Smooth Is Fast? Not So Fast
Smooth is fast. Smooth is powerful. But smooth is not floppy. Smooth is actually the result of well-timed and synchronized co-contractions that remove muscle slack, eliminate shear forces (jerk), and amplify power, coordination and control, and protection (PCP).
Beware Of The Cult Of Average
At the ARMory we study OUTLIERS so my players can become THAT GUY! While science seeks to find common denominators among the normal, it propagates “The Cult of Average.” Average is a code word for mediocre, and that is not our goal at The Florida Baseball ARMory.
Anatomy Of A Pitcher’s Hip Hinge: First Move Nuance
A well-executed one-legged hinge is vital to increasing impulse and improving velocity. But, not all hinges are the same. The single-leg hinge must be nuanced to link the athlete’s hardware to his software. This requires an in-depth investigation and appreciation of each athlete’s unique physical characteristics and movement preferences.
Find Your Dog
Everyone, and I mean everyone has a dog in ‘em. You wanna throw hard, you gotta find your dog. Over the past 3 summers we’ve worked with more than 450 players from all over the world in our Summer Training Program. If they stayed 4 weeks, the average guy gained over 4 mph on his fastball. For most of them, it wasn’t about adding anything. It was about using what we call SAVAGE Training to reveal the dog they already had inside them.
Anatomy Of Hip-To-Shoulder Separation
Unless you’ve been living in the baseball equivalent of a Himalayan monastery, you’ve heard pitching and hitting coaches avowing the importance of “hip-to-shoulder separation.” I’m not exactly sure when it began, but sometime in the last several years, someone coined the term, and it spread like wildfire. According to advocates of this tenet, pitchers and hitters should rotate the pelvis while the torso remains closed for as long as possible. The resultant diagonal stretch through the trunk allows the athlete to take advantage of the elastic properties of the abdominals, and chest muscles to store and then unload energy to be transferred from the lower half to the arm or bat.
More blogs:
Eccentric Biceps Is The Devil For A Throwing Athlete
Elimination or at least suppression of eccentric biceps activity is essential for protecting the labrum and the UCL. For this reason, safely and efficiently dissipating the energy of throwing through a rotational deceleration pattern is one of the seven attractors in pitching.
How We Individualize Workload To Decrease Injury Risk And Maximize Performance Gains
Common sense: To become an elite throwing athlete, you need to throw … a lot. BUT don't throw too much or you will get hurt. It stems from flawed assumption — that all throwing injuries are due to OVERUSE. Limit pitch counts. Control innings pitched. Take 3 months off every year. Coaches and organizations complied. Yet injury rates kept climbing. Why?
Late Life: How Chien-Ming Wang Made It Back To The Big Leagues (Part 2 Of 2)
It wasn’t long before Chien became the talk of the town in Surprise, AZ with eye-popping velocities reaching 96.7 mph With characteristic humility and class, Chien acknowledged his work at The ARMory in the off-season as the key to his new success. The day he mentioned it to reporters, the entire country of Taiwan visited and crashed our website. We doubled the bandwidth and after his next outing, it crashed again.
Why We Don’t Run Long Distances
Unless your team is really bad at managing rundowns, the longest pay in baseball is an inside the park homerun, takes about 14-16 seconds to complete, and the only guy who has to run that far is the guy who hit the ball. Everyone else is about 4 seconds or less and a pitch takes about 1.5 seconds.
Anatomy Of A Pitcher’s Hip Hinge: First Move Nuance
A well-executed one-legged hinge is vital to increasing impulse and improving velocity. But, not all hinges are the same. The single-leg hinge must be nuanced to link the athlete’s hardware to his software. This requires an in-depth investigation and appreciation of each athlete’s unique physical characteristics and movement preferences.
Why It Doesn’t Take 10,000 Hours
When an athlete achieves the mobility necessary to maximize his length-tension advantages and then finds the synchronous co-contractions to fully optimize the contractile and elastic properties of his muscles, he accomplishes his goal and his body naturally wants to do that again. His natural instincts take over and he is compelled to move in the same manner again and again. When it clicks, it stays.