Listen to the entire 3X Pitching Podcast Episode 5. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes by selecting the button on the far right.
[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/81122320" params="" width=" 100%" height="166" iframe="true" /]
3X Pitching – Podcast Episode 5 Transcript
This transcript is a rough draft. It is recommended that you listen to the podcast above.
Alright, It's Brent Pourciau with TopVelocity.net. And welcome to the 3X Pitching Podcast Episode 5.
Alright moving right along here, we've had some good podcast's so far. Been getting a good response, I'd like to hear more from you guys. If this is something you like I'd definitely like to keep it going and more than likely will keep it going. I would like to hear some of your opinions on how these podcast resonate with you. If you have any ideas or any suggestions on podcasts in the future or topics you would like to hear covered. Things like that... That'll be awesome.
The Pitching Instructor Vs Destructor
Ultimately the best way to do it is to go to the forums, post in the general section, just say podcast's requests or podcast question or comments and tell me what you have to say. I'd love to hear from you. And ultimately give me a little more information on what you guys like or don't like about this. Or if you want more of it or if there's a lot of you guys out there that are actually listening to this! OK, so today we're going to cover a topic on an article I just posted recently called, "10 Common Mistakes That Cause Pitching Injury." I don't like spending a lot of time talking about injuries just because I guess it's just a hard time in my career to overcome it but I know I have a lot to offer when it comes to the topics, so I did want to put a lot of good information out there for you guys because lets face it, just like I say in the article, pain and injury in pitching is a very common problem. Because we, you know, we can identify the issues easier and ultimately because there's still a lot of bad coaching out there. I like to call them, instead of pitching instructors, I call them pitching destructors. Little fun play on words. You know, these are coaches who have come into the coaching field right from the baseball field, meaning they were once players.
And they feel it's a no brainer and easy transition for them. I was a pitcher, now I can be a pitching coach! Well I believe it doesn't works that way. I believe you're going into a whole different profession. And it takes a whole lot of training, just like if I wanted to go to minor league baseball and I wanted to go be an umpire. I'd have to start over again and learn the rules of the game. Places I need to be in certain points of the game and kind of the tricks to the trade. I don't think I can just jump right into it and all the sudden start umpiring minor league baseball. I'd make a fool of myself. It's the same way with coaching. There's a lot of ignorance and guys think that they can switch over and be good at it. So we get these pitching coaches who are kind of relaying information they were given when they were young. Which more than likely was not good information and they're kind of trying to quickly interpret their moves and then describe them to you in an analysis to try to help you as a player and a lot of times, the majority, it doesn't work and causes problems. What makes a good pitching coach or instructor is someone who actually studies the mechanics of the pitcher and who analyses film and actually sees the movements in slow motion, understand the kinetic change, which is all the joints and how they link together in the body and work together and how the movements move through them and how they interact together. All these things, coming down to the studies and doing the research to really understand this and to research like I've done at Topvelocity.net with all the science we know behind doing studies to determine certain factors of pitching mechanics. If a pitching coach hasn't educated himself in that manner, then how effective is he?
I've seen a lot of great ballplayers in all sports, and I'd say baseball specifically, I've been around a lot of great ball players who when I've heard them coach, it was a joke. It was the funniest thing I ever heard. It was like a don't quit your day job kind of thing. Those guys are born to play and definitely not to coach. And then there's those guys born to coach and definitely not born to play. Of course your not going to have both ends of the spectrum, you're going to be somewhere in between, but the point being, it's not a seamless transition for a player to coach so if you just looked at that as someone who is a player and looking for a coach and you looked at all the options out there to help you with your game, you look at all these coaches and you look at how much did this coach play, how long did he play, what level did he play, and how long did he coach, how long did he study, how many analysis has he done. And if you look for a coach who has a balance of both or more on the coaching aspects, which is most important to you, it'll probably eliminate 99% of coaches in your area when it comes to good pitching instruction that's why there's a dying need for it. I get those countless emails of coaches, high school ,college coaches, low level college coaches, parents, saying just that we can't find this information that your putting out there. There a dying need for it and it's just amazing that's why I'm happy that Topvelocity serves a purpose in the baseball community. And I will continue to push it as hard as I can as long it serves that purpose and provides a service because it's something I love to do.
But that being said, we are really struggling with finding good instruction and in the game of baseball, it's such a high skill sport that you just..it's really hard and your kind of gambling on your career to go into it, just kind of naturally, I'm not saying it can't happen because I know it has. But just going into naturally and saying I'm going to figure it out. That's a big gamble. Your opportunity to improve your success as a baseball player is greatly improved when you get some of this critical information of how we move, how we should train to better those movements. So that's where you can really get an edge. You take guys like Greg Maddux, who they called the professor. He was this nerdy looking guy you knew and as far as his athleticism he was a great athlete. His appearance made him look like he wasn't a great athlete. But as far as his athleticism, among all the other elites in the MLB level, he was more than likely average or below average. His intelligence is what got him to the top level and getting him in the hall of fame. That's what really unique about this sports but at the same time this sport has the fastest recorded body movements in all sports, so at the same time you still got to understand the speed and power aspect of this game and at the top level of all sports. It's a great game because you have to be intelligent, well you don't have to be intelligent, but your success is improved if your intelligent and if you understand the movements because that'll allow you to overcome the athleticism you may not have to compete at the level you want to be at. The point is in the average realm of baseball instruction, the pitchers are the average pitcher or below average in athleticism, there is a big need of good instruction and unfortunately we don't find it. Because we don't find it, we have a ton of injuries and we have common place on any team to hear someone is hurt more in baseball than any other sport. And I would say probably soccer's the worst but baseball's not that far away. So it is a problem and obviously it's a serious problem if you look at the stats from ASMI, the American Sports Medicine Institute, and they operate on twelve thirteen year old kids that have ruined themselves and seriously hurt themselves while playing the game of baseball, the research was induced by coaches and parents not giving them proper instruction, overusing them, and not teaching them about physical development and training. Keeping the body strong, healthy, and durable. And the misconceptions around all that as well.
Pitching Injury Statistics
So that being said, lets look here at some more pitching injury statistics. We're just going to run through them. There's eleven of them here, there's actually a lot more out there than this, it's just some of the basics just to see the risks involved in what were dealing with. 1 out of 20 pitchers at the average age of 17 years experienced a serious injury in their pitching career. This is from a study of 481 pitchers from the ages of 9-14 who’s pitching career was documented for 10 years of play. 2 of these pitchers had surgery before they turned 13 years old. So one out of twenty has experienced injury in their career. That's insane! Pitchers who pitched more than 100 innings in at least 1 year were 3.5 times more likely to be injured during this same study. Another eye-opening statistic. Two previous studies of American youth league pitchers found that elbow pain was present in 18% of pitchers aged 11 and 12 years. Obviously just more information that it's very common. 58% of high school pitchers in one study experience elbow pain. One study has examined the prevalence of shoulder pain among young pitchers, and they found that 26.5% had had shoulder pain by the end of a youth league season. 38% of high school pitchers experience shoulder pain. You can see at the higher lever, still considered the youth level had more pain and injury. The risk of shoulder pain is 2.5 times greater for pitchers who throw more than 75 pitches per game. The risk of elbow pain is 3.5 times greater for pitchers throwing more than 600 pitches per season. So we see pitch count and overuse is obviously, there's a big correlation, to injury and pain. Rest should be incorporated in all programs; athletes who participated with arm fatigue were almost 6 times more likely to suffer from elbow pain and 4 times more likely to have shoulder pain that those who did not have arm fatigue. Roughly half of youth pitchers report elbow or shoulder pain at least one time during the season. The study's saying at least half report pain. For each additional 25 pitches thrown after reaching the 50 pitch count, the percentage of pitchers experiencing pain increases. So pitch count is linked to these arm problems. And that's another big problem.
Look today how it's common place to play all year. I've talked to parents continuously, and their number 1 question is how do I use the 3X Pitching Velocity Program while we're in season? Well we can modify it and there is a in season program but I'd like for you to go through the off season program first. Ultimately I'd like you to learn through 3X, learning the approach which can take you a whole season, and then preparing yourself for your off season program. Then I get the coaches or parents saying but what if he doesn't have an off season? That's your decision. Pitchers are made in the off season. There's no way i can take all the pitchers who have had great success with the 3X Pitching Velocity Program and take their career and remove the off seasons what holds most of the gains and then replace them with a season and expect them to be in the same place they are today. I can guarantee most of them would be injured. The majority of them would not be throwing as hard as they are today and as successful as today. I would put my life on it. And that's crazy because we treat these high school, college and professional baseball players differently. We expect them to have an off season. Maybe not in high school but more in college and professional. We expect them to have an off season. We don't do that with our youth pitchers. We expect them to play all year long. That is a problem. More pitchers are being thrown at a younger age when the body is not strong and durable and the growth plates are more exposed and vulnerable to stress. So you can see how it really is unfortunate how unprepared and the environment we created for our youth pitchers. It's not an environment for you to experience pain. So when you hear someone say, "I've played through all of little league and never experienced pain." I would say it's probably because you don't throw hard. It's probably because your not that good. If your good you've had pain.
Common Mistakes Pitchers Make Which Cause Injury and Reduce Performance
OK, so, now we're going to go into an article we go over some of the key mistakes and define these key mistakes. These are the most common mistakes, I'm going to define three of them as not related to pitching mechanics. The last seven are going to be related strictly to pitching mechanics. We know just what I said earlier, that ASMI determined that the three factors to arm pain and arm problems are going to be poor mechanics, poor physical fitness, and overuse. So overuse is simple. We need to institute pitch counts. I wasn't on pitch counts when I was young and I remember every single game I wasn't on a pitch count. That was when my arm did weird things. It'll be hard for me to say today that I wouldn't worry about pitch counts. I know are the times I'm more vulnerable. The interview I did with Jim Morris, from the movie the Rookie, you can listen to his interview here on the podcast by subscribing to my iTunes feed. Jim talked about his fourth surgery, with a well known Dr.Joe, operated on his arm, and the doctor told him that most of the damage you've done to your arm, he'd had nine career surgeries, most of the arm damage done to your arm came before you were 15 years old. And when I heard him say that, it game me goose bumps because it makes me think back to all the times where I was 15 years old and was showing off my arm, where I was trying to throw my arm off or I was being over pitched and overused by coaches. I think of all that and realize and believe I'm staying on the same boat. My rotator cuff surgery at 18 years was related to all the damage done before I was 15 years old. I wouldn't have to think twice about that. I would totally agree with it. So pitch count is important. You can follow ASMI's youth pitching statement where they give you a recommended pitches to throw. When you see the recommended amount of pitches a young pitcher should throw in a year, it's going to be tough. You're going to realize how overused youth pitchers are. Because it's way under the amount, I think it's around 600 pitches, if you look at these kids playing all year round they're probably throwing twice or maybe three times that. It's kind of sickening because we would never do that to a mature athlete. Obviously these pro pitchers throw more than that but it's important. I would really institute it. I tell parents when do you want your son's glory years to be? Do you want his glory years to be when he's nine or ten. Do you want his glory years to be when he's 15 or 16? Do you want his glory years when he's 18? When do you want his glory years to be? I really believe if you want it to be later in life and you want him to have a long long successful career, don't push him when he's young and he's weak and his growth plates are vulnerable. That's when I would keep him on the shelf and selectively put him in and out and controlled on a pitch count. If my son wants to play and your worried about your son not enjoying the game or having fun, put him out on the field. Not after he pitched ultimately I would say, rest him and then put him on the field and let him have fun. Put him in another sport. I'm a big advocate of a multi sport talent. Put him in another sport. Let him have fun. That's not an excuse to say that your son should pitch as much as he wants, have fun, enjoy the game, and compete because he can do that many different ways. He's doesn't have to be abused on the mound over and over again.
That's a controversial topic I could have gone off for a long time. And I'll get into that with any parent but I stand my ground and have very strong principles when it comes to that and when I coach USSSA and I'm the only team with a bullpen and when we go to games I would take a bench and put it down on the outfield side on the foul line and I would tell 3-4 pitchers to sit down there. I was the only team doing it. I took an average team to state championships. Every time I put a pitcher on a field, he was fresh. They were throwing guys two days or three in a row and maxing them out. It was easy! The problem of other coaches is how can we do this and have them sitting out there whose parents are going to pay for that. That's when you learn they do this only for money. We abuse kids because of money. I found a way to not make money the problem. I got sponsors, parents to understand they could come and go as they please and he'll be used as a pitcher mainly, and I just did the best I could to set it up that way and it work you guys. We need to do that, these are young kids. We're not trying to win the major league world series when they're ten to twelve years old. Lets take care of these kids and sometimes it a better coaching decision because it puts a fresher kid on the field. That's where it makes sense for those who have the competitive edge.
Alright, so pitch counts! I believe in them and that they're big. The other one was poor physical fitness. We know this is an issue because, you know we see and hear the misconceptions of strength condition for young pitchers. I'm going write a whole other article pretty soon and how young we be to train and start strength training. if you want to be careful that we're not exhausting the muscle and then going into a game an trying to compete completely exhausted Kids are vulnerable and their growth plates and open and joints are porous. We want to make sure that they're strong but not too strong. There's a balance there which is why its something we need to address. It's not a complete yes or no and it's not black and white here, just because your growth plates are open doesn't mean you can't workout. That's absurd! There's no studies that prove it and it won't benefit you anyway. We'll talk more on why as we go through here. That's going to be covered more here in the 10 common mistakes. And the last one being the poor mechanics an that's what we're going to go into and how important it can be.
So number one of the ten most common mistakes is poor leg and core strength. So basically it gives you a good understanding why this is important and gives you the studies showing that its been proven to be an issue and important to prevent injury. Poor core and leg strength, we have studies that show the muscle contractions of the high velocity pitchers have have a ramping up effect going to front foot strike and these studies not only found that these high velocity pitchers, they activate more of their leg muscles and ramp these maximum voluntary contractions up going into front foot strike, but that it's important to do that. You have a lack of power and strength coming through the lower half, you actually force more demand on the upper upper body. So these same studies that said "Look, these high velocity pitchers generate more force by contracting the muscles harder in a ramping up effect through the stride which you understand 3x pitching, goes along with triple extension and 3x pitching. If we don't do that, then stress overload on the shoulders is increased and even exaggerated, so yo can take so much stress off the upper body by using more of the legs in your delivery. It's a performance component and factor and it's a injury prevention factor. It's a performance because high velocity pitchers use more legs in the stride and an injury prevention factor because if you don't use the legs and generate speeds in a ramping up stride, then your going to put a load on the shoulders that is over exaggerated from what is necessary and overtime the shoulder is going to break down more. It's critical that no matter how young the kid is, you have to get his legs strong or his arms are going to have to make up for the lack of strength. So that's why you can see studies show that there's is more injuries in young pitchers strictly because they don't have the leg strength and haven't gone through puberty, hormones haven't kicked in, they haven't built big quads and hamstring and glutes and they're using more of they're arms. There arms are breaking down. And they have pitching coaches telling them "lift up, down and out, slow strides, don't rush, land soft" All these things to reduce the dynamics of the stride and reduced stride and power. And force the pitcher to use more of the arm. Very important. That's why I put that one up front. That's both mechanical and training understanding to really force arm health and injury prevention.
The next one is overthrowing in practices. That just goes in the long line with pitch counts. Guys will count pitch count in games, so they'll have a pitcher do his warm-ups, stretch it out a bit, get on the bullpen, do his bullpen, gets out of the game and throws his warm-up pitches, and his coach hasn't started counting pitches yet. He could have thrown 80 pitches. He hasn't counted one pitch. I don't want you guys just counting game pitches, those are important, but you got to count all those warm-up pitches too and make sure, and that's not going to go into that ASMI youth pitching protocol, but you need to understand that these pitches need to be counted in pregames, making sure that not leading to overuse. The next one is pitcher catcher combos. I was a pitcher catcher when I was in high school. And that's when I had rotator cuff surgery. You got to be careful with it. It's not the fact is your a pitcher catcher, what the problem is, studies show that through a season the pitcher, which is again saying the pitcher solution throws the most throws obviously. The second to that is the catcher because hes throwing all those throws back. So if you're going from the pitcher and throwing a 100 pitches to the catcher, and finishing game another 60 pitches. You can see how that then causes overuse and more wear and tear. Be careful with pitcher catcher combos because of that factor. Maybe the starting pitcher goes 6 or 7, in youth 3 or 4, and then the catcher comes in and throws one inning. I might be for that. But don't do it a lot. You're putting a lot of throws on those arms. Alright let's get in more into the pitching mechanics of these common mistakes to pitching injuries!
Number Four, Poor Leg and Trunk Power. Just along the line with the leg and core strength. It just focuses on it and the importance of it again in reducing stress of the arm and also there's some more studies there that talk about this. This is a good one I'm going to read out to you. "The complex interaction of the lower extremities and core musculature in the kinetic chain reduces the kinetic contributions of the shoulder joint. Thus, the pitching motion should not be thought of as an upper extremity action, rather an integrated motion of the entire body that culminates with rapid motion of the upper extremity. Improvement of velocity can result from optimization of the kinetic chain, which likely also reduces the kinetic contributions of the shoulder to produce top velocity. Reduced kinetic stresses on the shoulder may prevent injury, leading to greater durability and health of the throwing shoulder." Chandler and Kindler studies show that that 20% decrease of trunk and pelvis power forced the pitcher to make up for it in the shoulder rotation with a 34% increase to keep the same force on the ball. It wasn't just a 20, 20, it was a 20% decrease to a 20% increase, it was a 20-34%, it was an overcompensation. That's the problem and why this is such as key component to performance and injury prevention.
Five, Open Stride Foot and Open Stride Foot Placement. Now this is important. This really to me, goes with horizontal abduction. We'll take about that later and what that is. Maybe I'll throw in a little right now on horizontal abduction. If a pitcher gets his throwing arm elbow behind his back, going into front foot and his shoulders closed, and then he is going to land with an open front foot, which means it's facing away from the throwing arm and he steps to an open position from his drive line, if I drew a line from my drive leg toe to the front of the plate. If he's stepping to the left side and he's a right handed pitcher, right side for an left handed pitcher, with the open foot, that puts more stress into the shoulder and even the elbow. But you can see if you put yourself in the position, full stride, open foot, step in an open position, throw your elbow behind your back, you can feel all the torque pulling on your shoulder and elbow. So if you have a pitcher who keeps the elbow behind the back going into front foot and shoulders closed, and he's stepping into those positions, be careful. He's putting excessive amount of force on the shoulders. Now this is kind of catch 22 here. We have force on the shoulder, more force on the shoulders show the harder we throw. But there's a balance here. If we go to far, we tear the the thing up. That's one case if you have a kid having shoulder problems and you see he steps open with the foot in the open foot placement and his elbows abducted behind the back, then you can work on his foot placement and that'll help him relive the shoulder pains.
Next one, Poor Elbow Flexion. Basically studies show landing with an extended or high cocked arm puts more stress on the shoulders. It's interesting. You get a lot of young pitchers that when they stride, they stride really slow, they think its all about arm speed. He starts with the glove high, break aggressively, swing the arms, reach the arms back, all this stuff is going to put them into a extended or a position at foot strike where that arm is not in flexion. That arms going to be extended or reaching up, the arm will be swinging behind the back. All those things are going to put it in a position where we don't have flexion. Studies have found that more flexion, there's really a balance of flexion from 70-90 is a better place to reduce stress on the arms and shoulders. Just making sure that when they get to front foot, that there arm is flexed and relaxed behind the head. Some shoulder abduction meaning elbow pulled behind the back. The arms should almost be cocked and more internally rotated. If anyone wants the specific description to that, I can give you that and you can also find it and pull it all together which is referenced at the bottom.
Number 6, called "Baseball throwing mechanics as they relate to pathology and performance." They really give a good description of that but don't pull it all together. I can pull it all together for you and kind of show you where you need to be at these points. Just make sure you have some flexion. Any of that swinging of the arm, any aggressive movements of the arm, extensions of the arm, just like I said is related to slow strides or too aggressive hand breaks. Just tell him to keep the arms relaxed. The arms are reacting to lower half movements. Just focus on that. Focus on keeping the arm relaxed, reacting to the lower half movements, focus on the pitcher accelerating and ramping up the speeds through the stride.
Alright, next one, No Trunk Tilt and Low Arm Angle. They found that pitchers who dip inside in a submarine/sidearm position as much as we heard and I used to throw that way after the injury. That reduces stress on the arm. It doesn't on the elbow joints. The elbow joint actually take more stress and the shoulder joint, we reduced the stress on the shoulder joints when our torso is shifted a little bit back towards our butt. So as we're striding our torso is a little behind the butt. I call this Tilt in 3X Pitching Mechanics And the arm is at 90 degrees. That arm is just above the elbow and we're at that 3 quarters arm slot. They found that those positions and up are the healthier arm positions. It's interesting because it's really convention wisdom belief the other way around. And you think below the shoulder and down is the healthier arm positions. Its not true, The healthier arm positions are more up that's because the arm is riding the body more. When its down its really leaving the body more taking on most of the force in that movement. Really stress with pitchers to be more vertical and tilted toward the butt and not drag or drop the arm because its really hard on the arm.
Number 8, Excessive Horizontal Adduction. That's when the arm starts to accelerate and we start to open your shoulders to our target and externally rotate the arm. Studies show that when the elbow is further out in front of the face or chest to external rotation, we call that horizontal adduction. That puts more stress specifically on the elbow and UCL and they found that the point of acceleration, when the arms starts to move forward, if it's in that really adducted position, it's almost too much for the arm to handle. Studies found that someone throwing just low 80's in the position with a good horizontal adduction, it actually snapped all the cadaviers ligaments. We want to make sure we have more abduction at that point in the arm than horizontal adduction when the elbow behind the face, the key to that is hip to shoulder separation . If we have hip to shoulder separation, that means the hips are opening before the shoulder and then shoulder speeds are peaking way after the hips, the arm is getting involved later, therefore it'll externally rotate quicker, especially if we have good flexion in the arm. Then we're going to not get into that nasty horizontal adduction and put all that stress on the UCL. That coupled with the previous one and of dropping the arm, tilting at the arm forward, devastating to the pitchers. You can see that created a good category of big percentage of little league pitches, they all do that and that's why they have arm pain. So just making those adjustments mechanically maybe might even touching pitch counts can have a significant effect on reducing pain or possible injury.
Late Internal Rotation Pronation. Now if we're in that same position with horizontal adduction out in front of the face with the shoulders squared and arms back. That's going to create the arm to internally rotate late and in front of the face. Pronation is going to happen late. And that is also found to create more stress on the elbow and the shoulder because now with the shoulder, the shoulder and the rotator cuff is having to support that early arm movement and late internal rotation it's having to support that now the arm is in front of the face so more stress will be put on the rotator cuff. We found that professional pitchers actually, when they pitch because they get more hip to shoulder separation, get less horizontal abduction, the elbow stays behind the face, they're activating more lats and subscapularis and the top of the pecs, so that's specifically the lats being involved is critical , it's a big muscle group, it can handle tons of stress, that's our little back wing, that's when our back wing gets really fatigued when we pitch, its a decelerator accelerator, and it's not going to get involved if we cant get into that position. That's going to come from hip to shoulder separation. Hip to shoulder separation really is the key component that will fix 8, down is you can develop a good hip to shoulder separation, maybe even 7.
Last one, number 10. Reduce External and Internal Rotation Range of Motion. So if pitchers have been throwing with bad mechanics for a while, then just in general when a pitcher throws, he stretches the external rotators and actually starts to create more range of motion and his arm goes further back. You can take a pitchers pitch for a while, pull his arm back for a RHP and his left hand back and left arm back, the right arm will go back further. But you will notice the same internal rotation is less. So you'll have more external rotation in the throwing arm but less internal rotation in the non throwing arm. The problem becomes when the internal rotation is reduced past the same amount of external rotation that was gained. So if you gained external rotation and lost internal rotation , the same amount is fine. But if it becomes more and you lose more internal rotation than the same out of external rotation gained, its a problem. It means your setting yourself up for a labrum tear and the cuff, the integrity of that joint has been compromised. The pitcher needs to stop pitching and needs to strengthen the cuff, rebuild the mobility and integrity, and then get back to it Pitching coaches out there, parents out there, if your son is complaining of shoulder pain, that's a good place to start. Check that internal and external range of motion. Make sure that's health.
Why the 3X Pitching Velocity Program
Alright so that's what we did and in the ten mistakes we laid out a great game plan just a good understanding of whats going on. I hope this enlightens whats out there, some of those pitching coaches, any players that are dealing with arm pain once you worth it all together. Learn the stuff, the more you learn the stuff, not only will your performance get better, but your going to feel a confidence gain, your not going to be hit with these obstacles of injuries and things where you have to take yourself out of the game to get yourself back to it. That will slow you down and screw up your career. You need a all the good health you can get in today's game. And what we didn't go over is we went over a little bit over the remedies, but more into the remedies and game plan, if you have these problems or some of these problems or a lot, its really the 3X Pitching Velocity Program. As much as its a velocity program, its an injury prevention program. I've had, my favorite guy to really kind of support my program is Darell Coulter, go to his website when you have the chance, http://www.pitchinghabit.com. Great guy , he played and was drafted by the Phillie's, he play 3-4 years in minor league ball. The first thing he told to me when he came down to my camp, he said "It's great its a velocity program, but the best thing about this program its great for injury prevention and great for those guys with arm problems, poor mechanics, poor physical fitness, all those things that cause arm problems. It is the perfect program for them." Its just cool to hear that. Ultimately its why I created it. I had torn my rotator cuff when I was 18 and I was trying to find a better way to do this guys. I needed something that was going to reduce the throws in my arm but still allow me to rep out and put in those thousands of reps to develop this motor coordination of these high velocity mechanics. But not put the wear and tear in my arm. That's when I developed the 3X Pitching Velocity Programs. That's the 3X Pitching Velocity System. That's the propriety series of drill in the throwing program using the med balls and baseball I developed to reduce those reps but still allow you to get tons and tons of throws. Or reduce the stress but still getting those reps. On top of that, its a program that builds optimal power and gives you that superior leg and core strength to be able to take the stress in the arm and put it in the legs to increase performance and prevent injury. That's where most of the answers are that solves all of this. I don't ever want to give you anything and feel like I left you hanging. That's the program that ultimately pays my bills and I get money on it but it allows me to do this every day, I love this, it allows me to help you. Its an amazing program, it speaks for itself. It creates great results, there is tons of guys on the site who talk about it everyday and benefit from it, its' here to help you if your in these position,. If you have any serious injuries, you do need to see a doctor or physician and get checked out but this information is going to help you when the doctor tells you wants going on. It'll help you solve these problems. Don't think this a reason to avoid the doctor. Its not scary. Just go and learn whats going on and lets fix it. That's the best approach, anything else sets you up for failure. Don't be scared of it. I don't believe in an career ending injury. I may call it a career ending injury but its not. If you really love this game and willing to work hard and learn from your mistakes, you can overcome anything. I appreciate you listening to this podcast, keep going up there working hard increasing pitching velocity. Like I said I'm here to help anytime. Reach out to me and I'll try my best to get you to your pitching goals.