The best thing about the gym is it’s always giving feedback and clues.

Many answers to performance issues and even injuries can be found in the gym.

Here is a good example… (and this type of thing happens often especially with athletes from repetitive motion sports like baseball, running, softball, golf, etc)

We’ve trained Geno Nap for years and he had a great HS career and also is off to a solid start in college. Geno plays D1 baseball and is the starting catcher at Marist.

Geno is a tremendous athlete and a very skilled player but his issue has always been getting bigger and stronger. Even now he’s on the small side for D1 catchers weighing maybe 165. He is a hard gainer and just struggles to keep weight on through the long season. Every off-season Gene becomes more athletic, stronger, more powerful, etc but struggles in-season to maintain his size and strength and performance falls off because of it.

SouthThis season he barely got through the season with a shoulder issue and had his summer season ruined because of it. He was supposed to play in the New England Summer league (A great opportunity to play in the 2nd best summer league for college players) and couldn’t go because of a shoulder issue which thank god turned out to be nothing more than some inflammation from overuse (too much throwing). I know that it can be very difficult to manage these athletes and balance the amount of volume of throwing, training, and rest. However, if you pay attention there are always clues left behind…

Long story short he trained 4x a week all summer and set PR’s in all major lifts (including bench press because all throwing athletes should be able to take a full range press). At 165 pounds he deadlifted 495 and pushed up his number in the jumps too! He left last week throwing great, hitting great, and feeling great. He also went to a good sports PT twice a week.

When Gene gets 3-4 days of training in per week his body weight is up, he feels (and is) healthy, fast, explosive, and just all in all sharper. He needs a good dose of strength work to balance all the throwing or he gets FLAT. The baseball season is just too long to abandon his training. An athlete like Geno needs to cut back throwing for extra strength work. Many other athletes are in the same boat. I read a study somewhere that when a group of runners cut their running down 30% and trained with sleds instead of running they all PR’d in their races. Im not advocating not practicing but with repetitive sports and year round single sport athletes volume HAS to to be decreased and strength maintained in order to to avoid overuse injuries.

There is whats called a speed barrier in sprinting. Basically, after a certain amount of sprinting the body has a governor and limits how fast the body can run. Essentially you adapt and get stuck a certain speed and can’t get faster with out adding something. This happens with throwing, swinging, long distance running, and just about any skill that gets practiced over and over again. The body accommodates to the demands placed upon it and performance plateaus or starts to decline. The problem is that most coaches want to add more of the same to get through the plateau but the body needs something new…

If you have a great offseason and you feel your best at the beginning of the season then listen to your body. Know that you need to keep some of your off-season type training going during the season. It’s not rocket science… just listen to what your body says. In Geno’s case I told him lift more, throw less very simple. Instead of an extra round of throwing get and extra lift. Train the smaller stabilizers and the single joint isolation exercises daily.