Week 58 is done and it was an awesome week of work.
This was the first week I actually started throwing with some intent again and it felt great. I only did one day of high effort throws and it was last Monday when I did some plyo testing after my drills were done. As I said in last week’s post the results were promising and I recovered from it reasonably well. The real test will be this week. I did my plyo testing yesterday and I’d like to get in some flat ground throws at max effort on Friday, but I need to have my recovery dialed in to make sure I feel good enough to do that.
The goal for my flat ground this week will be to feel good enough to do it and to be somewhere above 90mph, and then build from there. After seeing Robert Stock make his debut this week, I went back and watched some of his videos from two years ago, when he was trying to make it back into affiliate ball from Indy ball. He had never thrown 98mph before that offseason and then he obviously built from there and added command and offspeed and was able to sign with the Reds. Then this offseason he got above 101mph, so that’s kind of the model I have in mind, and I’m trying to get my mindset to the point where I’m not putting past limits on myself. Where I’ve been is only the starting point and I’m trying to surpass that and I know I can, it’s just going to be a matter of consistency in both performance and mindset.
I know I’m jumping around, but my plyos went well this week. The numbers were all high for it being so early in the process, and almost all of them went up from last week so both of those are encouraging. The plyos give some very interesting immediate feedback because since they’re soft you really have to have relaxed arm action and create intent at the right time, which has always been a problem for me. If you death grip them they go slower, whereas with a baseball you can get away with it a bit more. In my experience this is especially the case with the gray ball. I have a tendency to squeeze it hard when I want to throw it hard and the velo is usually about 6mph lower when I do this. Creating intent at the right time is going to be big for me going forward and the plyo balls should help with that.
Lifting is still taking a back seat to sport specific training and mobility work, but it’s still a helpful piece as I’m trying to use it to improve my power. I’m doing a lot of fast movements in the beginning of my training sessions and then hitting a big lift at a relatively heavy weight towards the end to maintain max strength. This next block I’m focusing more on maintaining unilateral strength which I think will also be helpful moving forward.
Anyway, thank you for following me on my journey to the show and check back later this week for more content!