• MLB Pitch Smart guidelines say so
• After a long season you have severe range of motion (ROM) limitations
• It’s what players have done for years
Reasons against shutting down
• You want to get better before next season
• Your current skill level isn’t high enough for you to reach your goals
• The muscles, ligaments, and tendons responsible for throwing respond to stress; without stress, they will atrophy
Reasons for shutting down
MLB Pitch Smart guidelines say so
MLB and USA Baseball teamed up to create a list of recommendations to help baseball players navigate their careers. The list for athletes ages 15-18 is depicted below:
Generally speaking, I agree with these recommendations. (I don’t believe that pitchers need to throw a consistent changeup before developing a breaking ball, but that’s a topic for another day.) Most of them fall under the category of recommended practices for athletes who are in a competitive season: proper warm-up, proper rest, and fatigue monitoring. A competent coach should be able to follow these guidelines pretty well.
That being said, there is no evidence that taking 2-3 continuous months off from all overhead throwing decreases injury risk. None.
Thankfully, I’m not the only person who is interested in looking at risk factors for arm injuries. A group of researchers from the University of Michigan gathered data from 14 studies which included 2,426 individual pitchers from youth to professional levels. I encourage those interested to read the full study, but the authors concluded the following:
“High-level evidence is lacking to substantiate current safety guidelines for baseball players. Only weak evidence exists to causally link risk factors such as age, position, and pitching volume to elbow injuries among baseball players, and no evidence exists to support any consistent causal risk factors related to shoulder injury. Well-designed prospective cohort studies are necessary to uncover risk factors related to injury among baseball players from the youth to professional level” (Agresta, Krieg, & Freehill, 2019).
Essentially, evidence that not following safety guidelines can cause injury does not exist despite this topic being researched for decades.
A table from this same study evaluated the Pitch Smart risk factors and their causal relationship to injury; it is presented below.
Establishing a causal relationship to injury is incredibly difficult given the many, many factors that contribute to any given injury. Although some of the Pitch Smart risk factors – pitching while fatigued, pitching with injuries to other body parts, and not following a proper strength and conditioning routine – pass the logic test, they are not actually supported by the data.
Again, the ability to establish a causal relationship to injury is near impossible; many scientists have spent their entire careers trying to understand injury and robust data still does not exist, especially in pitchers.
So, next time someone recommends an extended shut down and cites MLB Pitch Smart as their source, understand that their recommendations are not substantiated by data.
After a long season, you have severe ROM limitations
If you attend a respectable training facility, your ROM should be checked during an evaluation and rechecked periodically. It is common for pitchers to lose ROM in their upper body following a long season. If this is the case, priority number one for your offseason should be to restore these numbers to baseline. This can be achieved through a quality sports performance program.
In my opinion, this is the best reason to take time off from throwing.
While ROM is lacking, avoid throwing at moderate or high intensities. Low-intensity, low-volume throwing can be performed if your arm feels good.
To avoid being hypocritical, there is only weak evidence that lacking ROM can increase injury risk, and to my knowledge, changes in ROM and their relation to injury in individual athletes has not been studied. Based on mine and my colleagues experience, however, restoring ROM early in the offseason should be a top priority for pitchers.
It’s what players have done for years
This isn’t a good reason to do anything, both in baseball and life. Get informed, take control of your career, and make decisions to set yourself up for success.
Reasons Against Shutting Down
You want to get better before next season
Most of the athletes we see specialize in baseball by their freshman or sophomore year of high school. They choose to dedicate their lives to becoming the best they can be. Between spring, summer, and fall seasons, there isn’t a good chunk of time to focus on velocity, pitch design, or mechanical improvements. That’s where the winter comes in. It’s the only substantial period of time where we aren’t balancing the demands of competition.
Let’s say you follow Pitch Smart guidelines and shut down from October 15 to January 15. The high school season starts right around March 1. So, that gives you six weeks to get your arm “in shape” before high school starts. After three months off, six weeks is barely even enough time to build back up, much less improve.
If your goal is to throw harder, you need reps. If your goal is to develop a new pitch, you need reps. If your goal is to improve command, you need reps. If your goal is to improve mechanics, you need reps. You can’t get those reps sitting on the couch.
It would be a disservice to mandate long-term shutdowns if you’re serious about player development.
Your current skill level isn’t high enough to reach your goals
If your goal is to play collegiate baseball, there’s a certain velocity threshold for each level. For a D1 pitcher, that’s typically high 80s, low 90s. For D2, that’s anywhere from low to high 80s. For a D3 pitcher, that typically high 70s to mid 80s. Obviously there are more factors that go into the recruiting process, but as a general rule you need to be throwing at or above these speeds.
If you’re a high school junior who throws 82 and you want to play D1 baseball, you got some work to do. Shutting down for 2-3 months isn’t the recipe for throwing 87 in the spring.
The muscles, ligaments, and tendons responsible for throwing respond to stress; without stress, they will atrophy
The body is great at responding to stress. The easiest example of this is in the weight room. As athletes lift weights, their muscles grow. Also, they gain the ability to lift MORE weight.
Conversely, if you lift consistently for months at a time, then stop, what happens the first time you get back in the gym and lift heavy? You are sore.
When it comes to throwing, we can apply a similar approach. While throwing, the muscles, ligaments, and tendons responsible for throwing undergo a level of microtrauma. If soreness is excessive, we’ve applied more stress than the athlete can handle. If soreness is minimal or non-existent, that’s a good sign the athlete can handle the stress applied. Makes sense, right?
If we stop throwing, we stop applying stress. If we stop applying stress, the body loses the capacity to recover. This makes the on ramping process much more difficult, especially in throwing where the arm moves faster than any other recorded human movement.
However, if we continue to apply stress, especially at low levels, we can maintain some capacity to recover from throwing.
Someone who has researched tendon and ligament stress extensively is Dr. Keith Barr from UC Davis. Much of his work involves animals and in-vitro studies, so it’s unclear if these findings can be applied to baseball players but bear with me. His findings show that ligaments do, in fact, respond to stress. Further, through low-grade stress, ligaments actually become stiffer and more resilient over time. However, without stress, they become weaker and more susceptible to injury.
If we apply this evidence to pitchers, it points to the protective nature of continuing to throw.
Recommendations
For athletes who wish to improve their baseball skills from October through February, a long-term shut down is NOT recommended. Rather, a de-load period is preferred. This de-load period should consist of 0-3 weeks of no throwing immediately at the end of the fall season, followed by a period of 2-4 weeks of very light throwing – 30-40 throws with a baseball (or PlyoCare balls) at 45-60’.
After this period of very light throwing, a 4 week on ramp should be executed where the athlete gradually increases throwing volume and intensity. When high-intensity throwing is performed and executed, it is important to monitor how the athlete responds in regard to soreness and fatigue. When the athlete can throw at 90-95% intensity with little to no soreness post-session, he can advance to velocity development.
During a velocity development phase, maximum effort throwing should be performed once per week at most. Maximum effort throwing can include pulldowns, bullpens, or positional specific throwing (a catcher throwing as hard as possible from the crouch). Maximum effort throwing should continue as part of a structured throwing program throughout the offseason, with intermittent periods of low effort throwing as needed (i.e., de-load week). The throwing program should lead into the spring season with the athlete fully prepared for the demands of the season.
An offseason structured like this allows us to improve in the skills necessary to perform at a higher level compared to the previous season in the safest way possible. By continuing to throw at low efforts rather than completely shutting down, we can apply stimulus to the muscles, ligaments, and tendons responsible for throwing. By continuing to throw, we avoid muscular, ligamentous, and tendinous atrophy that will occur with long periods of inactivity.
Closing Remarks
It’s clear where my opinion lies when it comes to shutdowns. For serious baseball players, long-term shutdowns do not make sense. There isn’t sufficient evidence to support that shutdowns physiologically benefit throwers, and it’s possible that they could cause more harm than good.
The current state of baseball values pitchers who throw hard and throw nasty stuff. The best time to improve those skills occurs from November through February. If you want to be the best you can be when the season rolls around, the time to train is now.
References
Agresta, C. E., Krieg, K., & Freehill, M. T. (2019). Risk Factors for Baseball-Related Arm Injuries: A Systematic Review. Orthopaedic journal of sports medicine, 7(2), 2325967119825557. https://doi.org/10.1177/2325967119825557
MLB: Pitch Smart: Pitching guidelines: Ages 15-18. MLB.com. (n.d.). Retrieved October 27, 2021, from https://www.mlb.com/pitch-smart/pitching-guidelines/ages-15-18.
Paxton, J. Z., Grover, L. M., & Baar, K. (2010). Engineering an in vitro model of a functional ligament from bone to bone. Tissue engineering. Part A, 16(11), 3515–3525. https://doi.org/10.1089/ten.TEA.2010.0039
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