This study came out in March, and I flagged it then as something I wanted to spend some time thinking about. It’s a classic example of a sports injury, and one that careful mobility training and deliberate practice could probably help prevent.

In short, the study states that the windmill style of pitching in softball leads to a higher incidence of bicep injuries. The windmill style of pitching, if you aren’t familiar with it, is where the pitcher starts with the arm in front of them, goes up to 12 o’clock, back to 9, down to 3, and releases at 3 o’clock.

Mobility Training

You know the old saying “the hip bone is connected to the thigh bone”, well that is true up and down the body — and force transmits up and down the body. If you think about pushing something or someone, something with a bit of give is less likely to topple over and break that something solid, yes? The same holds true with joint mobility. The shoulder drives the movement, and the force radiates both down the arm and across the back and down the opposite leg. If you don’t have mobile chains up and down, what do you suppose happens to that force? It has to come out somewhere. So, if the body has a full arsenal of mobile joints, the entire body is able to absorb the force of the pitch.

Deliberate Practice

Moving at the speed to get a pitch out is A LOT of work. (I just tried it, and wish I hadn’t.) Getting the shoulder to move in that motion, even at a slower speed can be a stretch, no pun intended. It’s important to work through the entire range of motion related to the pitching movement at a wide variety of speeds, working on the rough spots in the circle. Then, as the circle improves at slow speeds, you can speed it up gradually.

The vast majority of sports injuries come from either eccentric (uneven) loading — things like lunging — or movement at end range of motion (you can think of that as joint lockout, generally speaking). It’s because people don’t train there, so the body becomes vulnerable.

While the example was a softball injury, the concepts of mobility training and deliberate practice apply everywhere. Your body needs to be ready and mobile in all ranges of motion and at all speeds. Even if you are not an athlete, you never know when you need to catch something that is falling or mis-step coming off a curb. And it’s always the “stupid stuff” where we get hurt.