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Single Leg Progressions… Progressing the Step-up

The anomaly of the step up in is how much it’s used while there is so little research available on its transfer to sport. Other than scattered research from the early 90s involving what the Eastern Bloc countries are doing with the step-up, the research on the exercise is limited (2). This makes it a bit of an “ugly stepchild” to the split squat or s. leg squat. While some coaches such as Mike Boyle believe that it should be avoided for athletes with knee pathologies (1), there are many coaches that have had great success with the exercise in healthy athletes. I myself love them as we train a primarily baseball population. Continue reading “Single Leg Progressions… Progressing the Step-up”

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How to Create the Best Prescription for Power

When I first started training, I like many others believed that if we just keep improving absolute strength our athletes would continue to get bigger, faster, and stronger. Fast forward to many years later, and I can tell you with a great degree of confidence (and experience) that most metrics crucial to sport such as speed, explosive ability, and change of direction can only be improved for about the first year simply by increasing absolute strength, as in getting stronger, by utilizing big compound lifts under high load.  However, Continue reading “How to Create the Best Prescription for Power”

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5 Lower Half Pitching Issues Preventing a Consistent Release Point

Lower Half Pitching

It’s no mystery that one of the keys to successful pitching is a consistent release point.  While I do believe that the term “repeatable delivery” is a bit of a stretch, and that many times inconsistency in your arm slot can be a major cause of difficulty in repeating your delivery, I believe we need to dig a little deeper and look closer down the kinetic chain to lower half pitching issues. Continue reading “5 Lower Half Pitching Issues Preventing a Consistent Release Point”

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Creating Lower Half Stability to Create Upper Half Mobility

Last week I posted a “before and after” shot of a proprioceptive drill that I use with our athletes to train anchoring the lower half in order to create a more stable platform at the hip and to actually allow the athlete to “feel” what we are attempting to train during a common throwing drill that we use with most of our throwers. It received such a great response that I decided to explain it in slightly more detail. You can view the post here: Continue reading “Creating Lower Half Stability to Create Upper Half Mobility”