“Thankfully, persistence is a great substitute for talent.” – Steve Martin
I’ve never viewed myself as particularly talented, but I have always been willing to outwork and outlast other people in order to get what I want.
The idea of talent is something that can hold people back if they’re not careful.
If you view yourself as talented and believe that you don’t have to work to improve, your progress will stall before you can realize your full potential.
On the other hand, if you don’t view yourself as talented, and you don’t have a growth mindset, you may view work as useless because you believe you’re shackled by your genetics.
My journey to the show is all about a growth mindset. How else could I continue to push myself and try to reach an elite performance level, when I’ve experienced so much failure throughout my baseball career?
Tendinopathy Rehab
I’ve been slow with putting out installments of this blog series for the last few weeks because I’ve been rehabbing some forearm tendinopathy and there hasn’t been a whole lot of interesting progress to report. I am definitely getting better, and I’m getting close to throwing again. I’m excited and I’m feeling impatient, but if I know that if I want to get in quality, uninterrupted training time I need to take care of these issues now.
I’ve moved on from isometrics, to tempo work (slow concentric and eccentric), and next I’ll be adding in some dynamic loading. The dynamic loading will probably start at the end of this week or the beginning of next week.
I’m very excited to move on from the boring stuff and start getting back into throwing where I know I can make some major progress. If my forearm doesn’t force me to shut down I’ll be able to get in solid training and be able to make significant progress towards 100mph.
Power Training
As I’ve said for a while, strength is no longer holding me back, so I’ve shifted my focus to power. Right now I’m in the gym 4 days/week. Tuesday and Thursday are my higher volume, lower intensity days where I allow my CNS to recover a bit. Monday and Friday are my high CNS days and have very low volume. On these days I do jumping and med ball variations and VBT on my main lifts.
I’m working on concentric only jumps, med ball throws, and main lifts currently (more on this once I’ve collected more data). But, basically concentric only movements require even more neural drive because they don’t have the pre-stretch that comes from an eccentric countermovement. So, I’m hoping to get some interesting adaptations from this and I’ll eventually add the full movements back in and test them again, but the numbers are promising so far.
Here’s some sample data:
|
Movement |
Average (in) |
Peak (in) |
| Lateral Bound |
(PR) L: 88 R: 92 |
|
| Concentric Lateral Bound |
L: 84 R: 85 |
L: 87 R: 89 |
| Broad Jump |
(PR) 107 |
|
| Concentric Broad Jump |
101 |
104 |
Mondays and Fridays are very taxing on my CNS, so the volume is extremely low, but I’m excited to continue collecting data on what I’m doing so far and see where it leads.
If you guys are interested, in the next post I’ll get into some of the med ball variations I’m using and their velocity readings.
Body Composition
Additionally, I’ve been working towards some body composition goals. I’m not doing anything extreme; I’m just working on dropping a bit of fat. I like the body weight I’m at ~215, but I could stand to be a bit more lean and I think it would help the way and the speed at which I move. So, I’m going to drop a little bit of weight slowly and then regain it slowly working on limiting the amount of body fat.
I can’t wait to get back to throwing and put some of my new ideas to the test on the way to 100mph!
Anyway, thank you for following me on my journey to the show! Feel free to reach out with any questions and check back tomorrow for more content!