Distance Running

It's track season and I've been seeing a lot of kids running around town. Kind of brought the following article to mind, not only for baseball players but any athlete who is looking for long distance running as a recovery aid:


By: Eric Cressey


The management of pitchers between starts is one of the most debated topics in the world of baseball training. Some pitching coaches want multiple throwing sessions between starts, while others insist that a single bullpen is sufficient. Athletic trainers debate on whether or not a pitcher should ice after a throwing session. And, specific to my realm of expertise, there are differing opinions on what kind of running programs are appropriate for pitchers between bouts of throwing.

Not to toot my own horn, but I’m a pretty well-read guy – and I can honestly say that I’ve never read anything along the lines of a truly logical argument for or against a specific running program for pitchers. So, I guess that’s where I come in with this piece.

With that in mind, I’ll be very blunt with you: I despise distance running for pitchers (and the overwhelming majority of other athletes, for that matter). While many pitching coaches are probably reading this and cursing my name already for going against the norm, I’d encourage you all to hear me out on this. Below, I’ll outlined NINE reasons why distance running is not the correct course of action – and then, in my next installment, outline a new model for training between starts that we’ve used with great success at the professional, collegiate, and high school levels.

Why Distance Running is Not the Answer

Reason #1: Immunity Concerns

As a strength and conditioning coach, my number one priority in working with athletes is to keep them healthy. This refers not only to musculoskeletal health, but also general health. In an outstanding 2006 review, Gleeson wrote that “postexercise immune function depression is most pronounced when exercise is continuous [and] prolonged.” Interestingly, this review also noted that many of these symptoms are “attributable to inflammation of the upper respiratory tract rather than to infectious episodes (1).” In other words, distance running between starts is more likely to cause and spread sickness in your clubhouse than that tramp in the right field bleachers who wants to hook up with every guy in your bullpen.
Strike 1.

Reason #2: Endocrine Concerns

Here’s a little excerpt from an email I got from a minor league guy I work with in the off-season:
Yesterday might have been the roughest day of my career. It started by getting back from our game Sunday night at 11:30PM. I couldn’t fall asleep until at least 12:30AM, and then we had a 3:30AM wake up call to catch a bus to the airport for our flight at 6:15AM. We had a layover for an hour and a half, then got to the next city at 11AM. We drove to our hotel and I got to my stinky room at the Sleep Inn and tried to catch some sleep – except we had to be at the field at 4PM.

Days like this are the norm for many professional (and particularly, minor league) pitchers: late nights, early wake-up calls, red-eye flights, long bus rides, and – as a result – completely warped sleeping patterns. And, as I’m sure you can imagine, the diet that accompanies these travels is less than stellar, particularly when clubhouse food isn’t exactly gourmet or healthy. And, let’s just say that a lot of ballplayers at the collegiate and pro levels far too much alcohol, and that has direct negative consequences in terms of sleep and tissue quality.

So, basically, we’ve got absurd sleeping hours, terrible dietary habits, too much alcohol – and one of the longest seasons in sports. Effectively, we’ve done everything we possibly can to reduce lower testosterone and growth hormone output, creating a mess of a hormonal environment. Frankly, you could get this same hormonal response by forcing pitchers to watch Golden Girls reruns while sitting on bicycle seats and downing estrogen tablets – and you wouldn’t have any incidences of plantar fasciitis.

Instead, you know what’s done instead? Distance running! Yes, the same distance running that is responsible for the markedly lower testosterone levels and higher cortisol levels in endurance athletes. It’s like putting a new engine in a car with square wheels: studying for the wrong test.
It almost makes you wonder if some guys used performance-enhancing drugs just to counteract the negative effects of their running programs!

Strike 2.

Reason #3: Mobility Concerns

One of the issues with distance running is that it doesn’t allow for sufficient hip flexion to truly activate all the hip flexors. Specifically, we get a lot of rectus femoris recruitment, but not much activation of psoas, which predominately is active above 90 degrees of hip flexion. Likewise, you really aren’t getting much hip extension at all.
So, on the whole, by using a repetitive motion like jogging for an extended period of time, pitchers are losing mobility in their hips – and that’s the very mobility they depend on so much to generate stride length and, in turn, velocity.
Frankly, runners are the athletes (and I use that term loosely) I see with the most marked lower extremity dysfunctions due to the lack of range-of-motion in the jogging stride – and the fact that they pile so much mileage on this faulty movement pattern. I am a firm believer that we were made to sprint, not jog.
Strike 3. The batter’s out!

Reason #4: Negative Effects on the Stretch-Shortening Cycle

Here, I need to get a bit geeky for a second so that I can explain the stretch-shortening cycle (SSC). The easiest analogy I can use is that when you want to shoot a rubber band at someone, you pre-stretch it before you release your shot. Muscles work the same way; pre-stretching them (eccentric action) prior to shortening them (concentric action) stores elastic energy and helps that muscle generate more force. Anecdotally, I’ve heard estimates that as much as 25-30% of pitching velocity is attributed to elastic energy – or how effectively someone makes use of the stretch-shortening cycle.

Where we’re different from rubber bands is that we can actually train those elastic qualities to make our tendons more efficient at collecting, temporarily storing, and releasing that elastic energy to help us run faster, jump higher, and throw harder. It’s why doing plyos, sprinting, and throwing medicine balls can do wonders for a player’s performance.

With the stretch-shortening cycle, we need three things, according to Komi (2):

1. a well-timed muscle preactivation before the eccentric phase
2. a short, fast eccentric component
3. immediate transition (minimal delay) between stretch (eccentric) and shortening (concentric) phases. This period is known as the amortization phase, and the shorter it is, the less elastic energy we lose (as heat).

To be honest, #1 takes care of itself. For #2 and #3, though, we are definitely working against ourselves with distance running, as the importance of the SSC rapidly diminishes as exercise duration continues. In fact, the vertical jump only predicts sprinting performance up to 300m (3).
In other words, the longer exercise goes, the more we “muscle” it instead of being relaxed. What do we know about guys who try to muscle the ball to the plate? They don’t throw hard because it impairs pitching specific mobility and they don’t let the arm whip through.

I will take a guy with a good vertical jump over a guy with a high VO2max anyday. Distance running conditions guys to plod instead of bounce – and this definitely has implications in terms of chronic overuse conditions.

Strike 1.

Reason #5: Strength and Power Reductions

As just one example of how stressful the pitching motion is on the body, the humerus internally rotates at 7,500°/second during the acceleration phase of throwing. It takes a lot of strength and power to generate this kind of velocity, but just as importantly, it takes a lot of strength and power – and in a timely fashion – to decelerate it. We need to not only be able to generate enough force to resist and control this acceleration at end-range, but also be able to generate this force quickly (power). To that end, you would think that conditioning for pitchers would be similar to that of strength and power athletes, who avoid distance running altogether.

Instead, most pitchers run several times a week. When was the last time you saw a marathoner throw 95mph?

Additionally, in many cases, coaches encounter Latin American players who have never had access to weight-training equipment – and this is a huge window of untapped potential. Using distance running when these athletes could be devoting more time to getting stronger is a huge hindrance to these players’ development, as it conditions them to go longer instead of faster. At some point, you have to put more horsepower in the engine instead of just changing the oil.

We know that when we first get young athletes started with weight training, there is a huge transformation to make them more athletic in the 8-10 weeks that follow. You would be surprised at what good training can do for many advanced pitchers in the initial phases, too. The reason is that, unlike position players, many pitchers are (to be blunt) one-trick ponies. They know how to throw a nasty cutter, a crazy 12-to-6 curveball, or a slider with a funny arm-slot. So, it’s always been “okay” for them to be completely unathletic outside of their delivery. They might get guys out, but they’re long-term gambles teams because of their increased risk of injury; weak, immobile bodies break down the fastest – just like distance runners. Additionally, being able to quickly recruit muscles (and do so powerfully) is crucial for rapidly stiffening joint complexes to create stability and prevent acute injuries like ankle sprains and ACL ruptures. Strength and power athletes are much better off in this regard than endurance athletes.

Strike 2.

Reason #6: Inappropriate Intensities

In what was – at least in my eyes – a landmark study, McCarthy et al. (1995) looked at “compatibility” of concurrent strength training and endurance training. Traditionally, the attenuation of strength and power gains has been a big issue when endurance exercise is added to a strength training program. As I noted in Cardio Confusion, these researchers found that strength and power loss was only an issue when the intensity of the endurance exercise was greater than 75% of heart-rate reserve (HRR) (4). I can guarantee you that the majority of pitchers who are running distances are doing so at well over 75% HRR.

As I’ll note in my recommendations at the conclusion of this article, I strongly feel that the secret is to stay well above (circa-maximal sprinting, in other words) or below (70% HRR, to play it safe) when implementing any kind of running. The secret is to avoid that middle area where you don’t go slow and don’t go fast; that’s where athletes get SLOW! And, ideally, the lower-intensity exercise would be some modality that provides more mobility benefits.

Strike 3. The batter’s out!

Reason #7: Nobody likes to babysit.

Simply put, running is babysitting. Catcher is actually the position that requires the most endurance in baseball, but we don’t run catchers extra, do we? Nope – and it’s because we have bullpens for them to catch, batting practice for them to take, and all the other responsibilities associated with handling a pitching staff and being a pseudo coach on the field.

My business partner actually was a division 1 pitcher almost ten years ago, and when I brought up this argument, he smiled and nodded, replying with, “When I was a pitcher, all we did was shag fly balls and run poles.” Meanwhile, 57% of pitchers suffer a shoulder injury during a competitive season (5) – and that doesn’t even include elbow, lower back, or lower-extremity injuries! At the major league level, pitchers are 49% of the players, but they account for 68% of the time on the disabled list league-wide (6). Running isn’t going to prevent these problems; it’s going to exacerbate them.

Strike 1.

Reason #8: Distance running ignores existing imbalances.

Baseball is an at-risk sport for a number of reasons. You’ve got an extremely long competitive season, overhead throwing, and – possibly most significantly – unilateral dominance. Switch hitters and guys who bat right and throw left (or vice versa) tend to be a bit more symmetrical, but the guys who bat and throw on the same side tend to have the most glaring issues. Many really smart dudes – most notably, Gray Cook – note that asymmetry is quite possibly the best predictor of injury. When we get pitchers after a long season, our first goals are to address range of motion deficits in:

1. lead leg hip extension (tight hip flexors)
2. lead leg hip internal rotation (tight external rotators)
3. lead leg knee flexion (tight quads)
4. Throwing arm shoulder internal rotation (tight posterior rotator cuff and capsule)
5. Scapular posterior tilt (tight pec minor and levator scapulae)
6. Throwing arm elbow extension (tight elbow flexors)

I knocked back some caffeine, splashed some water on my face, and really put my thinking cap on to see if I could come up with a rationale for how distance running addresses any of these issues. In the end, I had nothing. I came to the realization that jogging negatively affects the majority of them – and pitchers would be better off just shagging fly balls instead of splitting time between that and long runs. At least they move side-to-side when they’re chasing fly balls.

Strike 2.

Reason #9: It’s really boring!

I am a firm believer that the best coaches are the ones who engage their athletes. The best coaches I had in my athletic career were the ones who made me look forward to each training session. With that said, the only people who look forward to distance running are – you guessed it – distance runners!

Most of the ballplayers you’re coaching have always seen running as a form of punishment for doing something wrong; they hate it as much as I do (okay, maybe not that much). And, truth be told, they’d hate it even more if they realized it is limiting their development as athletes.
Strike 3. The batter’s out – and the side is retired.
Conclusion

I have always disliked it when people criticize the status quo, but fail to offer solutions of their own. With that in mind, the next installment of this series will outline my personal perspective on how to attack the time between pitching outings.

Doesn't Get Much Better Than This

What a week so far, the start of weeks seem to be a bit crazy. Makes things so worth the craziness when you have clients who go out of their way to write recommendations like this:

I'd really recommend Dusty - I've been working with him since October, and my strength and endurance are greatly improved to the point where I don't think I've been stronger even back in high school or college. I also like Dusty's ability to craft different exercises to accommodate any past mobility or strength issues or injuries you may have. I won't say you won't be sore, but I have never had a situation where I overtrained and hurt myself while working with Dusty, and that happened a lot in the past when I was trying to do things on my own.

If you want to finally get in really good shape, no matter where you are starting from, Dusty can help you achieve your goals. Give it a try, I did!

My point isn't to brag, just to show what hard work and a solid training program can do for an individual.

Foam Rolling

I've talked about foam rolling from time to time, here's the geeky stuff on why it is effective:


· Self-myofascial release (SMR) on a foam roller is possible thanks to the principle known as autogenic inhibition. The Golgi Tendon Organ (GTO) is a mechanoreceptor found at the muscle-tendon junction; it's highly sensitive to changes in tension in the muscle.

· When tension increases to the point of high risk of injury (i.e. tendon rupture), the GTO stimulates muscle spindles to relax the muscle in question. This reflex relaxation is autogenic inhibition. The GTO isn't only useful in protecting us from injuries, but it also plays a role in making proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF) stretching techniques highly effective.

· The muscle contraction that precedes the passive stretch stimulates the GTO, which in turn causes relaxation that facilitates this passive stretch and allows for greater range of motion. With foam rolling, you can simulate this muscle tension, thus causing the GTO to relax the muscle. Essentially, you get many of the benefits of stretching and then some.

· It's also fairly well accepted that muscles need to not only be strong, but pliable as well. Regardless of whether you're a bodybuilder, strength athlete, or ordinary weekend warrior, it's important to have strength and optimal function through a full range of motion. While stretching will improve the length of the muscle, SMR and massage work to adjust the tone of the muscle.
What's SMR good for?

· Traditional stretching techniques simply cause transient increases in muscle length (assuming that we don't exceed the "point of no return" on the stress-strain curve, which will lead to unwanted deformities). SMR on the foam roller, on the other hand, offers these benefits and breakdown of soft tissue adhesions and scar tissue.

· One mustn't look any further than the overwhelmingly positive results numerous individuals have had with Active Release Techniques (ART) to recognize the value of eliminating adhesions and scar tissue. Unfortunately, from both a financial and convenience standpoint, we can't all expect to get ART done on a frequent basis.

· SMR on the foam roller offers an effective, inexpensive, and convenient way to both reduce adhesion and scar tissue accumulation and eliminate what's already present on a daily basis. Just note that like stretching, foam rolling doesn't yield marked improvements overnight; you'll need to be diligent and stick with it (although you'll definitely notice acute benefits).

Techniques

· These techniques are actually very simple to learn. Basically, you just use your body weight to sandwich the roller between the soft tissue to be released and the floor. Roll at a slow pace and actually stop and bear down on the most tender spots ("hot spots"). Once the pain in these spots diminishes, roll the other areas.

· In order to increase the pressure on the soft tissue, simply apply more of your body weight to the roller. The simplest way to do this is by either moving from working both legs at once to one leg, or by "stacking" one of your legs on top of the other to increase the tension.

· As you get more comfortable with SMR, you'll really want to be bearing down on the roller with most (if not all) of your body weight. As with almost anything in the training world, there's considerable room for experimentation, so you'll definitely want to play around with the roller to see what works best for you. Be careful to avoid bony prominences, though.

· One other technique to be beneficial is to work from the proximal (nearest the center of the body) to the distal (away from the center of the body) attachment of the muscle. For instance, instead of working your quadriceps from top to bottom all in one shot, shorten your stroke a little bit. Work the top half first, and after it has loosened up, move on to the bottom half.

· This is an important strategy because as you get closer to the distal muscle-tendon junction, there's a concomitant increase in tension. By working the top half first, you decrease the ensuing tension at the bottom, essentially taking care of the problem in advance.

· Note: Those with circulatory problems and chronic pain diseases (e.g. fibromyalgia) should NOT use foam rollers.

Ten Ways To Help Alleive Low Back Pain

1. Improve Hip Mobility - If your hips are stiffer than your lower back, movement will occur at the lower back. Improve hip mobility and you'll be able to bend over without to much forward flexing at the lower back.

2. Improve Thoracic Mobility - Forward flexing and rotation shouldn't be made at the lower back. The more movement and mobility at the mid or thoracic vertebrae the less movement that will occur at the lower or lumbar vertebrae.

3. Strengthen Your Core - A strong core (glutes, abdominals, low back) will help stabilize the lower back and keep movement at the low back to a minimum. There are much better ways to strengthen your core than a crunch. Crunches can end up putting more stress on the lower back. Use planks, dead bugs, and roll outs to name a few.

4. Use Hips To Bend Over - In most cases bending over at the lower is not advised. Learn to use your hips to bend over. Stay in a neutral position at the lower back and the chance of lower back injury will greatly decrease. Some bending will occur from time to time but learn to use your legs as much as possible.

5. Stop Using Machines - Machines don't have much carryover into the real world and aren't "functional". When you use free weights you force your body to stabilize not only at the core but you also receive more activation from every other joint and area of the body. How often is your range of motion set, like when using a machine?

6. Stop Stretching Your Lower Back - And hamstrings for that matter. They may feel tight but look on the other side of your body. In most cases tight hip flexors pull the pelvis into anterior tilt forcing the low back and hamstrings to be under constant stretch or tension. It may feel good at the time to stretch these areas but when hip flexor flexibility improves you'll have lengthened musculature on the backside.

7. Improve Resting Posture - Or stop resting so much. The move movement the better. Make it a goal to never sit down longer then 20 minutes.

8. Lose Body Fat - Ever wonder why a pregnant ladies back always hurts? That weight they are carrying on the front side is making the low back work overtime to keep your body upright.

9. Change The Way You Sleep - Stop sleeping on your stomach. Sleep on your side or back.

10. Improve Glute Activation - Guess whats right below the low back? The glutes. I see terrible glute activation when people start training. The glutes are a very powerful thing and when they are learned to be used much less stress will be put on the low back and hamstrings. This will also help pull the pelvis out of anterior tilt along with many other problems that can occur down and up the chain.