I often get this question: Should youth athletes get into a strength training program? The answer: YES!

Youth weightlifting - if properly designed - is perfectly safe and produces solid results. I often hear the tired myth of "Weight lifting too early can stunt growth." Not a single research study has corroborated this statement with medical evidence. In an article written by John A. Bergfeld, M.D. (of Cleveland Clinic fame), he said:

Despite the previously held belief that strength training was unsafe and ineffective for children, health organizations such as the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) now "support children's participation in appropriately designed and competently supervised strength training programs.

Later in the same article, he said:

As far as what age a child should start such a program, here is a good rule of thumb: If 7- or 8-year-olds are ready for participation in organized sports or activities such as little league or gymnastics, then they are ready for some type of strength training program. For children starting out in weight training, lifetime fitness and proper exercise techniques should be emphasized. Adults designing training programs should provide a stimulating environment that helps children develop a healthier lifestyle. (emphasis mine)

Avery D. Faigenbaum, EdD, CSCS corroborated Dr. Bergfeld's research and statements.

So please, let's put this myth to rest. While it is true that it is probably best to train athletes when they start to produce testosterone (puberty) to reach ideal results, weight training before then does not endanger their growth plates or bones - they will simply see results much slower than an athlete who is going through puberty will. For youth athletes under the biological age range of 13-14, special care should be taken to address their recovery cycles and closely supervise their novice training protocols; a linear progression model works best, but weight should be added sparingly and much slower than in athletes who have begun to enter puberty.

While I assume these types of posts get repetitive over time, I feel obligated to at least inform my audience why I haven't been posting much other than the stock "I'm busy" or "I am working with my coaching/training site." Frankly, neither of those excuses are good enough, so I wanted to clear the air for the real reason that posts having been flying up with mechanical jargon and animated GIFs that you guys love so much: I'm worried that what I say is detrimental to the study of pitching mechanics.

There, I said it: I'm afraid that every mechanical breakdown of a pitcher I make is really just undermining the work of people like Dr. Fleisig at ASMI and Eric Cressey at Cressey Performance. So, I've decided to do something about it. During the long layoff, I've been doing a lot of research and interviewing to learn more and attempt to validate my beliefs, even if only in theory. The clients that I've coached and trained have increased their release velocity and pitch frequently without pain or soreness, which is a good start, but it's ultimately just anecdotal evidence that doesn't prove much. One of my clients is playing winter ball and was hesitant to go to the pitching coach, telling me that he didn't want to listen to a traditional coach who can't justify his views. I told him that such blind loyalty is dangerous, and that he should absolutely keep an open mind. I convinced him to lend his ear to the coach and take his advice for a trial run. The coach told him basic stuff like "stride more closed," "develop a short arm action," and "load the scapulas." The results were predictable - just weeks into the program, he developed pain and soreness in his throwing arm's bicep and anterior shoulder with decreased velocity and control.

One person who was kind enough to meet with me is PhysioCare's Andy Lodato, who graciously took time out of his busy day to show me the finer points of measuring shoulder internal/external rotation using a goniometer, a process described by Eric Cressey in the excellent article "What I Learned in 2008" on T-Nation.

If anyone in the Seattle area is in need of physical therapy, I highly recommend that you check out Andy's clinic in Woodinville. They have a great fully-equipped facility with a kind staff who knows their stuff.

In doing all this research and study, I've built up the basic page of my coaching/training site and have begun to sketch an opening assessment that will be done on all incoming clients - one such test is the total motion about the shoulder joint as described above, using a goniometer. And by studying those fields, I've decided that establishing a baseline is very important to any researcher's corner. As such, I'll be investing my own hard-earned cash to conduct research studies using high-speed video and imaging software to build a report much like ASMI's computerized biomechanical breakdowns. I'll be renting batting cage time, investing in the necessary lights and backdrop, and offering free pitching lessons to youth pitchers in order to measure a handful of variables to see what correlates best with release velocity and to see if there's any patterns with self-reported pain/soreness and mechanical flaws. While I doubt my own research will turn up anything groundbreaking, I look forward to building a portfolio of youth pitchers that I can review and perform calculations on over time.

And lastly, you'll all be happy to know that through a lot of my research and study that I've become more rock solid in some of my beliefs and that I've learned a ton over the past few months. I hope to be able to share the results of my introductory research study over the next year and see if we can come up with some interesting conclusions. In the meantime, you can look forward to a few mechanics posts coming this week.

As always, thanks for your patience and your understanding. Remember - no one has all the answers. I'm not even sure that we even have all the questions. Keep an open mind!

Eric Cressey runs Cressey Performance in Hudson, MA. At his facility, he trains a lot of professional and amateur baseball players with the help of a few experts. I've adopted a lot of his work in my training regimen, and highly recommend it to everyone interested in training baseball athletes.

I've selected a few of his posts that I found particularly useful - check them out if this is your cup of tea!

Pressing and the Overhead Athlete
Why overhead pressing for baseball players doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense.

"My Coach Says I Shouldn’t Lift…" | EricCressey.com
Does your high school or college coach tell you not to hit the weights?

Crossfit for Baseball? | EricCressey.com
Crossfit is immensely popular amongst the young and old alike. But is it useful for baseball athletes?

The Be-All End-All Throwing Program from your Favorite Snake-Oil Salesman | EricCressey.com
Have you seen those programs on the Internet that promise a 95 MPH fastball? Eric Cressey and Matt Blake talk about their approach to training pitchers.

More photos » by Brian Blanco - AP

Toronto Blue Jays shortstop Marco Scutaro dives for the ball as Tampa Bay Rays' Gabe Kapler rounds third base and hopes he doesn't rupture his Achilles tendon. Again.

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Stop me if you've heard this before: Conditioning month is meant to bring out the best in the high school athlete. It's a punishing routine, often run twice per day at obscene hours (5 AM morning session, 6 PM evening session) where the men are separated from the boys. The morning session involves running 2 miles to "warm up," followed by intense 100 meter sprints and other plyometric work. Puking is common and is taken as a sign that the workout is hard enough and the coach is doing his job.

In the evening, the players convene for skill work - the soccer players run hours of foot skill drills, exhausted from the morning session, while the football players practice hitting and tackling if they're not in the weight room performing quarter-squats with 600 pounds on their back. Basketball players are running ladders, suicides, testing their vertical leap, and jumping over plyometric hurdles - all the while feeling a burning sensation in their shins but unwilling to speak up to the coach about it. Because after all, no one wants to think that you're not tough enough, right?

Wrong.

High school coaches are singlehandedly responsible for dogging their athletes and pushing them well past their physical, mental, and psychological limitations. The ones who succeed on these absurd five-day-a-week programs with four or more hours of intense work are the genetic freaks, the ones who are truly the outliers. The ones who fail and suffer injuries are deemed "weak" and not worthy of making the team. The rest plod through it, nursing their "soreness" (in actuality, these are injuries), icing their bodies, and sleeping for hours on end, hoping the pain will go away in time for the season to start. Athletes lose 30 pounds in a month, slash their 40 yard dash time, and increase the weights on their squats that closely resemble a bad leg press rather than a true full squat. Progress was made - the ends justify the means.

Wrong.

High school athletes are often rank novices - they are thoroughly unadapted to stress and can be pushed to their limit every time they train because they have no previous experience! Novices do not get stronger when they train, they get stronger when they recover. Overtraining is when you push an individual past his limitations and do not respect the time it takes to recovery from a workout that disrupts homeostasis. Overloading is when you design a program that disrupts homeostasis - good programs overload, but do not overtrain.

An example of an excellent novice program is that of Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength - the novice lifter works every other day, increasing the weight on all of his lifts (Back Squat, Press, Bench Press, Deadlift, Power Clean) every session. This is the linear progression model. The athlete gets one day off between workouts and two on the weekends, though adding a "metabolic conditioning" workout on one of those days is not a terrible idea (as long as there is one day of recovery before the next heavy lifting day).

Training for Novices (aka High School Athletes)

The ideal novice training cycle looks something like this:

1. Load phase. This leads to exhaustion and a disruption in homeostasis.
   
2. Recovery phase. This allows the body to recover and rest.
3. Supercompensation phase. This is where the body gets stronger and adapts to the stresses placed on it in the Load phase.
   

The first step is then repeated. However, if the load phase is started too late after supercompensation, then the effects are mitigated and the athlete may return to the base level of fitness. Confused? This excellent graph from Footballdrills.com should help:

More after the jump...

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As any follower of this blog can tell you, I am prone to ADD-style updating - seven times in a week, then no posts for two weeks after the onslaught. Some of this is due to how my creativity ends up striking me, and some of it is due to my hectic work schedule. Currently, it's a bit of both. Higher-ups from SB Nation (the blog's parent company) have contacted me and have been unhappy with the updating schedule from its main author. However, in my defense, my posts take significantly longer to conceptualize and write than your average fan blog, and I think this is something that my readership understands.

Sabermetric articles have been pointed out as "out of place" on this blog, and I want to make it abundantly clear that they will remain and will continue to be encouraged. This blog is intended to be a forward-thinking blog about all of baseball - this was the goal when I founded it, and it will continue to be this way so long as I run it.

I was awestruck at all the responses to my article about Homer Bailey and was grateful that my readers took the time to comment. I have a draft partially written about all the suggestions and comments, and I look to post that sometime soon. Not a day goes by that I don't think about the amazing growth of this blog and how much I owe you - the reader.

I have been unable to commit as much time as I'd like to the blog lately, and to remedy this, I have been seeking authors to help keep the gears moving along. hazel is the first addition to the staff, and I have yet another in the pipeline that I have been discussing and considering as well. The pattern of bloggers here is fairly consistent - they post excellent material here, get noticed by larger blogs (some that pay them), and they move to those sites. This is not only perfectly acceptable, but encouraged! However, I still hold hope that my partner-in-crime, devil_fingers, will continue to hold the sabermetric front steady.

Lately, I have been extremely busy with my day job (boo...), but also busy with my other venture - Driveline Performance, Inc. Previously Driveline Baseball, Inc., we'll be reforming as a general sports and conditioning outfit that primarily serves baseball players, but will also train and analyze athletes from various different sports. Our web presence has been the focus of much of my development, and I hope to show it to you all in the near future.

And last, but not least, I have identified a university that will work with my chaotic schedule and will be able to offer some distance learning classes in order to allow me to finish my undergraduate degree in Health and Human Performance Studies. I am seeking to re-enter the collegiate ranks in Spring 2010, with a projected graduation date of Winter 2010 (I have just one year to finish my Bachelor's Degree). In my Fall 2010 semester, I plan on sitting for the NSCA Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) certification test, as well as various one-on-one personal training certifications. I look forward to sharing what I learn with the readers of this blog and the clients that I currently work with.

Thanks again for all your support and understanding with the blog's less-than-normal updating schedule.

More photos » by Al Behrman - AP

Cincinnati Reds starter Homer Bailey pitches against the Milwaukee Brewers in the first inning of a baseball game, Thursday, July 16, 2009, in Cincinnati. What changed since then? (AP Photo/Al Behrman)

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While checking the usual baseball-related sites today, I noticed a very interesting article: Bailey locates his missing velocity. In it, the author states:

CINCINNATI — From 98 to 94 and back to 98 in one easy lesson — only it was slightly more than one lesson.

Homer Bailey, though, said it was an easy process relocating his misplaced 98-mph fastball, but he couldn’t do it himself.

"Last offseason, when I first started to get on the mound, my agent told me, ‘Go see Skip Johnson, he is the pitching coach at the University of Texas,’ " Bailey said. "I thought, ‘I ain’t got nothing to lose, because things aren’t looking so good.’ "

...

"So I went for one bullpen (session) and he was telling me try this and try that," said Bailey, who tossed eight scoreless innings Friday, Aug. 28, in beating the Dodgers. "The whole time I’m kind of like, ‘All right, Homer, keep doing it. It feels funny and it feels different.’ So he told me to come back in a couple of days and throw another bullpen.

"And he gave me some drills to do at home before I went back and I kept doing them," Bailey continued. "I went back for the next bullpen and the ball just jumped out of my hand and I just stared at it. I threw three pitches and said to myself, ‘It’s back.’ "

And what happened before, when he threw 98 and it sunk to 94?

"I have no clue where it went," he said. "I thought there was something wrong with my shoulder or elbow. My groin bugged me and I thought maybe that was it. But it really wasn’t. Just a little mechanical change. If you look at it on video it’s not that different. You have to have somebody who is there right on you to see the difference.

"It’s the tempo, the way everything loads," Bailey said. "I knew after that second bullpen and said to myself, ‘This is going to be fun again.’ After that, I had eight or nine sessions before spring training and every time it got just a little better and a little better."

(Emphasis is mine.)

Well, first of all, we know that slow motion video is going to be better than anyone's trained eye - no matter how good of a coach they are. If we're talking very minute differences, that's nothing something the human eye is going to be able to pick up immediately - or possibly ever. Regardless, let's take a look from old video from May and video from September to see if there's any meaningful difference between the two sets of mechanics...

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