Listen to the entire 3X Pitching Podcast Episode 2. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes by selecting the button on the far right.
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3X Pitching - Podcast Episode 2 Transcript

This transcript is a rough draft. It is recommended that you listen to the podcast above.

Performance Data of Professional Baseball

Alright! Brent Pourciau, Top Velocity.net.
Welcome to the second episode of my 3X Pitching show or podcast, whatever you want to call it.
Today, I was going to go over this new study I came across on some of the performance data of professional baseball players and how it has changed the game. If you haven't heard about 3X Pitching or if you've been with the program for a while, it's really where we've been headed, but this just gives us more information to set the bench marks. We have now a ton of benchmarks to set the standards for high velocity pitching. Of course, through mechanics and through all the research that I've done and developed with 3X Pitching, but also performance wise as far as with the 3X Pitching profiles with these high velocity pitchers and how they move through these components. Now with these elite athletes who have made the major leagues or professional baseball, how they can perform when it comes to power or strength and speed, which is of course the athleticism of the game. So this is good. If we can see these benchmarks and standards, then we have something to work for. So we don't feel like we're training blind. And I would say the majority of baseball players out there in their off season program or even whenever, they're training blind. I get these calls all the time, "I've been doing this this and this, Why am I not getting better?" Well let's look at your numbers, let's look where you measure up to these standards. And it really tells the story and you can't argue with it. But ultimately it gives you the light or shows you the light at the end of the tunnel which when you're training blind, you can be on the completely wrong path, which the majority of baseball players are. Alot of them go down the wrong path, waste their careers training the wrong way in developing their body the wrong way. Or just neglecting some of the key components of creating the high performance athlete. Of course, it's going to be more pitching specific, because this is the 3X Pitching show, but this can go across the board.
This can be for all position players just looking at this performance data. So this is great and I plan to very soon put together a 3X Performance Guide to where you can, once you're in the 3X Pitching Velocity Programs. It's going to give you all these benchmarks that we know we need to hit. Which covers across the board the complete high velocity pitcher. From the mechanics to the athleticism. From where we need to be and ultimately it's going to be a formula. It's just going to be a recipe for you reaching those goals and dreams of being a high velocity pitcher. As long you plug away and follow the program, and you see your improvements, then you're just moving that much faster toward those benchmarks and goals of being a high velocity pitcher. That's going to come out soon.

3X Pitching U-Stream Show

I also have some other things in the work. I'm planning on doing a show at the facility during our training sessions this summer. Going to have a ton of guys training down here, just out of New Orleans with me through the summers with the 3X Pitching programs. And the goal is to have a u-stream studio, basically I'm going to set up a u stream or kind of radio type broadcast, going out to many different formats, even podcast it as well. And that's just something we might do everyday, through our training, once a week depending on our training week, depending on how much time it consumes and I'll be interviewing all the guys training with me, who'll be talking about what we'll be working on for the day, challenges for the week, what were the improvements. Just for you who aren't here training with us. Or even if you were, it'll only make it more fun. But if you weren't here training with us, it'll give you some encouragement and allows you to follow along. Kind of join in, wherever you are. It'll make you feel like more part of the 3X movement or what were going to call this show, the TopVelocity Nation. So it'll make you feel more a part of the movement and I just thought it'll be fun. It'll provide enthusiasm for you guys and also some great info. Also I'll like to ideally have the show where you can call in to the show, so we can have people calling in and asking questions, which would be really cool. So that's going to be in the works and is the plans for the summer, something starting around May, when you guys are out of school. So look for that coming in on, it's going to be called TopVelocity Nation. So yeah, a lot of great things to look forward to. But lets get into this episode where were going to cover and if you want to follow along, right now you can just head on to my pitching articles, pull up the Holy Grail Study Proves MLB Players Produce More Vertical Power.

Body Weight Correlates to Higher Levels of Pro Baseball

It's interesting how I start off the article. It's very interesting when you start to look at pitching specifically or baseball more like you're looking at the Olympics. We look at these guys as athletes and unfortunately it has been our history as baseball players where we see ourselves as something special and outside of the athletic world. We kind of fit in our own little mold. But what I think what we're learning is just the opposite. We're not that much different. So it's good to see we even have some of the elite athletes in the game of baseball. We are caught up in these conventional ways. I posted an interview that is on the site of Tim Lincecum reflecting on the past year. Where he struggled and I'm looking at it right now. Ultimately he's looking at his previous successful years and said it himself, bragging that he wasn't eating fast food and he changed his diet. He changed his training program. Which is swimming and he lost 30 pounds. Which once I saw, blew my mind. Someone already 170 pounds lost 30 pounds in major league baseball, that's unheard of. To me that would have been conventional wisdom saying, "Oh we have got to be skinner, more limber, we don't want to bulk up", those kind of things, but look, I really believe that the numbers correlate. The weight loss correlates to his poor performance. Even though he's a great competitor, and he was able to come through as a relief pitcher. This shows he is a great athlete and just shows he deserves to be there. Very poor training decision or off season decision going into this 2012, past 2012 season for Tim Lincecum. When we look at these performance data, we can see why it was a bad decision . Ultimately, seeing that his dropped a good 2-3 mph. On average really crushed him. It just changed his game when it's not as effective anymore. Specifically when it dropped down to the lower velocities in the league, when he used to be a guy who could put it in the higher velocities. It's obviously something he did that led to the drastic drop in his performance and I really believe it links to that weight loss. There's is even studies in inconsistencies in velocity to weight loss. One of them was in my previous article where I covered on the first podcast on the study called, Study Proves Body Weight Is Pitching Velocity Factor. We talked about how body weights correlated to pitching velocity. Basically, we're going to see the same thing as we move on in this article.
Here's the study that we took the performance data from. It was called, Anthropometric and performance comparisons in professional baseball players. They took a two year study of 343 professional baseball players and they accessed there height ,weight, body composition and grip strength, vertical jump and ten yard sprint, speed and agility.The population consistent of minor league affiliates.From rookie ball to A, AA, and to AAA and all the way to major league baseball. This chart, as you can see on the article, which really is the holy grail now, and it's something you should print and put on the wall. It shows the data and the average numbers of the performance data. And it separates it by the level of the game. Rookie ball, A, AA, AAA, and to the MLB. That performance data covered age, height, body mass, body fat, lean body mass, vertical jump, vertical jump peak power, grip strength, ten yard sprint, pro agility. I don't know if this is a shocker but the conventional wisdom of the game ultimately didn't prepare you for this but you can see as we move up levels of the game, we see all the numbers across the board, pretty much 99% go up. So the better athlete was at the higher level as we moved up. More importantly, we are getting more information on vertical jump heights. I've always been a big believer in vertical jumps. It's a big time when you come down to 3X Pitching Velocity Camps, we take your vertical jump, broad jumps, just because I was around a lot of good coaches who used to same thing to measure the athlete. It's a really quick indicator of how good of an athlete you are. Because it's also an indicator of your power production. And if we're a power athlete, as baseball is a power sport. Power athletes are the better athlete. Then those athletes are going to have higher vertical jumps. Now there is a difference when we take this into pitching. When we take it into the high velocity pitcher it becomes just as important. So if you're 6'10, you have more leverage on generating force, than a guy who's 5'10. And that's important. But at the same time we can see here that the taller athlete was always at the higher level. So if you start off at rookie ball, the average height was 6 feet 7 inches. When we got the major league baseball, it went up and up, actually the tallest tallest average at AAA was 6 feet 7 7/10 of an inch. For rookie ball 6 foot 1/5 of an inch, no, no, no. Six feet one and a half inches. Then in major league baseball, it was 6 foot 2/10 of an inch. So it dropped a little bit but we could see that the taller athletes were at the higher level.
So that makes sense. But in pitching that becomes even more important. As we know leverage puts more force on the ball, but we still have to have the force production to start the force and start building that energy to leverage it and then apply the force. The point is the vertical and power production is where that energy is created and that is critical for the high velocity pitcher and the 3X Pitching is an approach that cuts through the conventional wisdom because it doesn't change itself in the low velocity pitcher or the high velocity pitcher. Ultimately it's not the conventional approach which is very typical and we run into a lot. Where it ultimately says if you're not 6'5, 6'3, you're going to have a hard time playing in the professional level. It pretty much discredits you and doesn't want to help you if you're under 6'0. 3X Pitching does not take that approach. We are here to work with all pitchers and we do. I would say the majority of pitchers who work with me are under 6 feet because these are the guys that are struggling the most because of leverage. They have to make up for it in the power production. I spend a lot of time focusing on power production because I get the smaller pitcher.
If you come in as a 6'6 pitcher, I've had a guy I've work with for years named Mitchell Sewald, who's with LSU now. He's a 6'6 pitcher. It was a lot easier for him. We still had a lot of work to do. Just because you're 6'6 doesn't mean you're going to throw 95 like Mitchell did. It just makes it easier and that the potential is there. I do have a guy 6'6 as well, he doesn't have half the speed Mitchell has and he's a high eighties guy. If you look at the guys like Mitchell and Daniel on the site. The same height but Mitchell's twice as fast. Maybe three times as fast as Daniel. Therefore it's power production it came down to. It's always going to go to power production. Tall just means you have an edge , but if you don't have the speed and power to use it, then it has very little use. We can take the data here and understand that the most important one is peak power production.
So we want to go down to the chart and look at the vertical jump peak power. We can see that rookie ball was around 10.7 or 10000 Watts of power were generated in the athlete. MLB jumps to 11.5 and 11542 Watts was generated by the mlb ball player. So how do we get that. This is the most important in the board. We know what we're working with in the chart and enhance the athlete but most importantly we want to what kind of power production can they push out. Also the mean power. We want to see that above average as well. So how can we calculate that? The second half of the article bottom uses the Harlow formula. We can measure the peak and average power, which would be mean.We can put in our numbers and covert our pounds to kilograms and make a vertical jump from millimeters to centimeters. We can put that in and calculate it. It's going to really astonish you when you look at it. You're more than likely going to see how far behind you are to the average athlete, is not going to be the average major league athlete or professional athlete. They're going to definitely be elites. The performance data are professional athletes and these are elite athletes. As much as baseball players don't want to believe that, you're going to have an eye opening experience when you calculate your peak and average power. But that's what we need to do, calculating those numbers. Once you see that. Wow, say you're 8000 produce 8000 watts. You calculated and your number is around 8000. Well you got a lot of work to do. For you to get to rookie ball, to be an average athlete in rookie ball, you have to produce another 2000 watts. Maybe you have to jump another 5 or 6 inches or vertical jump. When you're vertical jump is based on your weight. There's two things here, If you look at the formula, it's using your weight and your height in the vertical jump. The more you weight, the less higher you have to jump. So if you're 175 pounds and you have to jump 45 inches, you're going to say "I can't jump 45 inches." Maybe if you could get to 200 pounds, you have to jump 36-38 inches. You can see how , back to the original article about weight correlates to higher velocities. It's easier for a heavier athlete to generate power than a lighter athlete because he doesn't have enough weight to put force behind the ball. So adding weight, as long as it's lean muscle, as you can see lean mass was a category. Of course the MLB athlete had the most. More lean muscle will support more power. That's the approach. That's the bigger, stronger, fast approach and the Fusion System in the 3X Pitching Velocity Program. That's what we're trying to do.

Power vs Endurance Training the Pitcher

There's a study that shows called, the Noncompatibility Of Power And Endurance Training Among College Baseball Players. The endurance training group's decreased an average around 39.5 watts during training. So it did decrease your power. During endurance training in the season, they lost around 40 watts of power. Well that's not a lot but the other group did resistance power training and they increased around 211 watts, plus a minus 169. Some of them were even more than that. This is proving the best way to keep your velocity in season or to enhance your velocity this off season is to do power training over endurance training. So what kind of power training is best? I put up a list on exercises Dr.Garhammer did on the power outlets of all the lifts in the weight room. The superior move was the clean, snatch and jerk. All the Olympic lifts. So those were superior. The back squats was 1100 watts, the dead lift was 1100. The jerk was 5400 watts. The clean was 5400. The superior lifts were the Olympic lifts. Makes sense because they are plyometric movements in the weight room using heavy loads. Makes perfect sense. So if you're that guy at 8000 Watts of power, after you calculated your peak power, and our goals is to hit 10000 and be an average athlete in rookie ball, i would advise you to use a program like 3X Pitching and the Fusion System which implements an Olympic style lifting program which is going to be more effective at enhancing your power production. So that's the goal here, if we can do that, if we got the numbers and followed the program, we implement these key training methods to increase power production and we start to see the power production go up into these professional elite numbers and then at the same time we can calculate our 3X Pitching profile or see how we get our hip to shoulder separation, how well we get to triple extension before foot strike, or how early you get to foot strike. If I get all those key mechanics and along with these performance data, then we're on the road to high velocity. That's how. It's not rocket science. That is a guarantee that you'll add 5-10 mph or 15-20. Wherever you are, you would potentially reach your topvelocity. This is where it's revolutionary and the holy grail.
This was what ultimately I was setting out to do when I developed Topvelocity.net. I wanted to give the pitcher these benchmarks and things they can follow. A program they can use to hit these standards. They were the person they wanted to be. Which was the high velocity pitcher. That's what all this does. This is a great opportunity for you to see what door you're knocking on or what it's going to take for you to go where you want to go. It also shows if you're working hard enough and if you're putting your efforts in the right pace. Or am I wasting my time. That's what I hope to achieve and hope it saves you a ton of time getting you in a training program and heading towards the performance data of these professional athletes. I'll leave that there. I was going to go to more to ground reaction forces but I'm going to cover that in the next podcast. So we talk about how in this performance data, it allows you to generate more ground reacting forces. And how those ground force reactions will you get more leverage or support the leverage you already have to generating high velocities. So we're going to go into more of that the next episode and that study is an article as well. You can read it if you want before the next podcast. But the studies called, Studies prove ground reactions highly correlate to high pitching velocities. So we'll go over that and it's going to show how this performance data is going to help us become high velocity pitchers. I appreciate you listening in and keep working hard. If you have any questions post them here on the page where this podcast is or send me an email. Contact me or post it on the forums. But hey, I'm here to make you a better ballplayer, I'm here to make you a harder thrower, I'm here to turn you into a high velocity pitcher, so let me know what I can do to help you and I'll see you in the next podcast.