as long as possible each night, and if I came down with a terminal illness my family and friends would have to endure my green, rotting teeth, diaper breath and rotten-clam smelling armpits ’til the bitter end. We’ll see who really loves me!

8. Do you like to travel? If so, who with?

I am a huge fan of traveling and shirking my responsibilities. I went on a trip with my friend Patrick “Wink” Nolan about 6 months ago, and it was hilarious.  It’s funny to be around people with varying viewpoints.  Patrick is a huge Christian and I am solidly Atheist, so we had some great clashes and I made sure to use my foulest language and talk about the most crude things I could come up with.  Yet, through all his slightly embarrassed laughs, he didn’t break. (Goddamnit)

9. This is still shaping up to be quite a lame interview.  If you could do one uninhibited thing tomorrow with no hit to your image, what would you do?

I talked about and imagined this with my friend Andrew while in Wal-Mart buying bacon one night at 2am.  I thought, what would happen if I went up to that huge display of oranges and just started throwing them in all directions as fast and as hard as I could? Would Wal-Mart employees stop me? If they didn’t, I could definitely unload all 300 or so oranges on the store, pretty much destroying it in a hellfire of sweet, sunkissed fury.  I would just crush things with those oranges, throwing them as hard as I could at display cases, shelves, TVs, mutant shoppers, you name it.  They would rain in on shoppers from 250 feet away, and you would hear Baltimore-accented screams all over.  It would be a lot like a terrorist attack, but much more benign and delicious.  I’d go to jail for multiple years.

10. Finally, this nonsense is almost done. Any last thoughts?

Yes, actually.   If you found this self-indulgent interview humorous, then Science-Bless you (remember, no God for me).  If I have amused one person (I have ->me) then this has fulfilled it’s purpose.  If it’s amused more than just my lame self, then wow, I’m even greater than I thought I was.  If you made it this far, Thanks for reading, and expect a lot of great things to come in the near future as the site undergoes some even greater expansion, a new logo and more!

Weighted Baseball Training: The Theory

Before we take even one step forward, I want everyone to understand one extremely important fact about the weight of a regulation baseball: ITS ARBITRARY.

People get so caught up on believing that throwing a regulation 5oz baseball is the safest, no matter what.  Many say that throwing a weighted ball (heavier than regulation) is going to hurt your arm.  But guess what? Doctors didn’t choose the weight of a regulation baseball back in the 1880s based on it’s impact on the human body, and I think people forget this.  Rather, our bodies just adapt to throwing the 50z ball, because it’s “normal” to our throwing arms.  Anything higher or lower than this normal ball just means stressing the arm in a different, but not necessarily injurious, way.  If baseballs were traditionally 9 ounces, our arms would consider that normal as well.  So, don’t consider a weighted ball evil just because it’s different than what is traditional.  After all, javelin throwers throw a javelin weighing several pounds and don’t suffer more injuries than baseball pitchers.  That said, lets get going…

The Basics

Weighted balls are made anywhere from 6-12 ounces in traditional baseball form, and go even heavier as sand filled mini-medicine balls.  Ron Wolforth, at his Texas Baseball Ranch, uses some of the sand filled balls for drills with his pitchers.

Yet, the protocol for building velocity that is now held as the gold standard appears to be the overweight-underweight throwing program.  This involved throwing a 6oz ball, a regulation 5oz ball, and an underweight 4oz ball in a 2:1 ratio of underweight/overweight to regulation.  This means if you threw 60 pitches in the program one day, you would throw 20 heavy, 20 regulation, and 20 underweight.

Why overweight and underweight? It builds on the theory that your muscles need both strength and speed stimuli to learn to consistently move an object faster.  Throwing the 6oz ball makes the arm move slower (after all, it weighs 20% more), but with more force.  The underweight ball allows the arm to move faster but with less force.  So, combine the two, and your arm gets a combination of strength and speed stimuli.

This overweight/underweight program has shown to be successful in sprinters using hills.  Flat ground is regulation, and uphill and downhill are the novel stimuli.  By making a sprinter go uphill at top speed, he must apply more force to the ground to get where he is going.  He can’t move as fast, but builds strength in the process.  Send that same sprinter at top speed downhill, and his legs are forced to turn over much faster than normal, thus helping increase his stride frequency. Sounds reasonable right?

It is.  A 20% change in stimulus has been said not to be overly stressful on the body, and is optimal for performance.  Who says this and where did they get their data? I’m not sure, so let’s not become convinced just yet…

Are Weighted Balls More Dangerous?

Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer to this question.  However, lets go back and think about what we have already discussed on the matter:

1. The traditional 5oz baseball is a bodily stimulus that was chosen for our arms arbitrarily.  Javelins weigh several pounds, and aren’t shown to be more injurious.
2. The body adapts to stress.  Bones become more dense from weight training, and connective tissue becomes thicker and more resilient.  There is no reason to think this phenomenon is not present in baseball throwing.
3. A weighted ball cannot be thrown as hard, so stresses on body tissue MAY not be greater than that of a regulation or underweight ball.  Stress on the arm is a product of weight and arm speed, so a heavier object moving slower MIGHT NOT produce increased force.  Do I have data on this? No, but it’s simple physics.
4. There are no studies out there proving that weighted balls are more dangerous.  It’s unfortunately incredibly hard to nail down exactly the variables at work when dealing with the human body.  If a player tears a ligament throwing a weighted ball, how can we validly infer that it was the weighted ball, and not his poor mechanics COMBINED with the weighted ball that caused it. Or maybe his ligament was already deteriorated to the point where ANY throwing was going to cause the final tear.  It’s difficult to know.

What Can They Do For Me (And What Can’t They)?

They can stimulate your throwing muscles in a new way, there is no doubt about that.  If you squat 100 pounds every day, then suddenly throw 200 pounds on the bar, your body WILL feel a new stimulus and adapt – It’s just the way we work.

Most notably, weighted balls will stimulate the concentric phase of throwing, which is the acceleration phase.  Yet, because the arm is moving slower with a weighted ball, the decelerators will not have to work as hard, and as such will be faced with LESS of a stimulus than a regular ball thrown with more velocity.

What’s the problem with this? Your body needs to have equal strength to both accelerate and decelerate the arm, or any body part for that matter.  Your body will not let you throw your arm out the socket, which is more or less what would happen if it allowed you to throw a ball 90mph without the strength to slow a 90mph down to zero.

This is, however, where the underweight ball tends to shine; because your arm is moving faster than it otherwise would, it has to learn to slow a faster moving arm down in the same amount of time. Yet, I would hypothesize that this action, throwing a lighter ball faster, would be potentially more injurious than a weighted ball, simply because your arm might not know how to deal with the increased speed.  Is there research behind this? Again, no. Strengthening the rotator cuff in a ballistic manner to accompany weighted ball training would be ideal, and maybe allow for more gains from it.

And on the subject of gains…any gains made will take time, and will vary depending on the thrower.  Untrained athletes make the biggest gains in the least time, and highly trained athletes fight for just a few percentage points of increased performance.  This is called (drumroll, please) diminishing returns.  Rest assured, that ANY type of training, weighted ball included, takes time to work.  Expect any gains to take at least 4-8 weeks, if your body makes gains from them at all.  You wouldn’t expect to squat 400 pounds overnight, so don’t expect a magic bullet with this type of training either.

To summarize what overweighted balls can and can’t do for you, based on their fundamental principles:

• CAN provide a strengthening stimulus to the arm in the concentric phase of throwing
• CANNOT provide strengthening in the eccentric (decelerating) phase of throwing
• CAN increase load and stress on soft tissues IF (a big if!) thrown with enough velocity to surpass the total load provided by a regulation baseball
• CAN potentially make your arm more powerful, but slower moving, if not coupled with higher velocity, such as underweight, training.
• CANNOT increase permanent velocity increases overnight

So, hopefully we have now have a decent understanding of what weighted balls can and cannot do for you.  Weighted balls, in theory, have some good application, but also have limitations, mostly in their lack of ability to increase decelerating strength.  Their role in arm injury is anecdotal at best, so it is best to do your homework and use them under proper supervision, if you feel they are appropriate for you.  Individual results vary according to the protocols used, but I know that some swear by them and others swear at them, making it again, a personal choice that should be based on some solid research.

To Throw or Not to Throw? Good Question. Feel free to comment with your thoughts…