Managing Workloads

You only get one workload “bucket”. Everything that you do on a daily basis from walking to the car to high intensity sprints that day goes into your bucket. That’s why just working hard is not the recipe to prevent arm injuries in baseball. You’ll burn yourself out and eventually get injured. That’s the reality.

What else goes into that bucket?

You guessed it. Pitch counts.

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Pitch Counts

The science isn’t new. Throwing too much - especially as a young baseball player - leads to bad things. Pitchers who throw more than 100 pitches in a game are more likely to sustain shoulder and elbow injuries. 

That’s why 25% of 12 to 16 year old baseball players sustain some sort of arm injury.  You don’t want to end up in a physical therapist’s office, right?

Here at PRO Athlete Physical Therapy, we support pitch counts in 98% of cases. Why? Because in most instances not only are pitchers blowing past pitch counts, they’re also spending the rest of the weekend playing catcher throwing even more. 

Here’s what MLB recommends. Keep in mind they know the most common baseball injuries and are trying to help:

Here’s a list of things the research has told us about what causes arm injuries in baseball other than violating pitch counts. As a physical therapist, these are things I want to manage right away when athletes come into my office:

• History of injury
  
  
• Training > 16 hours per week (in youth athletes)
  
  
• High pitch velocity
  
  
• Bad shoulder range of motion
  
  
• Bad shoulder strength
  
  
• Bad throwing mechanics