Mechanical Breakdown
Ryan Bliss
Head Softball Coach, Executive Director Of Undergraduate Recruitment, Adjunct Professor at Wesleyan College
Let's start at the beginning
Literally the first thing I do in my delivery is completely backwards. During the take away phase of my arm action my hand leaves my glove in an incredibly pronated position. To find a pronated position hold your hands out in front of you like you're holding a bowl of soup. This is a supinated position. Now break the bowl in half like it's an egg and dump the soup all over the floor. This is a pronated position. When the hand leaves the glove, a pitcher typically wants to have the hand in a supinated position with the ball facing themselves or the ground (Check CC's hand). This allows them to drive their elbow back behind their body loading the scap through the pick up and elbow spiral phase.
I break with my hand facing second base and start my pick up phase with it almost facing completely up towards the sky, inhibiting my ability to drive my elbow back. In my defense, I do end up with some scap retraction right at the end of my elbow spiral most likely due to the abundance of flexibility in my shoulders. After driving my arm back completely straight and upside down I get some elbow flexion and land at a neutral hand position. However, my elbow spiral phase is very short, I get very little lay back, and my forearm flies out. Can this all be due to how I take the ball out of my glove? It totally could. Is it? I have no idea. The only way to find out is to address it in my drill work and see if anything cleans up further downstream. Keeping my hand supinated at separation will be the first thing I address in my On Ramp.
Upper Half
The first incredibly apparent flaw in how I use my upper half is that my trunk stack is almost nonexistent. Pitchers that throw gas usually load up on their back side, then stretch their lower half forward into their stride. I kind of jump off of my back leg and have my shoulders almost directly over top my front knee at landing. By having my torso this far forward I pretty much ruin my ability to block on my front side. My front foot is pushing down into the ground to stop me from falling on my face instead of driving back to stop my forward momentum.
Mike Soroka from the Atlanta Braves does a great job of staying stacked and behind his lower half. You can see how different our postures are at foot landing. His front leg is ready to stop him, while mine is catching me from falling over. While this is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed, it's better to focus on one area at a time. I am going to try to iron out my arm path for the first four weeks and try not to think about my trunk stack at all. At the four week mark, I will re-evaluate and see how my arm path looks. If I think I have made sufficient progress, I'll swap out one or two of the plyocare drills for others that focus more on staying stacked at landing.
On Ramp Program
My plyocare work is going to go:
- Reverse Throws 2x10 1kg 2kg
- Constrained Bravo Drill 1x10 1kg 2kg
- Scap Retraction Pivot Picks 1x10 1kg 2kg
- Scap Retraction (Row and Go drill) 2x10 1kg 450g
- Roll-Ins 3x10 450g
This is the on ramp program I've built out for the next four week. I have a week to acclimate with lower intent Hybrid Bs to get my body used to the extra volume and new arm action I'm trying to learn. Then I throw in a Hybrid A (basically a more intense Hybrid B with compression throws after long toss) every fourth day to start trying to build my arm up. I added an extra off day in week four, because I don't know how my body is going to react to throwing hard again. I might need an extra day off from rotating, but if I'm feeling good I'll throw the Hybrid B that day and double up Recovery days before the Hybrid A on Saturday. Then week 5 is money week. I have a whole 6 days rest from my last high intent day before I go full send on a Velo day and get a real idea of where I'm at. I've already knocked out the first three days of workouts and the arm feels ok. Today I am going to lace up the spikes, jump on a mound, and see how hard I can throw after throwing nothing but BP for two years. If I break 70mph I'll be stoked. Let's get after it.