Last week was thrown off a bit by a trip to Moab, Utah but was still a solid week of training. It was just a long weekend so it didn’t require too much adjusting, and it was a great trip!
Now back to training. I’ve been continuing to work on hip/shoulder separation as I think that’s my big rock that will lead to some of my other inefficiencies being cleaned up. I’ve been using less time on long toss and more time on drill work. I don’t tend to do well with super high throwing volumes so I have to be precise with what I choose to do each day.
I took a lot of the time to work on blending my drill work to my pitching delivery and I’m getting pretty close to full effort. Next week I should be back to testing and that will be fun.
Closer to full effort my drill work is having a more significant effect on my patterns, which is very encouraging as I was getting frustrated by my patterns at lower effort. Rockers and roll-ins have been a big focus of mine as they seem to sync up my movement and hammer on my weak points. While my front leg looks awful during low effort rockers, at higher effort it looks significantly better and even better than it does from the mound.
I’ve started using a longer walk up into roll-ins again since that seems to help sync me up better and force me to move more athletically. While I do think that using a shorter walk up can lead to more direct transfer to the mound, it gets me thinking about the movement too much and ends up not serving its purpose. As I get closer to trying to optimize from the mound I may start using fewer steps, but I’ll decide that when I get closer to that point.
My basic focus at this point has been to move less robotically through all of my drill work, so more speed has been used through most of my drills. Walking wind-ups are included in this. I was using one step into them, but that didn’t help me carry momentum through my delivery very well and didn’t give me much of a “drift.” With more steps into it, my body is drifting more and improving my hip/shoulder separation, so I’ll stay with this for a while.
My tissue quality has also been improving. I got an Armaid, which has been great for forearm tissue work. I haven’t found another toll that works as well for forearm release. Mixing my mobility work into my lifting has been a big help in terms of maximizing my time and recovery. Some of these movements are very taxing due to the amount of stiffness and focus they require to isolate precise movements so I don’t include them on recovery days or my CNS would never get a chance to recover.
I’m in my power block at this point and it’s going well so far. I’m using some movements I haven’t used before and they’re feeling pretty good. Since movement speed is the goal during this block, anything I can measure I am. The radar gun is measuring all of my med ball throws and all of my jump distances are being recorded. We’ll see what happens as the block progresses but I expect to see some solid improvements based on how well the weights moved during the strength block.
Thank you for following me on my journey to the show and check back later this week for more content!