You have poor posture for the majority of the day, and then you try to go out and throw a ball when your shoulders have been hunched forward most of the day. That makes it hard for the muscles in the back to operate efficiently. We need the muscles in the back and shoulder to brace the shoulder when a pitcher is throwing, so we often prescribe physical therapy and conditioning exercises to get the shoulder prepared to throw. We also found that the majority of injuries among the pitchers we studied occurred during the first six weeks of the season.
That suggests part of the problem may be that some pitchers go from doing a little bit of training—or maybe nothing at all—to throwing a great deal in a short period of time. And many break down. Baseball pitchers get elbow injuries, such as ligament tears that require Tommy John surgery.
What brings softball pitchers in to see you? We need to teach pitchers to have their shoulder blades tucked around the chest wall to take tension off of the shoulder. Source: Washington University of St. Search for:. Science Health Culture Environment. Share this Article. You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.
Why are pitchers more vulnerable to injury than players at other positions? Do the girls recover their strength? Studying pitchers in highly competitive softball leagues, Smith, an associate professor of orthopedics, and his colleagues found that 40 percent had some type of shoulder or arm injury during the season.
And when the researchers looked more closely, they found that part of the reason may be that softball pitchers frequently pitch several games in succession, particularly during tournaments. The dogma involving throwing athletes is that the underhand pitch is thought to be safer, but there have been biomechanical studies in recent years indicating that the stresses on the shoulder are very similar, regardless of whether one is pitching overhand or underhand.
On a fast-pitch softball team, the pitcher is the player doing most of the throwing. Meanwhile, the center fielder may only throw at peak effort four or five times in a game. There is some data suggesting that fatigue is a precursor to injury. Light activity, electronics OK during recovery What did you find when you went to softball tournaments and evaluated pitchers as they pitched consecutive games on the same day or multiple games in a few days?
We used a device called a dynamometer that allows us to test strength. They push against it, and it gives us an objective measurement of strength. We also asked them how they felt, how tired they were and how much pain they were in. We can correlate objective measures of strength and associate those with how the athletes say they feel. Usually during a tournament, we compare these things at the beginning of a day of playing to these same measurements at the end of the day.
Learning how to throw overhand is a pretty involved process which is why people without a lot of practice doing so often look so funny when they try. You have to get different parts of the body to move at just the right time and in just the right way to do so efficiently and effectively — whereas throwing underhand or pitching underhand is a pretty simple and straightforward alternative.
Another reason that softball now requires their pitchers to throw underhanded is that there is a lot less wear and tear on the shoulder joint, something that every single baseball player especially pitchers can attest to. Throwing underhand does not put this kind of abuse on the rotator cuff simply because the motion works the way that our arms are biomechanical he inclined to work with our shoulder.
Bicep injuries are very common, especially at the higher levels of the sport, and when you get into fastpitch softball these kinds of injuries are more and more place. This was done on purpose originally again to make the game safe for indoor play , and while a lot of position players find a way to get comfortable throwing the ball around the diamond overhand you lose a lot of accuracy, you lose a lot of speed, and you lose a lot of control.
Throwing the ball underhand, the other hand is a whole lot easier when you are dealing with something this large and this heavy.
I have a wide head, which is why a regular-shaped hockey helmet hurts at my temples. In the National Hockey League, the specifics of injuries are generally kept pretty quiet.
Hockey is a notoriously violent game, and one theory is that teams may want to keep injuries secret so as to
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