ISEH’s Gus Morrison, Ben Ashworth and Paul Read have together recently published a comprehensive testing and training framework for baseball pitchers. Their new guideline encompasses the rationale, methodologies and practical training recommendations together in one place.
This framework was developed due to prevalence of upper-limb injuries among baseball pitchers that cause significant time loss for players and financial losses for teams. There have been several studies that have looked into pitching kinetics and kinematics with some assessing different testing or training techniques for enhancing performance while minimising injury risks. So far however, there has not been any inclusive approach of combining both testing and training to optimise the health status as well as enhance performance among Baseball pitchers.
The framework aims:
• Analyse the sport demands to identify the key biomechanical requirements and injury epidemiology
• Present a test battery with clinically relevant benchmarks to examine the components identified in the needs analysis
• Develop a progressive sequence of exercises related to each of the assessments performed, which can then be used to formulate an athletic training programme
Gus Morrison commented and shared: “While this paper focusses on baseball pitching, many of the tests and training methods can be used in other athletic and clinical populations. We hope that this framework can be adapted within a number of sporting and clinical environments.”
Access the framework, published in Strength and Conditioning Journal.