EP108 – Is Throwing a Football Good for Pitchers? Plus Home Gym Tips

Dear Baseball Gods

In this episode, Dan discusses reasons on whether throwing a football is beneficial for pitchers. Dan also gives helpful suggestions on equipment to use when working out at home.

Links: Home workout video mentioned in the episode; Try Early Work Strength Program for free here.

To submit a question for the Q&A segment, email a voice recording to Dan at [e-mail]. Want to support the show? Buy a copy of Dear Baseball Gods on Kindle or Paperback, or listen on audiobook. Or, pick up Pitching Isn’t Complicated, his advanced-but-understandable pitching manual. Enroll in one of Coach Dan’s online pitching courses or his mental skills course. Use code BASEBALL GODS to save 20% on any course, just for being a listener. Sign up for Dan’s Email list and get a free pitching checklist, and follow up with him on the interwebs: YouTube Channel | Twitter | Danblewett.com

EP108 Transcript: EP108 – Is Throwing a Football Good for Pitchers? Plus Home Gym Tips

You’re listening to the Dear Baseball Gods Podcast. In this show, I help parents, players and coaches better navigate their baseball careers.

All right. Welcome back to Dear Baseball Gods. On this episode, we’re going to talk about is throwing a football. Good for pitchers. And we’re going to go into some home gym tips. So things, if you’re stuck at home, working out, what are some creative ways you can get it, you know, a little bit of workout kind of maintain your strength or maybe even get stronger.

So before we get going, make sure you check out the show notes of this podcast. Wherever you’re listening. I have my two books on baseball, my memoir, Dear Baseball Gods. Which is my story and can definitely help a young athlete or parent understand what their journey is going to look like. Also, my pitching manual Pitching Isn’t Complicated.

That’s down below. Also my online courses links to my YouTube channel. Social media handles all that stuff. And my new strength conditioning program built for ballplayers called early work. So if you’re new here or you’re a longtime listener, definitely check out the show notes, grab a book, grab some that can help you and just continue learning.

So first thing on the docket today is throwing a football. Good for pitchers. And I think the resounding answer is yes, especially if your pitcher who throws a slider. So quick thing about me. I was a curve ball, high, fast ball, like high spin rate kind of pitcher. And. Now I was never a football player. I was also never super interested in football, so I was never a good thrower of footballs.

I understand how to throw them. I just was like, never throw it, throw it around kind of kid. I don’t know why. I just, never gravitated towards football. But what’s interesting. And I’ve heard this anecdote from a couple different people, is that players like me who are really good at getting through the center of the ball and spinning it really well, tend to be bad at throwing the football.

And this sort of makes sense because the reason, so some guys are really good at throwing footballs because they throw sliders. And so a slider is essentially the same motion as throwing a football. You get around the side of it, and then you come back through the ball towards the end, applying. You know, it’s, obviously not a complete bullet spend that you’re applying to a slider, which is essentially what you’re applying to the football, but because the, football is large size, you know, your hands very similarly mimics what you do with throwing a slider.

So number one, throwing a football is good for players who were learning to throw a slider, but. From many, many teammates of mine who through football, semi, religiously in pregame, that they would just toss around us to have fun. And also they swore by it as sort of like keeping them sharp, throwing a slider.

So if you are a pitcher who there was a slider, I think it’s a good idea. Number two, when you start talking about the merit of weighted balls, It’s hard to deny that a different training stimulus, and this is a different weighted ball, different diameter of ball, different type of ball has to have some positive effect for your arm.

Now, all doses are important, right? So just, just because Advil will relieve your headache. If you take one pill doesn’t mean you should take six of them. Right? So a lot of the, injuries that are often attributed to way to ball training are probably more so. Related to, you know, skeletally immature kids doing it, kids doing on a program where they had like no ramp up kids doing it when they have really bad mechanics and way balls, maybe exacerbate that the extremely high efforts and intensities, they throw out all that sort of stuff.

But, you know, people gave way to ball training a really bad rep for a long time. I was a semi early adopter of doing it in my own training and training with pitchers that I worked with back in 2010 through 14. And then I, kind of abandoned it for other things, but. The thing to remember is a football is bigger.

It’s heavier, and it’s going to force your arm to adapt to that throwing stimulus in a new way, just like you would switch exercises or add more weight in the weight room. So the big thing here is we know that football players in the NFL really don’t hurt their UCL. They don’t blow their elbows out like baseball players do.

There’s an occasional Tommy John surgery in the NFL. I think Drew Brees had one don’t quote me on it, but they are occasional, right. And they also often happen with trauma sometimes too. Like if your arm gets, you know, football, the quarterback’s about to make a pass and his arm gets swatted and he fumbles like that can be UCL injury potentially, or a shoulder injury.

But in general, we know that. UCL injuries are the highest in baseball pitchers, and that’s because of velocity is heavily correlated. It’s heavily tied to the fact that the baseball’s lighter. It means you can throw it faster. The fact that the football is heavier means you can’t throw it as fast, even though Tom Brady and any NFL quarterback, they have cannons for arms.

They can’t throw a football 95 miles per hour. Right? You can throw up a football, like maybe up to 70. Don’t quote me on that either. But a really hard throwing football is like, not anywhere close to the speeds of a baseball. So, you know, here’s the thing. And so that has sort of a protective effect, just throwing it lower velocities, even because just because the ball is lighter, seems to have a protective effect on the arm.

The other thing about throwing a football is the football throwing motion is different. You can’t have as a really long arm circle because the ball is so big. It risks falling out of your hands. And, and this was actually, this was really good insight. Given to me from a, baseball pitching researcher.

And you said basically the body is smart. And because the arm acts as like a, lever, it wants to have a shorter moment arm as the wall, as the ball gets heavier. So, you know, if you you’re swinging, if you had a full-size sledgehammer, right. If you want to swing that more effectively, both from an accuracy standpoint and from velocity standpoint, You would grab it closer to the head.

It’s easier to manage that way because the, the arm is longer. If you grab that sledgehammer at the very end. Yeah. You can get some really big power into once it gets going, but it’s really hard to, to swing it because it takes so much torque. Two swing and rotate that three foot sledgehammer with a 10 pound sledge.

The same principle applies to your arm when you’re throwing. When you have a lighter ball in your hand, your arm can be longer, which is actually not as good for your elbow joint, but it can be longer because the ball is so light. When it gets heavier, your body starts to pull the ball in towards your body faster and towards your ear.

More. So what you see with heavier balls, this is what the researcher was telling me with heavier balls. The elbow angle tends to decrease. So it goes, starts to go below 90. And the ball is held by the ear longer, because again, your body doesn’t want to cast it out. That’s why you don’t really see NFL players throwing from sidearm because as the arm casts out, that heavy puts more stress on the arm.

It’s more uncomfortable and it’s less accurate. So essentially the football throwing pattern. If you that’s what we want to call it. Is to keep the ball tighter to the body a lot more like the way a catcher would throw or infielder would throw. And for a lot of pitchers, you do have arm action problems where they’re really long, or they’re really goofy.

They have obtuse angles at their elbow, throwing a football. I was going to have some positive effects there. So. That is also another benefit in addition to the fact that it’s just a bigger, heavier, different stimulus and being a good thrower is going to have, a lot of benefits. Like you take again and you take any NFL quarterback who can throw a football as far as in hard as they throw it.

They’re going to be a throw a baseball pretty darn hard too. And I think we’ve seen that with most of them. Like you take any of those guys that can throw a baseball into the, into the nineties typically. So that’s an important thing to know. So is throwing a football good for pitchers?

I think the resounding answer is yes. If you like throwing it, if you don’t like throwing a football, don’t throw a football. But I think the more you can consider part of your job as a pitcher, Is being, as being a good thrower, the better you’re not your job is not just to pitch down the mountain.

It’s also to be an athlete. It’s also to be adjustable. So when you’re not throwing your best or it’s raining, or the mountain Sox or the Mount is a huge hole or whatever it is, you have to make adjustments on the fly. And so being a good thrower with varied environments is important. You can’t be this guy who can only pitch well when the mountains perfect.

When the sky is blue, when it’s 76 degrees, And you got full night’s sleep, right? You have to be the guy who can pitch no matter what and make those little adjustments when you’re slipping a little on the mound or the mountains pretty crappy and all that stuff. So throwing a football on being a good thrower in general is going to help you make adjustments better because you’re training in a very training environment.

You’re throwing with difference, simulate different way to balls, different size balls, all that different stuff. And what I like about throwing the football is it’s not this way to ball scenario where you’re throwing it. Absolutely as hard as you can for a radar gun, which I do find a little bit dangerous.

What you do when you throw a football is you’re just running around having a good time. You’re chucking it at a friend who’s like running out for a pass. I find the way that we throw the football is as important as. What we’re throwing in the fact that the fact is that no one gets a football and does a running sprint and Crow hop and throws into a net for a radar gun.

Right? When you throw a football, you might challenge yourself and Chuck a couple of bombs, right. But in general, you’re throwing it like a medium distance at like a medium intensity. And you’re having good time. You’re moving around and still trying to be accurate. All those things I think are very safe.

And I think they’re probably very good for your arm and for your athleticism. As a pitcher. So throwing a football for me gets the big thumbs up.

All right. Next thing. Let’s talk about home gym tips. So if you’re stuck working at home, unfortunately this has been the reality for a lot of, 2020 with the COVID nightmare year. And it may be the reality for a lot of 2021 as well. So when you’re working at home, there’s a couple of things to know.

Number one, it’s more challenging to work out the back of your body. And that means you’re rowing muscles. So it’s easy to push ups. It’s easy to like find a weight or something. You can like push weight overhead. Right? You get like a gallon bucket of concrete. You could like push that overhead with two hands.

All those sort of like pushing. Exercises and pushup variations. There’s just a million million of them. They take only body weight. They’re really easy to perform rowing, however, which is much more important for a throwing athlete or a ballplayer because your back muscles help to, they need to be well-developed to, prevent injury and throwing.

They’re more of your decelerators and they do assistant accelerating a throw as well. And they’re are just important in being able to support bigger loads on your back, whether you’re dead lifting and squatting, which helps make your entire body stronger and bigger. So the back is a really big foundation piece.

You need a strong back again to support bigger loads when you’re squatting safe, just to squat them safely, which then in turn helps you get even bigger. If you have a really weak scrawny back. You’re just not going to get, to put a lot of weight on the bar to then get as big and strong as you want. And you really can’t get that big and strong without having chin-ups and dead lifts and squat variations in your program.

Like you need variations of the squats and deadlifts. I’m not saying you have to do straight Bardell lifts. Cause I don’t really like straight bar deadlifts, but you have to do some amount of these big, hard, full body stimulus kind of exercises to really get big and strong. So with that being said, rowing is one of the challenges and doors.

So you can get some bands like the 42 inch pull up assistance. Bands are great. Not only for pulp assistance, if you want to get like a pull up bar for your house, but also just for, if you can buy a door anchor and a carabiner. And connect that 42 inch band to it. Now you can do some decent one arm, row variations, two arm, row variations.

You can put it high, you can put a low, so you can adjust the angle of pole, which is important. You know, mixing up force factors like low rows, high rows. That’s important. So. One or two 42 inch bands. You give [e-mail]. They sell them there again, these big, like chin up bands, you get a couple of those, those go a long way for a lot of exercise variations.

They’re also really useful in doing core exercises, like, like sideways chops, low to high chops pal off presses, things that are really good for rotational athletes like baseball players. Those are important. And then if you have absolutely no money to spend on this at all, which I find again, if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re going to be serious enough about baseball, where you have some budget for all these expensive, stupid baseball things, right?

So if you just allocated save 50 bucks or 75 bucks, you get a couple of those, those jump stretch bands, you could buy it, go to home Depot. By a couple of things, a concrete film and a couple of five gallon buckets. And, you know, you could carry those around as farmers walk buckets, you know, that’d be pretty like 75 pounds each probably you could do some strong man type training, just like sort of carrying them around.

Obviously it would be really safe when you do this kind of stuff. And be really careful about the way you build things. As home-brewed gym equipment can be very dangerous. You have to be really, really careful. But there’s lots of ways to make heavyweights sandbags are great. So, you know, you can get sandbag filler bags on the web and you just basically buy these heavy nylon bags, go by, you know, play by, playground sand at Home Depot or Lowe’s or wherever, and, fill the nylon bag with sand.

And now for like 30 bucks, you have a pretty heavy sand bag that you can hold in the crux of your arms in front of you and do sort of like almost like a goblet squat. And you could do weighted lunges that way. But sandbags are really amazing. Just they can get a little bit, depending on the quality of the sandbag and how many, like you get like one layer where you have a sand bag inside of another sand bag, then they’re a little more acceptable for inside your home.

But obviously you don’t want a sand bag breaking inside your house. That can be a nightmare. So we use sandbags is just one of our pieces of training in my Academy. And they can be really, really versatile for, especially for like a long-term pandemic kind of thing. Where if you had a couple sandbags, maybe a couple of buckets fill with concrete with really heavy duty handles somehow.

And there’s a lot of ways to be creative, a couple of vans. Now you’re in pretty good shape. Cause you can do a ton of pushing variations with just different types of pushups, elevating your feet. Different push-up variations themselves. Obviously you can do farmer’s walks with any of the heavy stuff that you create, holding that in your hands and walking outside, you can use your sandbags, do lunge variations and some lightweight at squats.

Cause the sand bag is not going to be 500 pounds. And then a lot of the, like I said, the band stuff will help with the rowing and a lot of different rotational core stuff. So you can end up getting a pretty good amount of training for just maybe like 50 to a hundred bucks of creativity and some of your time.

Building some of these things out, but again, you have to be really careful about home-brewed equipment. And one thing I will say is, do not use a Swiss ball or a stick, you know, Swiss ball, stability, ball, yoga ball, those big inflatable balls. Sometimes you’ll see people, bench pressing with their back on a stability ball.

Now, most of the time this will be okay. And like they won’t burst, but those balls do burst and sometimes, and not all of them, some of them are, like a slow. Deflation tight ball. So when they do bursts, they don’t like explode and pop like a balloon. They kind of slowly deflate, but anytime you do anything heavy pressing weight above your body, you want to do it on a sturdy weight bench, not a stability ball.

So that might seem like a good cheap way. To do dumbbell bench press at home or bench, press at home without buying a bench. Do not do that. That’s a really big safety hazard because it only takes one time for that ball to pop. And now a bar’s coming crashing down on, you can get killed that way.

So just be really careful about. All the different services. If you’re using like an Ottoman or a chair as like some sort of prop, instead of a bench, just be really careful about the limits and don’t weight your body. If you’re doing stuff like that, it can be really, really, really, really scary. So, as much as home workouts can be beneficial and they can be.

You know, body, weight centered and largely very safe. You have to be careful and, and you cannot assume, that the worst won’t happen because as soon as that happens, you know, you’re going to be unprepared for it. And you don’t want to wait, crashing down on your head or your body or somebody else. So as far as other home gym tips, because I know when you’re home for a long time, you get stir crazy.

The big things are just focused on what you can control, because assuming you’re in that boat, a lot of other people will be in that boat as well. So, you know, take care of your arm care. You know, you can do all of your exercise with less and less arrest, which is going to have more of a metabolic and more of a cardiovascular effect, which is good.

So even if you can’t. You just don’t have access or don’t have a way to get tons of resistance, tons of weight. You can still do, like do your, your split squat jumps, then go right into your pushups and go right into your band rows. Then go right back into your planks. Then go, you know, you go back to back to back and just minimize the amount of rest you get.

And that’s going to get you a pretty intense workout, even though it’s not going to have quite the, maybe the muscle or strength building effect, if you had tons and tons of weight to use, because obviously weight is important, progressive overload. Is important for getting bigger and stronger longterm.

But again, when you’re lifting at home, chances are it’s just to bridge the gap kind of situation couple months, right? So if you’re still getting really high quality workouts, you keep your general physical preparedness up from again, like what I just said, kind of doing things with less rest and decreasing less rest and going back and forth really quick.

That’s still going to basically check all the boxes were after that couple of months. Bridge program of working out a home, you’re going to be in better shape to go back to your school or go back wherever, back to your performance facility, which is back open. And then just sort of jump back into normal weightlifting with heavier weights and progressive overload, a little more and more access to more varied types of equipment.

So hopefully that helps, obviously, like I said, home gym is never ideal. The goal is just to do as best you can be creative. And I sh I’m sure if you Google, you know, DIY weight equipment, DIY, you know, home gym equipment, stuff like that, you’ll find lots of ideas. Again. You just have to be really careful about, you know, like I do not recommend you building wooden, squat racks, or any kind of stuff like that.

You have to be really, really careful. And don’t jump to, Oh yeah. I can do this with my mediocre carpenter skills. The couple home-brewed wooden squarks that I have seen are typically built by people who are pretty good with wood and pretty handy and no have a pretty good idea of how to, how to architecture this stuff.

So that’s really bomb-proof for being made out of wood and you don’t want to cut corners. And again, nothing is worth being unsafe about and getting hurt, but hopefully this couple help, those couple home gym tips helped. That’s it for today’s episode of Dear Baseball Gods. I’d greatly appreciate it. If you’d subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts, don’t forget in the notes of this show.

You’ll find links to my pitching manual pitching isn’t complicated. My memoir, Dear Baseball Gods. My online video pitching courses and my new baseball strength training program called Early Work. You can sign up right now for a free 14 day trial to Early Work. And if you’re interested in one of my online courses, you can save 20% on any one of them using the promo code baseball gods.

Thanks again for listening and stay on your hustle. You never know, who’s watching.