The number of baseball injuries on almost all teams has increased greatly in the last few years. Every week you can read or hear about how new players are injured or athletes with an old injury having a recurrence of the same injury.
Fans of course lament the fact that if only the athletes weren’t injured, the team would be having a much better season. But the teams can be doing better by eliminating or minimizing most injuries. This should be the responsibility of specialized people in the organization who should be keeping up with the latest in sports training.
All baseball injuries are not preventable. However, we know that the number of injuries can be cut down greatly through proper training based on sound scientific principles. This is a proven fact! However, if you read the write-ups in the papers or commentaries on player injuries, it appears that teams just keep hoping that their players will not get injured. If they are injured, “it is part of the game.”
General managers believe that they are doing their job by hiring strength and conditioning coaches to prevent injury. This is a good start but simply developing greater strength is not the answer to injury prevention. Understand that this is the main focus of most strength coaches. They get players stronger and in better physical condition which may prevent a few injuries, but it is a far cry from what can be done to prevent most injuries.
It is important to understand that all non-contact injuries have a neuromuscular base. This means that injuries are caused by a disruption in the relationship between the nervous and muscular systems. It is usually related to a combination of nerve firing (timing) and strength or other physical qualities related to the execution of specific skills on the field.
For example, many players get injured while running the bases and making changes in direction, two of the more common causes of hamstring injuries. Some injuries are due to improper swinging of the bat especially with the “sit and spin” technique. Pitching injuries are often due to over-reliance on the arm, ineffective arm actions and poor releases.
When players develop strength, speed, quickness and explosive power it must be directly related to the technique involved in execution of a specific baseball skill. For example, if it is a hamstring injury received while running, doing an exercise such as the pawback, which duplicates the movement of the leg in running, develops strength in the same range of motion and in the same neuromuscular patterning as occurs in running.
As a result the pawback exercise is very effective in preventing future hamstring injuries. In my experiences, athletes to do this exercise and have good running technique, have never gotten a hamstring injury. Similar results can be achieved with other exercises that duplicate a specific joint action seen in execution of the baseball skill.
Getting a player in good physical condition, which includes getting stronger, should be the foundation for doing specialized strength exercises that are the key to injury prevention and skill enhancement. Doing this, however, requires specialized personnel who have a strong background in baseball skill execution and specialized strength development.
Also needed are staff members who can analyze player skill technique to determine weaknesses, areas needing improvement, causes of injury, etc. They should also be able to make needed corrections and prescribe special strength exercises to make corrections and enhance individual player performance.
This is not an easy task but one that must be done if we truly want to prevent injuries and at the same time, often enhance player performance. It is not simply a lofty goal but one that has been well proven in practice.
For more information on this topic see Build a Better Athlete and Biomechanics and Kinesiology of Exercise.