By: Tyus Adkins
The term “recovery” in baseball has too many structures and meanings. It’s an overplayed term just like “intent.” When a coach says, “get your recovery in,” what does that mean? For some it’s throw a slab of ice on your shoulder, for others it means run 3 miles, and to some it’s perform your j-band routine. In the training world, a consensus can be made regarding50% of performance is all recovery. So why are we leaving 50% of our performance up to poor structures and habits. In this blog we will address some common flaws we see in athlete’s post throw recovery and how to fix them.
At some point in your career, you’ve been told by a coach, trainer, or parent to ice your arm.It speeds up recovery, right? Wrong. Randy Sullivan has written extensively about why you should not ice. In summary, the reason your arm gets sore is not because you develop lactic acid. In fact, the reason your arm becomes sore is because the tendons and fibers in your arm get torn and chipped while your tissue is dismantled. Ice won’t fix that. Ice reduces swelling. If your arm is swollen, throbbing, and red, go to the hospital because you have bigger issues on your hand than getting in proper recovery. In a recovery video by Trevor Bauer he states,
“If you are having acute pain or swelling in any part of your arm or body after you are done pitching, you should get looked at by a medical professional and also should look at your mechanics as well.” He suggests heat for recovery as well because our muscles need blood flow to help heal the torn and broken micro-fascia and heat will expand our blood vessels which will help blood flow to the area. If we heat, we will loosen up the muscle and let blood flow to the affected area followed by active recovery which is addressed later in the post.
2. Get Your Bands In
Coaches tell players after they are done throwing to do 10-15 reps of external rotation of bands and then about 10-15 reps of band pull aparts after they are done throwing. But if we really look at the anatomy of the thrower, the players are only getting to a partial range of external rotation and doing it very fast as they are not controlling the eccentric part of the motion. Why only do half reps when we just got done doing 120 full range of motion reps? If we perform our band routine after getting full range of external rotation, that is the equivalent of doing 100 leg curls for recovery after running 100-meter dash.
Recovery is a lot more than just band work. We must work on lengthening the tissues that have just been shortened by our throwing motion. We have all been told as the season goes on our external rotation gets greater and our internal rotation gets shorter. Bigger engine and smaller brakes, anyone see a problem there? When we perform recovery, we need to loosen up and lengthen those tissues. Isometrics are one of the best ways to allow our tissue to lengthen and self-organize. For recovery purposes, we use isometrics at end range of motion of both internal and external rotation to actively recover those tissues we just wore down.
3. Run Your Poles
I’m not going to beat a dead horse here. If you’re interested in why you shouldn’t run poles you can research dozens of articles created on the internet. With that being said, we don’t hate cardio, just not in the form of running. We use circuits the day after we pitch to get a solid flush in.Try to incorporate primal movements such as bear crawls and stay in the frontal(side to side) and transversal (rotational) planes performing exercises for a minute back-to-back with each exercise (try for 4 or 5 at a time) without a break. Repeat 3-4 times.
3. Our Recommendation
A major priority in taking care of our arm is ensuring our shoulder blade can properly move as we see a lot of athletes who struggle with the posterior tilt of their shoulder blade. One reason is because when we go through our throwing motion, we anteriorly tilt our shoulder blade as we accelerate forward. Taking players through end range of motion on both posterior tilt and anterior tilt or “upward rotation” after they are done throwing is key to recovering faster.
Here is what we suggest for your post throw:
Address your low hanging fruit. Even if you do not have access to the best equipment or trainers you can still get properly recover just through your sleep, hydration, and nutrition. Drinking a gallon a day is a good place to start. Drinking water helps blood flow throughout the body that carries the proper nutrients to our muscles to perform and recover. Nutrition is also important as if we are trying to repair broken down micro-fascia. We need to have a good source of carbs, good fats, and proteins to repair that muscle. Everyone needs something a little different regarding nutrition but those are the macronutrients we need from sources (Ex. orange juice, steak, rice, protein shakes). As we transition from the just ice, run poles, and perform band exercises phase to a more effective post-throwing routine you will find that the suggestions above will play a vital role in the longevity of you or your athlete’s career. For help on longevity and performance emailtraining@connected-performance.com