1. Early results from the first 30 Warbird Throwers. A rough look at my data suggests that my group has gained on average 3 miles per hour and as high as 7. I’m pretty excited, and have new technology (Thanks Mike!) to share throwing data on my site. Check out the Player Velocities Page under the Warbird parent tab. If you’re not local you won’t know the names, but you can check the progress some of my hard workers have made. Nick Hieb, a Junior, just threw in front of a few college coaches and sat 3-4mph higher than he had previously peaked as of last year (his peak is about +5-6). Pretty excited about him – he’s earned it.

2. My Trip to LA for Alan Jaeger’s Pro Camp was awesome. I have lots to share but as of now too little time to share it. Soon – it was well worth the trip.

3. I’m going to share via video some of what I’ve learned about velocity this winter, and I’ve learned a whole, whole lot. The radar gun is the greatest pitchers’ training tool ever created, in my opinion. You’d be amazed how much pitch-by-pitch feedback can do for a thrower and a coach who wants his kids to throw harder. I’m not going to give away my proprietary program, but I will give you insight into what you can do at home today to throw harder immediately.

Thanks! Stay Tuned….

He answered red, to which I told him that he had to dilute the old by practicing the new mechanics as much as he could, until, over time, his mechanics changed. The more you practice, the more the new overtakes the old.

That being said, I got some photographical confirmation that I had improved my mechanics via the energy angle, but not quite to the degree that I had hoped. While the change is clearly visible, I more or less diluted my old mechanics with new, averaging the two together and finding myself in the middle. Yet, I’m ok with this, and it represented the best I could do given 4 months of practice and thousands of throws doing it. Check out the photos and see for yourself where I ended up.

A snapshot of the old…

A snapshot of how I practiced this offseason…

A snapshot of me from a game against the Phillies minor leaguers in March, 2011

When I got into games in Florida, I could tell I didn’t have as much of the energy angle as I had hoped I would; I was disappointed. Yet, I could have guessed that it would have been that way – after all, the change for me felt very new and scary.

Understand that the point of this post isn’t to color my failure as a partial success, but rather to posit that changes to mechanics take time, and even with dedicated practice you might not get exactly what you practice into the game.

This, what I call mechanical dilution, is something you just need to be aware of; sometimes we exaggerate even more in practice because we know that we aren’t going to get all of it in games, and exaggerating might be the best way to land us in the middle, and often the middle is a good change from one side of the spectrum.

Falling in the middle, or diluting your old mechanics, just means that what we worked on wasn’t easy, and that it’s going to take more time to carry 100% of our practice mechanics into the game. If I landed at 50% of the way to where I wanted to be this year, then I’m confident next off-season can get me to 90% or better.

And, once competition starts, it’s no longer time to seriously tinker with mechanics. You take what you’ve got, whatever it is, and refine it into being the most accurate and powerful set of mechanics you can. You can’t swap out the engine at the starting line, though you may be able to make a few last-minute wrench turns to make it purr a little better.

I’d have loved to be taking the mound with blue, but it turns out that I’m pitching this season with purple dye in my bucket.

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…

The Long Toss Benefits

1. Stretches the arm out while under tension

2. Utilizes a slightly different motion compared to mound throwing, allowing for a new muscle stimulus

3. Teaches one to reach out and really extend toward the target

4.  Allows the body to find peak arm slot efficiency in throwing the ball as far as possible (i.e if you pitch over the top, but throw farthest at 3/4, maybe it’s time to pitch at 3/4)

5. Develops synchrony in the body’s movements, which helps cure mechanical timing issues

6. Teaches to pull the arm down hard when coming back in, developing more arm speed and even more forward reach

How To

First, a disclaimer: A very good warm up should always precede a long toss session.

The best way to long toss is to go out as far as possible in 30 foot increments, making 3-6 throws at each distance (assuming you are well warmed up).

Once max distance is achieved, I usually make 6-15 throws at that distance, depending on how I feel, then start coming back in from 200 feet.  I don’t like pitchers to come back in a few feet at a time because if you are to maintain the same arc, you will only be slowing your arm down, which isn’t the goal.  So cut down to 200 feet and immediately start compressing your throws into a hard, low line. 

Again, when coming back in, the goal is to throw on as hard and as low a line as possible, compressing that max distance throw into a shorter distance throw; This is where arm speed is created.

I usually end at around 70-75 feet, throwing 5-10 as hard as I can, really trying to follow through to the grass.  It’s helpful to think about trying to throw the ball into the ground and make it rise up to your partner (though this isn’t physically possible).

Alan Jaeger is a big proponent of long toss, and has a great article on the subject, as well as the following video which explains his long toss method (largely the same as my own).  It’s well worth the four minutes.

The only issue with long toss is finding a home for it within one’s pitching schedule.  I usually long toss the 2nd day after a start, and maybe have another short one two days out from the next start.  Relievers have to get them in after games in which they don’t pitch or whenever they think they might get a rest day.  

The offseason, however, allows the time to get three good long tosses in per week, which over a period of a 6-8 weeks or more can really provide good velocity gains. Consistent long toss coupled with a good strength training program is where tons of guys come into their own and put on a bunch of MPHs.