The Definition of Insanity

There is a good chance that every one of my students can finish this sentence, “The definition of insanity is…….” (You got it) “…doing the same thing over and over again, in the same way, and expecting a different result.”
Last week we received way too many calls from pitchers we have never met, wondering if we can help them get to the next level. When a parent calls about his 16-year-old daughter who has not improved since she was 12, we wonder what took them so long to realize the old approach was going nowhere.
Then there was the call about a kid whose back has hurt for a “couple of years” but they were told that was normal for pitchers. In another case it was chronic pain in the shoulder.
Here is the problem with waiting too long to address form issues. Recent research into biomechanics reveals that the things a kid does at age 10 can lead to injuries at age 17. The constant wear and tear of any poor movement will constantly erode the weakest link in the chain. It may be a lower back, shoulder, between the shoulder blades, the forearm, elbow, or any part or the body that she is placing under stress due to bad mechanics. If you wait until the kid has hit a plateau or she feels pain, you have waited too long. The chances of her reaching her potential are greatly diminished.
This happens for different reasons. Let’s say a kid’s glove is flying out to the side, causing her to twist her body. You need to put everything else on hold until you solve this, and it must be done now. The core controls everything in the body. If the glove is flying out to the side, the core will change its muscle structure in order to accommodate the bad move. In other words, muscles that should not have been involved in the pitch are suddenly forced into action and they become dominant. The wrong muscles are doing the work, which is never good news.
As if that weren’t bad enough, the core will also develop an unnatural muscle firing sequence in an effort to restore some sort of balance. In other words, the core develops a “pathway” to overcome a poor movement pattern that should never have been allowed in the first place. Here is a good illustration. Recently we had two feet of snow in our part of Virginia. Our driveway runs through the pasture and curves around to our house. One day the temperatures rose. The packed snow became slushy. Returning home, my Jeep cut a rut in the slush. Temperatures dropped and that rut became frozen. I had carved a pathway that we could not avoid even if we wanted to take the left turn to the barn.
This is exactly what happens with poor movements. The body actually carves pathways, physically and mentally. If they remain for years, we can change them, but it is like breaking out of the icy ruts. The easier part is the mental side. She understands what needs to change and she desperately wants to leave the rut, but when she tries to do so the body is stuck with muscles that were trained and strengthened to fire in inefficient ways. It will take intensive work and sometimes it requires a lot of time with a qualified strength trainer to build the right muscles and train new muscle firing sequences.
Here is an example all of us have seen. The crowhop, or replant. In order to execute this move, a girl must do three negative things. Slow down the arm to wait for the foot to re-set itself, which results in a speed lag at the top. She must turn her foot (if right handed) back to face shortstop, and she must throw the hips back toward the first baseman. If this kid does not come to us until age 16 to fix this, there is little chance she will ever reach full potential. She spent 6 years training the wrong core muscles, teaching her core an incorrect firing sequence, and putting the core in a very weak position in general. We have to focus on new:
1-positions
2-firing sequences
3-correcting muscle imbalances
4-training the brain in a totally new direction.
This is a tedious process. It should never have gotten this far. It is not the fault of the kid, but of the person who let it happen, whether they did not know any better or did not see any harm in it. Either way, you have to make a change now. You do not get “do overs” in raising your daughter.
Pitching is confusing. Parents want to do the right thing, but sometimes they give too much control to others. This is your daughter. Get involved. Follow your instincts. Be impatient. Ask tough questions now. Make sure she is carving the correct pathways from the beginning.
**Note: We will be in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania the weekend of April 11, and near Atlanta the weekend of April 25, and we have a few openings for new students during those visits. Email me for info.