Today’s episode features Dr. Nick Serio.  Nick received his doctorate of education in sport and performance psychology from the University of Western States.  He is the co-owner and general manager of the “Athlete’s Warehouse” located in Pleasantville, New York. Nick also serves as the head pitching coach at Fox Lane high school, where the baseball team has had tremendous success.  

I watched Nick’s presentation on medicine ball training he did at the NISMAT symposium, which was a phenomenal and creative demonstration of special strength training for pitchers.  Nick’s work is the epitome of the full-spectrum blend of knowledge of sport specific skill needs, appropriate special strength exercises, as well as solid general strength principles.   

Nick’s special strength medicine ball programming is facilitating significant increases in players throwing speeds, all while keeping their arms healthy, as they avoid throwing baseballs year round (a huge factor in getting injured or burning out early).  Despite the impressive results he gets, Nick is a very honest and transparent individual, as he also indicates the many other training modalities the players are doing (plyometrics, resistance training) as well as simply growing and maturing. Regardless, Nick’s creative solutions to training are something special to learn about, and have ramifications for all throwing athletes, and rotational sports.

On the show today, Nick goes into the factors contributing to the massive injury increases in baseball, and how his medicine ball program can help combat this.  He also chats about general principles in training throwers, postural issues, and then gets into the fine points of his medicine ball training program. Nick also addresses the action of the front block leg in throwing, which is a universal principle, applicable to a great variety of rotational sports. 

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. 

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Key Points

An assessment of the factors contributing to the massive increases in injury in baseball
How Nick approaches upper and lower extremity work for throwing and rotational athletes from a general weightroom perspective
Addressing postural issues with throwing athletes
A full description of Nick’s medicine ball training program designed to improve pitch mechanics and velocity while taking load off of the arm and elbow
Training the action of the front leg, the block or brake leg in throwing and swinging actions

 
“There is a lot going on at younger ages that is missed because we are focusing so much on major league baseball.  The demands to get recruited and how we get recruited right now, put a tremendous amount of stress on a young pitcher’s arm”

“We created a system to try and attain this velocity (needed to reach the next athletic level) without putting further stress on them (through medicine ball training)”  

“In the past, it was the parents that have the answers, today, it is the kids who have the answers”

“I think it’s ridiculous that we have a pitch count in baseball… how many of those pitches in that 100 pitches were maximal intent? Well that’s going to take way more of a taxation of his out than a 2 outs, no runners on situation”

“When you look at most high level throwers, they are going to have retroversion in their shoulder, and that’s from throwing at that younger age; their body is doing that at those morphing times where we are going to have those improvements”

“Any real rotational athlete we’re looking at a couple things: we are looking at the reverse lunge… we love the overhead squat… and then a bear crawl, we are infatuated with crawling.. and then obviously sprinting”

“It’s difficult for me to differentiate the shoulder region from the hip region if I don’t account for the la...