Practice Bullpens Require More Practice Than Most Pitchers And Coaches Realize
One of the important questions I ask pitchers when they come for lessons is “What is your weekly pitching workout routine for improving your mechanics and keeping your arm healthy?”
Most pitchers do not have a regular routine for improving pitching mechanics or to ensure that their throwing arm is safe and healthy.
The problem is that most coaches and instructors are not well informed about what pitchers should be doing to improve their skills, maintain a good level of fitness and remain injury free.
Unfortunately, many high school coaches do not understand that pitching is a skilled activity that requires far more practice than coaches, parents and pitchers think it does. If pitchers are willing to put in the practice time both off-season and in-season then they have a very good chance to improve their mechanics, velocity and control while reducing the risk of injury.
Every weekly pitching workout should have as a goal improvement in all areas.
How To Reduce The Risk Of Arm Injuries
Prior to any throwing, as part of his pitching workout or practice bullpen, pitchers need to do a full-body warm-up routine focusing on the lower body, especially the hips and legs. This should only take 5-7 minutes.
Once the lower body is warmed-up, the pitcher should do a throwing arm warm-up routine using flexible tubing with hand attachments, not a wrist attachment. Wrist attachment flexible tubing does not adequately or fully warm-up the throwing elbow.
We recommend the First Pitch Strike Warm-up And Recovery Program. We have been recommending it to clients for over two years and it is the only scientifically designed flexible tubing program for pitchers. When pitchers start using FPS they comment that the day after they pitch it does not feel like they pitched at all.
Once the pitcher is finished with either his bullpen or game pitching, he does the First Pitch Strike and Recovery Program which helps put the pitching arm back in place.
When pitchers pitch during a game the back of their shoulder gets loose and the front gets tight. The recovery part of the program allows the arm to go back to where it was prior to pitching. In fact, the recovery part of the program may be as valuable as the warm-up. But neither should be left out.
If pitchers want to improve their pitching mechanics they must understand their main faults. After doing thousands of video analysis over the past 15 years, our experience has shown that most pitchers have 2-4 main mechanical faults. Identifying and improving these faults will help create more velocity and less risk of injury.
Mechanical faults should be systematically worked on one at a time using a high volume of practice while videotaping to confirm that real change is occurring. The goal being to improve as much as possible during each workout.
When working on mechanics, pitchers should not worry about ball control but instead should focus on creating a mental image or movie on what the result of the improvement should look like.
Using High Volume Sets Of Pitches During Every Practice Session
I use my IPad and a $3 app during every lesson to give the pitcher accurate feedback for quicker improvement
To improve mechanics pitchers, coaches and instructors should use blocked-sets of repetitions. A blocked-set can be 5-8 or even 10 pitches which are done one after another.
The pitcher and the instructor decide to work on one element of mechanics that needs to be improved. For example, let’s say the pitcher is moving too slow down the mound and needs to develop a faster tempo. The instructor would focus on improving weight shift, hand-break speed and back leg extension as the components of moving down the mound faster.
The instructor would either demonstrate the correction or show the pitcher a video of an MLB pitcher with a fast temp and good mechanics. Not all MLB pitchers have quality mechanics.
Prior to each repetition or pitch, the pitcher should visualize the new faster movement and focus on getting the front hip moving before hand-break and then at hand-break taking the ball out of the glove faster. Once he gets a good feel for that in subsequent sessions he can put his focus on back leg drive or extension.
If the pitcher was working on this for the first time I would recommend working in blocked-sets of only 5 pitches. After each pitch the pitcher should clear his mind by walking back around the mound and getting ready for the next pitch.
He should take 30 seconds in between each pitch to physically and mentally prepare for the next one and create a mental movie of the result he wants during the next pitch. Taking water in between sets or every other sets is advisable based on the weather.
After the first blocked-set, the instructor should show the video to the pitcher to see if the new movement was correct or not or whether there was a positive change. The instructor should provide positive feedback and then have the pitcher feedback to him what he thinks he needs to do on the next blocked set to improve.
Now we have a pitcher who fully understands the movement and what he needs to do to improve. Improvement is as much about psychology as it is physical. In fact, in order to improve mechanics the brain must be as highly engaged and the body…if not more so.
That’s why sessions like this can be mentally taxing for the pitcher. But for improvement to occur that is what is required, and it’s also why most pitchers do not improve. They simply do not put in enough goal oriented practice which uses visualization and video feedback.
Each session of one hour might only contain 5-8 blocked sets of pitches since it takes time in between to evaluate and then get ready for the next one. Remember it’s not about the quantity of practice but the quality. Thus without video feedback the quality of practice is generally very poor and little improvement occurs.
Why Pitchers Should Continue To Improve Mechanics During The Season
For pitchers and instructors who have the goal of improvement, it would take a minimum of 3 sessions a week to get ready for the season. Then, once the season is in full swing, booster practice sessions are recommended so that the pitcher does not revert back to his old bad habits.
These regular booster sessions during the season ensure that pitchers continue to learn new methods, improve their skills and to keep old habits from recurring.
Stopping mechanics improvement sessions during the season is why most pitchers do not improve and end up having below par seasons. It makes little sense that pitchers do not try to improve their mechanics during the season. Those who have no routine for improvement normally will revert back to their old mechanics and generally will pitch below normal performance levels or even get hurt.
During the season, pitchers should be throwing high volume bullpens of at least 50 pitches. I recommend that starting high school pitchers who throw 1 game a week should also have two practice bullpens.
The post A Proven Pitching Workout to Improve Mechanics And Reduce Risk of Injury appeared first on Baseball Pitching.
