He mainly refers to high school athletes, but I can personally attest to this being a problem at higher levels including college and the professional ranks.
When I played in college, our first pitching coach was only 2-3 years removed from his days as a Minor League Baseball player. The head coach had him develop the off-season strength program for our pitchers (myself included). He went with what he knew and gave us what he had been given as a professional athlete.
What we wound up with was a 2-day cycle, repeated 3 times weekly. Monday through Saturday, we lifted heavy, and we lifted a ton. We were graciously given Sunday as our day to recover.
This is a perfect example of both overtraining and not respecting recovery. For more, read Boddy's article.
I've been a bit busy lately with another project of mine, so I have been slacking a little when it comes to this blog. There isn't much substance to this post, but it's better than nothing.
This is another video that was filmed, edited, and produced by Dr. Marshall's students. It shows several of them performing some of Dr. Marshall's more unconventional training drills. In the video, they throw javelins and bucket lids.
The video quality isn't spectacular, and its producer added some background music (as well as a lengthy credits sequence at the end). I'd suggest muting the video, but then you wouldn't hear the commentary.
The pitchers perform the same exercises that they performed with the wrist weights and iron balls. The projectiles in this video are lighter, though not quite as light as a baseball.
These drills are more about neuromuscular fitness - joint action timing and sequencing or "muscle memory" - than they are about strength and durability. If I understand correctly, they are used to help learn and "perfect" Dr. Marshall's motion rather than to maintain it.
The bucket lid drill, designed to teach the appropriate axes of rotation for pitched balls, seems like it would also provide a decent "report card" for the release and spin of each pitch.
The student addressed the question, but claimed that the two arm actions are the same despite the obvious visual differences. He then took the opportunity to tell me that I don't understand how Dr. Marshall's pitchers throw a baseball. The student also claimed that the vertical elbow extension was the result of centripetal force. Apparently, this student wasn't paying much attention to Dr. Marshall when he explained forearm flyout.
Dr. Marshall had more useful things to say. He explained that his pitchers are taught to drive their upper arms in a position described to be "as vertical as possible." From this position, a pitcher clearly can only extend his elbow vertically. This matches exactly what I have seen from his pitchers when they throw baseballs.
When performing the weighted exercises, Dr. Marshall's pitchers appear to me to be powerfully extending their upper arms toward the target. This is because their upper arms seem to move from nearly vertical to nearly horizontal in the direction of the throw prior to release. As a result, their elbow joints extend their forearms toward the target instead of the sky.
Take another look at some of Dr. Marshall's students performing a weighted training exercise. This time, they are throwing iron balls which are obviously more similar to baseballs than the wrist weights are.
Again, his pitchers appear to be driving the heavy weights in a nearly straight 3-dimensional line. Some of them do this better than others. In this video, it appears that the pitchers who raise the ball higher are better able to keep the ball on a 3-dimensionally straight path through release.
Compared to the wrist weight exercises from last week's entry, the iron ball exercises appear to result in more skyward elbow extension. This could be an illusion caused by the arm's reaction to the release of a heavy object. Without high-speed video, it's virtually impossible to tell which happens first.
Because Dr. Marshall wants his pitchers to accelerate their upper arms in as vertical a position as possible, elbow extension is necessarily skyward. This is really the answer to last week's question. In Dr. Marshall's view, when performing his motion, skyward elbow extension is expected and unavoidable.
It seems that the difference in arm actions is the result of the weights being too heavy for Dr. Marshall's pitchers to duplicate the intended arm action.
This video is possibly the best example I've found of what Dr. Mike Marshall's arm action is supposed to look like. The catch is that the pitchers in the video aren't throwing baseballs. The pitchers are performing exercises from Dr. Marshall's wrist weights program.
4 of Dr. Marshall's students are shown here doing different things that include his wrong foot slingshot, wrong foot loaded slingshot, and pendulum swing wind-up drills.
One thing I've noticed repeatedly is that despite the straight-line acceleration of the heavy weights during these exercises, Dr. Marshall's students routinely demonstrate a dramatically different arm action when they throw baseballs.
The main difference is where the arm drives the baseball. In the weighted exercises (iron balls and wrist weights), his pitchers unquestionably apply force in a nearly straight line that results in extension that is simultaneously away from the pitcher's body and toward the target. When throwing a baseball, however, his pitchers apply a lot of upward force that results in extension that is away from the pitcher's body but toward the sky instead of the target.
[Added at 12:30 PM, Monday, April 27, 2009]
One of Dr. Marshall's pitchers from the video has emailed me and asked that I clarify the difference that I see. In short, Dr. Marshall writes that the driveline height of the baseball should be just above the ear. This description perfectly fits with the driveline height for the weighted exercises. In the high-speed video I've seen of Dr. Marshall's pitchers, the driveline height for their baseball pitches results in a release point that is almost a full arm's length above the ear.
[/Added]
Some exercise specialists believe that the extremely heavy weights train the muscles to fight gravity. As the pitchers step up the weight increments, their muscles learn more and more to oppose gravity. Holding up a 20-pound wrist weight requires more than 60 times the force that is required to hold up a 5-ounce baseball, so when one of Dr. Marshall's pitchers performs his arm action with a baseball, his body and arm are accustomed to applying much greater upward force than is necessary.
This is one explanation for the upward extension. It makes perfect sense even to a layman, but I don't believe it accounts for all of the differences.
Dr. Marshall himself focuses on the principle of specificity of training - that a pitcher should learn/train to pitch baseballs by pitching baseballs - so his interval-training programs make baseball pitching a part of the daily routine.
So why then do his pitchers have a distinctly different arm action when throwing baseballs compared to when they "throw" heavy weights? Truthfully, I don't have that answer. It could be related to old muscle memory, or I may have misinterpreted Dr. Marshall's ideal arm action.
Trip Somers