Pinch Hit Friday #70 - High-Low Models for Pitchers: the Why and How

Welcome back to the CSP Elite Baseball Development Podcast. I'm your host Eric Cressy and this is episode 70 of our Pinch Hit Friday feature. Hard to believe we've gotten to 70 episodes of these kind of quick hitter pieces. Really they were just brain dump ideas from me but they've been popular with our listeners so I've continued to keep them rolling. One thing I'd appreciate if you have the time is if you could pop onto iTunes and just give us a review. If you've enjoyed this, you can even use that as an opportunity to give us some feedback on topics you could like covered. This is something that's super helpful for us as we kind of build this community out. Certainly appreciate you listening. With that said, we're going to talk today about these high-low models that we use to approach how we plan for both our starting pictures and our relief pictures. We're going to talk mostly about starters but what I really can't overemphasize enough is that these are actually principles that you can employ whether you're dealing with baseball players or any other athletic population or even just general fitness stuff. High-low modeling works incredibly well and it allows you to get the same amount of training stressed into a model that allows you to recover sufficiently and adapt in ideal ways. Hopefully you'll be able to be able to glean some good stuff from this. Val means you're always welcome to reach out. Give me feedback and ask questions about how you can employ it to your specific situation. So here we go. Overuse injuries have emerged as one of the biggest threats to players at every level of competition. As an example, at the pro level, alma colateral ligament injuries at the elbow alone sideline pictures for roughly a year and a half. That's a ton of loss development and a threat to a lengthy career. Just as concernedly though, for youth players, overuse is the predominant mechanism injury that we see. So what can be done? Obviously, we need to train athletes to prepare for all the stresses the game may throw at them but at the other end of the spectrum, the other side of the equation recovery, it really doesn't get the attention it should. Healthy recover at arms mean you can stay in the game and give your best on the field. And that's where Mark Pro really comes in. Mark Pro is a cutting edge recovery tool that provides all the benefits of active recovery but without the extra effort, muscular fatigue or stress, attendance and joints that we get with a lot more aggressive active approaches. Players can use Mark Pro for as long as needed for exceptional recovery between training sessions or after games. We have four units in our facility and I find myself constantly loading them out to athletes when little issues are more than normal soreness surfaces. It's a great way to listen when at whispers instead of waiting for it to yell. I've handed these out to athletes before long flights so they can actually pop it on while they fall asleep on a flight and get some low-level recovery going while they're traveling cross-country. It's both easy to use and portable. Mark Pro is a powerful tool that allows recovery anywhere anytime. You can use it while you're relaxing at home, you're on the road or during tournaments. On a personal note, I was originally a naysayer when it came to Mark Pro. However, long-time CSP athlete Corey Clubert actually turned me on to it. He adopted Mark Pro into his post-pitching recovery approach and it was an integral part of him going out and throwing 200 innings a year after a year for quite some time. This led me to experience with it myself and with more of our athletes and the feedback was really consistently awesome. Now, just a few years later, you'll see it in pretty much every major league organization as parts of the routines of some of the most accomplished baseball players on the planet and it's a trusted resource for some of the smartest sports medicine professionals that I know. So, if you're looking for the same results enjoyed by these athletes, visit markpro.com/baseball. That's marcpro.com/baseball and be sure to use coupon code Cresci, C-R-E-S-S-E-Y, and check out for an exclusive discount. You won't regret it. One of the biggest challenges facing pitchers is recovery between outings and having been around the amateur world and the professional world. One of the best ways to illustrate these challenges is when we see amateur pitchers, whether it's high school or college guys, who go from a seven day rotation in high school or college and into professional baseball's five day rotation. This is probably also true of Japanese pitchers who come to the US. They go from a very predictable seven day rotation, you know, one day off per week, very little time zone travel, and then they come to the United States, and all of a sudden they have two fewer days to recover. Maybe they have a lot more travel, just a lot more stress. And it's been said, I can distinctly remember a kid in low way all the way back in 2008 telling me that I just had to learn how to pitch at 90% effort. I didn't bounce all the way back. And so different strategies have been employed industry-wide to try to really address this challenge, right? Some organizations have tried piggybacking, right? Where they do shorter outings. Maybe it was, you know, going three or four innings and and layering a couple starters on top of each other to cover those innings. We've also seen, you know, scenarios where organizations would have guys go to six day rotations in the short term and gradually transition them into the five days. So all these are still in the table with young pitchers, but I wanted to really talk a little bit more about some big picture strategies that we can employ, you know, we're trying to address this, you know, longer term. And keep in mind, you know, with relievers, the same challenges are in play because they often don't know when they're going to throw, right? They might throw back to back or, you know, three out of four. So there's a lot of stress, you know, pushed into a short period of time and we've got to work on consolidating stress so that we can actually have these low periods. So regardless of whether you're a starter reliever, you're on a five day, a seven day, where you're just throwing super inconsistently, the solution is always going to be the same. It's to employ a high low model of training/competition stress. So what does this mean? Well, first of all, high day is pitching in a game, you know, it's hard lifting, it's sprinting, it's change of direction work, something that's very intensive, right? And bullpen's can kind of go either way. I've seen people, you know, who throw 95 that throw their bullpen's at 75, and it's nice and easy. And I've seen other people who really, you know, have a hard time gauging intensity. So that's something you have to take into account. Meanwhile, low days are nice and easy, right? It might be some light aerobic base work, it might be some low key mobility circuits, it could be some easy catch play, it could be treatments. Basically, this is a spa day where you end the day feeling refreshed. It's a great day to take a nap and take advantage of all kinds of different longevity modalities, things like, you know, red light therapy and, you know, float tanks, and things like that that allow you to just kind of tone down the stress in your world. So let's put this into action with the classic example of the biggest mistake we've traditionally seen. And keep in mind, I've had this conversation with, you know, minor league pitchers who haven't even, you know, made it out of low A, and I've had it with veteran big league pitchers who were just trying to figure out how to just, you know, eke more out of their career while they're struggling to bounce back. So historically, what would happen is, you know, day zero would be pitched, super high stress, it's 95 pitches. And then pitchers would always, you know, pride themselves on going to a day one lower body lift usually like a long run, you know, quote unquote for recovery. You know, a lot of them would would still throw on this day. I've always kind of debated the merit of playing catch on day one, but that's a podcast for another day. And then on day two, they throw their bullpen, they do it upper body lift, usually, you know, kind of like a lengthy shoulder program. In most of the time, the bullpen on this day is not particularly good. It's guys who are just making sure their arm is still attached and they can't throw super hard because it's only 48 hours out. And then day three, usually tend to be like a big conditioning day, right? They'd they do some agility stuff. Maybe they, you know, they'd definitely run gassers or 300 yard shuttles, whatever it was. And then day four would be, you know, light, you know, running some short sprints and some catch play. And frankly, a lot of pictures who just were hoping that they were going to be ready to actually pitch on day five after digging such a giant hole, right? Because day zero was obviously super intensive with the game appearance. Day one was a lower body lift and longer on day two bullpen and upper body with shoulder program day three gassers. They've just dug this giant hole. And one day might not be enough to come back and be really, really fresh, right? All this strength should support our game exposures. In a reality, it's probably interfered with them more than anything else. And the same can happen with a day three bullpen where guys lift on days one and three and just do that hard conditioning on day two. It can actually be even worse in these situations if you have an athlete who really over does it with his bullpen and instead of having 72 hours to recover before the game appearance, he's only got 48 hours to recover from it, right? And, you know, so where do we start with these challenges? Well, I've often said that the best way to get out of a hole is to stop digging. And the ideal solution is simply to adjust the schedule to protect high motivation guys from themselves, right? The rule of thumb is that you need to insert a low day, either day one or day two, regardless of what your approach on a five day rotation is, right? So if a pitcher is a day two bullpen guy, he, you know, basically pitches day off and then throws his bullpen the next day, you have to do a spot day on day one, right? That that middle day has to be low key. And then you consolidate all of your train stress into days two and three. So historically, what that would look like, you know, as a guy would take a nice easy day on day one and then day two, he would throw his bullpen and do, you know, his preference, either upper or lower body left and more often, it's going to be a lower body left. And then day three would be, you know, maybe some long toss and, you know, some additional lifting, whichever one he didn't do on day two, right? If the pitcher is a day three bullpen guy, which I frankly prefer, it makes training, you know, programming a lot easier. You do your spot day on day two, and then you consolidate your training, you know, stress onto days one and three, right? So you can actually do two full body days between those two days. So it works really, really nicely. You're setting things up that way. The only thing you have to be really careful of is if you have an athlete that over does it with his bullpen, right? If you throw too much, too hard on day three and you, you have a smaller window of recovery. And regardless in these situations, you know, day four is going to be really like, you know, you leave that to the athlete. A lot of guys just like to do to, you know, throw a warm up, some short sprints and then, you know, play catch and they're good to go. Some guys will even lightly feel the slope just to feel like they're ready. But really everything in this works around mound sessions, whether they're games or bullpins, and it still enables you to get in all of your high quality work. So we've, you know, thus far really cornered the discussion on pro pitchers, but I think if we're talking about high school and college pitches on a seven day rotation, you have the luxury of getting in a lot more high quality work because of the extra 48 hours available to you, right? You can get in more work with throwing and lift the third time so that there's actually some medium work in there, right? And I don't normally use a lot of medium work and we'll kind of talk about why afterwards. But, you know, on a classic seven day rotation, you know, day zero would obviously be a pitch, right? Day one, I like to do like a sprint agility med ball session, right? This can actually be done immediately post game, you know, if you have the right schedule and facilities to make it work, this would give you like a full low day on day one. But most athletes will do it on that day one. So it actually winds up being more of a medium day or, you know, depending on how intensely you sprint, it can definitely be a high day. Day two, we're going to do a lower body session running. It after pretty good on that day. Day three, we're going to do some medicine ball work, upper body, you know, good day to mix in some more arm care stuff as well. This often tends to be like an extended long toss day when guys want to step on a little bit more. And then we have an athlete that wants to be on the mound twice between appearances. You could definitely insert it here and it would work great. Day four is a light day, right? Just a little bit of light aerobic work, maybe some mobility circuits, you know, treatments, things like that. And then day five, your your bullpen day is 48 hours out from your start. I like the idea of having the bullpen a little bit closer to the start just from a, you know, kind of learning standpoint, kind of close that loop a little faster. Bullpen and then some low volume sprint agility, med ball stuff and a short full body lift, right? This is a good time to just use some velocity based stuff, no heavy loads, just try to move weights fast. So we try to keep that pretty brief. So after the bullpen, no more than a, you know, 30 or 40 minute session, again, leaving, feeling refreshed. That's probably more of a true medium day, I'd say. And then day six would be similar to what a day four would be on a five day schedule where you're, you're doing whatever light work you want to do the day before you're pitching. And obviously if you get a two way player in high school, a college, those are additional high days. You can do account, you might set this thing on fire and get rid of some of the sprint work and pull back on some of the medicine ball because they're swinging and all that. But big picture, you'll see I really don't believe in wasting a lot of training time in recovery capacity in the middle ground, right? Typically that's going to be a lot of running gasses, 300 yard shuttles or even just like kind of conventional bodybuilding training like get your assistance working. That stuff's important, but don't waste volume in the wrong places. So it just gives you an idea for how to insert lows throughout your schedule. On a five day, you need to make sure that the day before and the day, either after or two days later, of your outing is going to be a low day. So you get two in that five day cycle. And last but not least, remember there are ways you can supercharge your low days, right? There's a variety of amenities out there. It could be quality manual therapy, sauna, sensory deprivation, float tanks, naps, red light therapy. You know, all these are great on on every single day of the week. They don't just have to be on your low key days, but I'm not sure that one option has consistently, you know, awesome feedback like the Mark Pro has, right? And this podcast is timely because this awesome recovery device is on sale for 20% off during spring training. Just visit markpro.com, M-A-R-C-P-R-O.com and enter coupon code Cressy, C-R-E-S-S-E-Y at check out to get the discount on your order. These are mainstays in our recovery lounge at Cressy Sports Performance and in our physical therapy clinic as well. Loads of our athletes also have their own units that they use, you know, both at home and when they're on the road to bounce back from their outings. Again, that's markpro.com and coupon code Cressy at check out to get 20% off as part of their spring training sale. You won't regret picking up one of these. They are game changers. Have a great weekend, everybody.