Bullets from Eric Schoenberg, Eric Cressey, and Matt Blake: Part 1

About a month or two ago, Eric Cressey (@EricCressey) hosted a baseball training mentorship at his facility in Massachusetts. He had a few guest speakers there, including Eric Schoenberg and Matt Blake (@Blake_Matt). They were "live tweeting" during the event, trying to share some info on Twitter with their followers. If you already follow these two, then you may have seen this information before. If you haven't (and even if you have), I suggest you click to read more as I will post a few of the bits I found good for parents/coaches/etc.

While the purpose of this mentorship may have been geared toward baseball players, A LOT of the information they shared can be applied to athletes of many different sports.

There is a lot of information here, so I'm breaking this up into three parts. Part One will be quotes from Eric Schoenberg. Part Two from Eric Cressey. Part Three from Matt Blake. 



From Eric Schoenberg:

1. "Make sure we are coaching proper movement and correcting bad habits rather than allowing athletes to get really good at moving bad" or poorly.
2. "No shock, but pitching for multiple teams, participating in showcases, pitching greater than 100 innings in one year are contributors to increased injury totals."
3. "Pre-throwing goal is activation, 'neuromuscular tuning.' Trying to turn things on and get mobility where necessary."
4. "The elbow is often the 'innocent bystander' in throwing injuries. Injuries occur because of problems further up the chain."
5. "Elbow injury is commonly associated with faulty scapular motion. Ex) Decreased scapular adduction, posterior tilt and external rotation."
6. "Plenty of guys have strong rotator cuff when arm is down by their side. May not fire the same when arm is overhead."
7. "Shoulder blade has responsibility to be in position dependent on where arm is. Needs to function congruently with arm movement."
8. "When evaluating movement, a lot of times, it's just as much about down-regulating muscle activity as it is about turning it on."
9. "Pitchers tend to lose supination, elbow extension, shoulder internal rotation, and scapular upward rotation. Make sure you check in on these."
10. "When evaluating total motion at the shoulder, make sure to stabilize the scapula and control for pure glenohumeral range of motion."
11. "Even if your athlete has the right exercise, but is executing it wrong, they're still feeding into the problem."
12. "Make sure you're not just treating the injured tissue, but you're identifying the movement fault as a whole."
13. "Give the athlete what they need. If they're hyper-mobile, don't need to keep stretching. Need activation and control. Individualization is key."
14. "Just because we do something more doesn't mean we get better at it. Make sure it's deliberate practice with intent and sharp focus."
15. "Important to find movement dysfunction. If you just address structural issue without addressing movement fault, pain will return."
16. "Not enough to pick right exercise, need to make sure recruiting right muscles during movement, otherwise just feeding dysfunction."
17. "Van Dillen, et al, 2008: 'Subjects with low back pain had less overall passive hip rotation and more asymmetry of rotation between sides."
18. "Considerations for low back pain- Create lumbopelvic stability, improve hip and thoracic mobility, avoid lumbar rotation, move through hips."

That's a lot of information. For parents/coaches, bullets number 2, 13, and 14 are certainly things you can check up on with your athlete(s). As for people in a similar field as myself (Athletic Trainers, Physical Therapists, Personal Trainers, etc.), ALL of these bullets are things we should be looking for in ANY of the athletes/clients that we see daily.

If you are a parent, coach, or another health care professional and have questions regarding some of the bullets above, don't hesitate to contact me or comment below.

I'll try to have Parts Two and Three posted by the end of this week, so check back for more. Thanks for reading.