Day 1 of Very Many
Ryan Bliss
Head Softball Coach, Executive Director Of Undergraduate Recruitment, Adjunct Professor at Wesleyan College
Prep
Today was the first day of my On Ramp for my Road To 90 "project." I decided to go with a four to six week On Ramp period to make sure my body is ready before going to the first high intensity throwing I've done in years. After years of throwing buckets of batting practice cold I like to think my arm is still in decent shape, but I guess we will find out soon enough. I started by making sure I had everything I needed to do this.
- A place to throw plyos
- A place to long toss
- The equipment needed to perform the drills
- The equipment needed to analyze my movements and track my progress
I found a place to throw plyos by cleaning out part of my garage and building a plyo wall out of an old workbench that had been left from the people that lived here before me.
I have a fairly long back yard, a suitcase full of chewed up baseballs, and a Bownet to throw long into. The only issue, my yard has my house on one side and a river on the other so over throws will result in broken windows, or baseballs going over the falls at Cascade Park. Looks like I will be developing some accuracy during this as well.
I have all the equipment needed for the drills on hand already from my lessons at Leffew Fastpitch. I will be breaking down my mechanics using my iPhone with the free version of the Coach's Eye app, and tracking my velocity with a Pocket Radar Ball Coach.
Day 1: Hybrid B
Day 1 was a bit weird to program, because I don't really have any idea where I need to start. I have a ton of footage of other peoples' mechanics, but I've never taken any slow motion video of my own and picked them apart. So, the real goal today was to run through a warm up and plyocare drills to get loose, and then collect slow motion video of my mechanics to analyze later and buildout my program. I decided to stick with a lot of constrained arm action work through the warm up due to a sneaking suspicion that my arm path needs work. After watching today's videos, I can confirm that staying constrained and working on arm path is indeed a good idea. Yikes.
Here is a link to a quick video of today's workout. I'll probably get a full analysis of my slow motion mechanics put up tomorrow along with the 4-6 week program I will be following.