The 8 Vector System was created and published by Jordan Nieuwsma and Nick DiMarco from Elon University. The 8 Vector System is a mental model that allows you to organize the vast amounts of movement variations in sport. The purpose of this is to prepare athletes by physically preparing their bodies and tissues to efficiently decelerate, withstand, and transmit force …
The Reverse Lunge: Building a Foundation for Athletes
Training the lower half of the body usually focuses on the big movements like squats and deadlifts. They dominate the landscape for most athletes, and rightly so. When you look at a pitching motion, the majority of the actual motion from leg pickup to release is performed through an interplay of single leg motion. That interplay could fill a novel, …
ABCA Podcast on Developing Athletes
Strength training for baseball players has certainly evolved over the years and for this week’s podcast, we connect with two of top strength coaches in college baseball in TCU’s Zach Dechant and Coastal Carolina’s Nick White. This episode is packed with tremendous insight as both Dechant and White speak about their growth as strength coaches and detail the specific plans …
Ahead of the Curve PODCAST
Was really fortunate to receive a call several months ago from a high school coach in the metroplex by the name of Jonathan Gelnar @J_Gelnar7. He runs a great baseball specific podcast called Ahead of the Curve. If you haven’t checked it out yet make time to do so as he’s put out a wealth of information from a variety of coaches. Ahead …
Baseball and the Olympic Lifts
One of the most popular questions I get is about using the Olympic lifts with baseball athletes. First off, I came up through my athletic career as well as my early coaching career with the Olympic lifts as a staple. I even trained as an Olympic lifter for an extended period of time on the Bulgarian, and Russian systems years …
Active Thoracic Spine Disassociation
The following videos come from my 2016 CSCCa presentation on the thoracic spine. It is one of our more advanced progressions through our active t-spine rotation. I say more advanced because of the control it requires from the pelvis, and t-spine. In the active series, the internal / external obliques control motion versus our lying progressions where we can apply opposite arm …
Medball Throw Series
Fall semester intern Colin Feikle gives a brief demo and description of 8 medball throws that we use with rotational sports at different times throughout the year. Generally, we prefer a 6-10# medball with 5-10 reps per side per throw. Side Throw – Focus: Hip rotation Front Throw – Focus: Hip extension into the wall Rebound Throw Focus: Weight transfer …
Hip Matrix w/ Rotation
One of my favorite exercises for creating dis-association of the thoracic spine is the Hip Matrix w/ Rotation. This movement came to us several years ago from one of our former interns Jeremy Fraden and we have used it ever since. Dis-association can create high levels of muscle activation, and motor control within a joint or segment of the body. In this instance an …
Training Rotational Movement Patterns
I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately from high school coaches about our baseball training. The number one thing is how to implement rotational work into their training. Many small schools, and/or high schools don’t have access to cables, bands, or even med-balls to supplement their program with rotational training. Even if they did have access to some of these tools, due …