Identifying and Training Mechanical Development for the Individual and The Outlier
This 15 video goes through 12+ movement, mechanical and muscular profiles that affect how pitchers move on the mound and simple ways to asses and affect those movements in simple terms.
So much of conventional coaching and education is geared toward training the masses and understanding the average population. Unfortunately, in baseball, the best way to coach players is by treating each athlete as The Outlier. For conversation sake, lets approach this article and limit our thoughts to just pitchers and focus on the need for individual assessment and searching for context on their movements, rather than taking it for face value.
Movement Quality vs Movement Capacity
When evaluating a pitcher, the first thing to look at is present movement quality and project how those qualities graduate to overall movement capacity over time. A simpler way to put it is that as evaluators, we need to look at the forces and structures that cause movements, rather than only the movements themselves. Then, we need to account for the consequences those movements have on the delivery and how they project to profile the player despite (or in-spite) of his long-term training. For example, (and this a way over-simplified example) if a pitcher prefers a “tall and fall” type of delivery, we shouldn’t just take it for face value and assume that he moves that way because it works for him. As Simon Sinek would suggest, Start with Why! Does he prefer the tall and fall delivery because he has tight adductors that don’t lengthen as he moves down the slope? Is he lacking rear hip internal rotation and his body won’t put him into a vulnerable spot? There are plenty of questions to be asked and answered; but this should serve as a reference point to a Socratic method of understanding the player and the context of his delivery. After identifying movement qualities, the next step is projecting movement capacity, which often calls for massive collaboration with S&C and medical teams. The priority when projecting movement capacity is to understand previous training while accounting for short-term and long-term total training volume and purpose- this offers a subjective idea of what a player may become and why he may (or may not) become that. If that same player who preferred a “tall and fall” delivery only because his shortened adductors were limiting how he could move and he ends up gaining that ROM and adequate strength, then projecting his overall movement capacity changes drastically. The key component in a “baseball guy/ coach/ scout ” projecting movement capacity rarely has to do with ONLY baseball training itself and everything to do with the cross training the player gets from the S&C and medical teams. Understanding, or even the right questions about, movement context account for the factors off the field to offer a more complete perspective on the field. Pretty neat how collaboration in baseball can work, huh?
How Do You Affect/ Improve Movement Quality?
For more in-depth details and examples of how to identify and improve movement quality, you should watch the video at the top of this article. If not, you’re about to g