It’s been another solid week.
I’ve been making progress with tissue quality and mobility. One of the issues I’ve been dealing with is missing end range elbow extension. I’ve been using passive end range holds, active manipulations, and soft tissue work to regain full mobility. It’s a relatively common issue in throwers, but not a problem I’ve had before. It results in pain near the olecranon, and obviously pain can be a limiting factor for making throwing progress, so this has been the main focus of the last few weeks.
As far as specifics of the throwing program go, I’m in my fourth week of the on-ramp. If things continue to go well I’ll be moving on to some higher intensity throwing, but I’ll have to see how my elbow is doing. I’m feeling pretty good about it since Monday I pushed to a higher intensity than I’ve thrown at so far and I recovered well and was able to throw as Wednesday. Friday I tested low effort pull downs and the results were encouraging, so I’m excited to see where I’m at this week.
The limiting factors that I’m focusing on right now are hip/shoulder separation, horizontal abduction and the point at which my arm flips up, and back leg mechanics. What I mean by the horizontal abduction piece is that, when my arm flips it’s also starting to move forward which takes away from the potential help my pec can provide. Ideally, when my arm flips up I still have a significant stretch on my pec and my arm hasn’t started to move forward yet, so it’s a matter of patterning and improving mobility.
Hip/shoulder separation and horizontal abduction have always been issues for me but I’ve been able to rely on intensity and strength to still throw at relatively high velocities. However, that isn’t sustainable and leads to big peaks and big dips. I need to improve my movement efficiency and be able to create “easier” velocity, so that my velocity doesn’t fluctuate so much based on arousal level.
In the weight room I’ve moved on to my concentric focused phase in the Triphasic Training model and it’s going well so far. I’m excited to move on to the power phase and see how I move some lighter weights because I’ve been moving the heavier weights pretty fast. The intent to move everything fast has definitely been helping. Volume has remained relatively low due to the focus on neural adaptations and quality reps, but I still have a few higher rep sets of assistance work in the program on Fridays, since I have the most time to recover before throwing again.
I’m pumped to see where I can take my velocity and look forward to seeing the changes I’ve made come together on the mound.
Thank you for following me on my journey to the show and check back later this week for more content!