Strength Coach Andrew Sacks joins the show to discuss baseball strength, youth training, and programming for baseball players. We dive into movement, optimal exercises, and Andrew gives advice for the beginner that is looking to increase strength and athleticism. Dan and Andrew riff on bad research and data analysis in the baseball world. Great information for anyone interested in strength training

You can find Andrew on Instagram @Coach_Andrew_Sacks and Twitter @Andrew_Sacks. Also check out Prime Sports Performance in Baltimore, MD.

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Transcript: EP57 – Talking Baseball Strength with Coach Andrew Sacks

Dan Blewett:   all right. Welcome back. We are alive. This is the morning. Brushback episode 57. It is Tuesday, September 15th, I guess. I shouldn’t say that because then it takes the shell now. No, one’s gonna wanna listen to it. After the fact, but, Oh, well, it’s been ruined I’m here with Bobby Stevens, my cohost from the windy city.

Robert, how are you?

Bobby Stevens: I’m good. I’m good.

Dan Blewett: In a new venue. Once again, you’re the most, you’ve had like 18 different venues that you’ve podcasted from over the duration. Um,

Bobby Stevens: I’m easily the most versatile, versatile podcast co-hosts you’ve ever had.

Dan Blewett: Well, it just seems like you’re experiencing homelessness or something like that.

But anyway, we also have a great guest today. Friend of mine, longterm friends, since preschool, actually coach sax from Baltimore. Andrew, how are you? Good.

Andrew Sacks: Thanks for having me guys excited to be here.

Dan Blewett: So, if you don’t know [00:01:00] Andrew he’s, uh, Andrew underscore sax on Twitter, you’ll also often find us collaborating on arguments like kill John I’ll jump in we’ll mall people together with words, but Andrew owns prime sports performance, uh, in the Baltimore area, he’s a former collegiate baseball player.

He was a catcher. Um, all right. Super smart guy and a close friend of mine. So we’re excited to have him here today. Uh, so Andrew. Did you go inside today? And did you wear a hoodie? Cause I went outside of the day and wore a hoodie and I was very excited about it.

Andrew Sacks: I did not go outside today, wear a hoodie, but if I had known it was 56 degrees, I would have just checked the weather and it looks gorgeous.

Dan Blewett: It was really nice. Bob, what is it like how much snow do you have on the ground? There’s

Bobby Stevens: the inch and a half where now it’s actually really, I I’m wearing a hoodie right now, but I didn’t need one outside. I know you’re partial to hoodie, weather, Dan. I mean,

Dan Blewett: I think everyone likes toady, whether it’s just, just when it’s like, like right now in D C it’s gonna be a high of 76 today.

So that’s a pretty [00:02:00] solid like San Diego temperatures. That’s big time

Bobby Stevens: outdoor working out weather.

Dan Blewett: Yes. So let’s jump to it. So we don’t get too far down a rabbit hole of Ark, typical nonsense. Uh, Andrew, you’re doing obviously strength training with tons and tons of kids. What is this? The current phase that your athletes are in at the moment?

So, what does September look like for your guys and gals and what do you typically suggest for people who are, this is a good, this is like a common chunk of the year where parents are like, Hey, we’re kind of transitioning. What should we do? What are the smart things to do? So what do you

Andrew Sacks: got? We kind of depends.

Um, The phase that they’re in right now, depends on whether they’re playing fall ball. Um, whether they’re going to shut down, throwing for awhile after fall ball ends, like I many innings they pitched or they, they played during the summer in the spring. Um, most people right now are into like a power phase.

Um, cause we were trying to get them up to a peaking phase right before they shut down [00:03:00] for throwing for two months. Um, Jennifer we do is we try to build strength first, uh, to build a base of strength because power and explosiveness are ultimately about like how much strength you can produce, like really quickly.

So our first thing we want to do is learn, build strength. And then after we built that base of strength and we learned to produce it really quickly with like a power phase. And explosiveness phase, but not everybody’s on the same training schedule. So, uh, like I said, something folks are in like a strength phase right now because they started late or they have like a slightly different timeline.

Some guys are in the power phase and an explosiveness phase because we want to have them peaking right at the end of fall ball, just they can go out and they can show the coaches that they are good and they throw hard and they run fast, all that kind of stuff. Um, yeah, it just really depends on where they are and who they are and kind of what they need at that time.

So

Dan Blewett: I think a lot of the people that reach out to us have kids that either are a little bit of a runt compared to others. They’re waiting for their growth spur. They’re just the [00:04:00] standard five, eight, 129 pound, you know, eighth grade or whatever. So if we were to just like, take a type, like, say that, so you have a 14 year old kid, who’s 135 pounds.

Uh, like what, what is his like general overview of the year look like starting from like September to sip, to like nuts next

Andrew Sacks: September. So he was going to start now being 135 pounds. I guess the first thing we would have to do is, well, you always want to run an athlete through an assessment to figure out what their training history is, their injury history.

Um, just figure out like who it is you’re working with and for somebody who’s that small, I would say probably you want to start with just basic strength exercises because they probably don’t have a lot of experience with that. So learning to do exercises properly, like from an early age is very important because you don’t want to start doing exercises wrong.

And then as you get stronger, you’d add more weight to these exercises with bad movement patterns. Um, So learning how to do like a good squat, a good hip hinge, upper [00:05:00] body push a good upper body pool. That’s all really important right off the bat. And then once you’ve learned how to do those things, you can do them proficient.

Then you can start adding more weight. You can start playing around with different like periodization schemes, but in general right now. So I was starting today in September. We probably go through about maybe a four to six week strike phase. Then we switch over to power, maybe two to three weeks. Then we switched over to pure speed.

So we’re training basically at all ends of the speed strength spectrum, but at different times of the year to try and get athletes to peak at the right time. So usually what I’ll do is. I’ll figure it out. Like when did this app, you need to be at their best. Like when do they have like a showcase? When do they have like the start of their competitive season?

Cause that’s when I know they need to be peaking. So we need to be training for max explosiveness and speed at that time. And then basically reverse engineer my programming to figure out how do we get there basically from point a to point B so that everything kind of time’s up properly. And you can’t really do that.

I think, unless you reverse [00:06:00] engineer from the end point. So that’s a good one. Yeah. You’re going to Bobby.

Bobby Stevens: I was just saying that’s good because a lot of, a lot of kids are just like, you know, I want to get bigger or I want to get more explosive. They just pick whatever they want to do. And then that seems to be like the focus of the whole winter, getting up to whatever they’re gonna do, but, uh, I wanted to touch base.

So when I started lifting, you know, in high school, we went through phases of size, strength, power, and then performance. At least that’s what my trainer broken down into. Do you stay? Do you stick with three, as far as strength, power and speed. Are there more phases? Like if you were going to plan out the perfect off season for a baseball app, baseball or softball athlete, what are those phases?

Dan Blewett: How many phases can we, I, I caught myself doing this the other day. I hate to so much. Can we all agree? We can like either, like I can get a knife and we can do a blood oath, but can we all agree to not call baseball players, baseball athletes? Can we leave? Can we leave? Can we [00:07:00] officially leave it at baseball players?

Why do we, they call them athletes. It’s a, it’s implied that a baseball player is an athlete. There’s never been a baseball player. Who’s not an athlete except for David Wells. So I don’t

Andrew Sacks: know why. I don’t know why it’s with ourselves.

Dan Blewett: If we’re going to be honest. Yes. Why are we calling them athletes? Just call them baseball players.

It’s always been fine. It’s completely fine. Now. Okay. All right. We can move on. Thank

Bobby Stevens: you. Sounds more

Dan Blewett: professional. Sounds stupid.

Andrew Sacks: It’s a big little word.

Dan Blewett: It sounds stupid.

Bobby Stevens: Why are we reinventing

Dan Blewett: literally everyone

Andrew Sacks: with Blake when somebody. Here’s the thing, when they’re on the field, you can call them players and it’s fine.

But as soon as they step into a gym environment, like all of a sudden they’re athletes, I think that’s just cause that’s like preferred nomenclature of trainers and strength coaches. Like you don’t say like by players, you say like my athletes think that’s where that comes from. But I think in the right context, it does sound really Philly.

Like you wouldn’t be watching a baseball game on a field and be like, Oh, that [00:08:00] guy’s a really good first base athlete. No,

Dan Blewett: it’s a, I mean, I think it just in general, it’s frozen team sports. I mean, there’s football players, basketball players, hockey players, baseball players, track athletes. Oh, wait, cross, cross country.

No, cause they’re not really playing track. They’re like running track or where they’re shot pudding. Like either way. I just know why, I don’t know why we’ve bridged the gap and done that because it just hurt. It hurts me. And I caught my, I said, I said it once the other day, despite being very anti. All right.

So back to whatever Poppy’s question was, I’m sorry. I ruined everything.

Andrew Sacks: I think probably the question was, are there phases in training and like, are there more than the three? Really? It kind of depends on what periodization scheme you’re using. Um, right now we’re doing with a lot of our athletes. If we have a lot of time with them, as we’re doing try phasic training, meaning that it’s broken up into.

Like three basic blocks. So it’s block puritization. So you have like your strength phase. Do you have a Scarlet [00:09:00] transmutation phase, which I just call it power phase. So the easiness of it, and then you have the peaking phase. Um, and then it’s all kind of the same as what you said that you used to do the same, the same idea, just with like different, different names to it.

Um, but that said you could be doing. Like linear periodization, where you’re doing like the hypertrophy phase, where you’re just working on getting really big, then you have the strength phase and the power you can be doing block periodization, where you have like speed strength, explosiveness power. You could be doing like a conjugate program where you’re simultaneously working on strength and power at the same time.

So there’s a lot of different options when it comes to training. So. That’s it, it’s kind of a hard question to answer without knowing exactly what program we’re talking about, but like, there’s, there’s a lot of different ways that you can get good results with the athletes or players. If, um, if you just know what you’re doing, then you kind of know how to manipulate the variables.

Like you can get good results from linear periodization work in current training, like a, like a West side program or try phasic, like what we do [00:10:00] most of the time with our athletes. So, can you breathe that?

Dan Blewett: Can you briefly explain all those, all those three, I’m going to stop you every time. There’s a word that I think maybe like someone that’s just like, not in training, maybe doesn’t know.

So like period, try phasic. Um, what’s I can either just like briefly at those.

Andrew Sacks: Sure. So periodization is basically just, um, it’s how you alter training variables over time to provide different stimulus to them body. So if you’re in, let’s say a linear periodization, that’s kind of the easiest one to explain linear periodization.

Okay. Means that you start with focusing on building muscle size. First, we call it a hypertrophy phase. So the idea is if you have more muscle cross sectional area, you can theoretically produce more strength. You can produce more force. So they always start with building muscle size first. Then they will take that existing muscle size.

They had strength to it with a, with a strength block of training, uh, that after that, the next thing is, well, we’ve built [00:11:00] size, we’ve built strength. Like what what’s next we have to do for athletes. The next move is to work on applying that strength quickly. So building power. So they go from hypertrophy.

To strength to power. And each one of those blocks kind of builds off the last one. So we build muscle size to increase strength. We increased strength to increase power. We increase power to increase speed on the field. Um, that’s all it really is. Um, and usually if you’re using, uh, moderate weights for like higher reps, like eight to 12 reps, That’s gonna be good for building muscle size if you’re using heavier weights.

Um, so it’s something you could do for me, maybe one to four reps, that’s gonna be good for building strength. And then for building the speed and power, you want to use the same basic rep scheme as you would for strength, but you want to drop the intensity of the load to say that it’s something you could squat for three reps, like your three rep max, you would then take those three reps and do them at maybe 50%.

Of your one rep max. So it’s all about just kind of adjusting the variables to get to that end goal that we talked about [00:12:00] before of like having guys peak at the right time. Um, and then for the try phasic thing is an idea that the strength coach from Iowa had, I think it was Iowa or Minnesota.

Dan Blewett: Um, we’ll know his name is Cal deeds, Saudis.

I think he was Minnesota. Yeah,

Andrew Sacks: it wasn’t Minnesota. So he had a really good idea of which was he broke down athletic performance into basically three parts of movement. There’s the East centric movement. So I’ll just use the example of a squat to explain this. So the ecentric movement in a squad is like, as you’re like sitting down, we call that an eccentric contraction, safer in your quads because your quads are lengthening a while.

There. So while, while they’re under tension, you have an isometric phase. So if I get to the bottom of the squat and I stop, that’s the isometric phase, that’s where I need to be able to reverse. And then as you coming out of the bottom, that’s the concentric phase. So we have egocentric, isometric concentric.

He [00:13:00] did is he figured out a way to isolate each one of those parts, the lift to increase the athlete’s explosiveness over time. Really smart, basically what he does that he does, like. Two weeks of just East centric work, going really heavy, going down really slowly. And that you do two weeks of isometric work where you get to like your bottom range, you hold it for a second and then you explode it up out of it.

Then two weeks of just like regular tempo squats, for example, then after that, that’s when you switch over to like the power stuff. So. You’re not doing any like slow descent. You’re not doing any pauses, just going down and up as fast as you can. So you’ve built up the ability to have really good ecentric strength.

So you can control that downward portion. You built up really good isometric strength, so you can stop dead at that bottom portion and you can reverse it really quickly. When you break down athleticism, a lot of times it just comes down to like, how well does an athlete absorb force? Like how well can they stop it?

And then like, reverse it. So like for pitching, running, uh, swinging. [00:14:00] Pretty much anything jumping, anything you want to do. It’s all about taking that force and it kind of like reversing it. So it works really, really well. We’ve been doing it for the past two years with our athletes. So we get a good, like three, four months with we’ve seen really, really good results.

Um, we used to do mostly like concurrent training, like kind of like a West side type of program. Where you’re trying to work on strength and speed at the same time. And I think that works really well, especially if you only have guys for maybe a month or two, you can do that kind of program and it’s really effective.

But if I have athletes for a longer period of time, I really liked to use and try phasic program to give them a really good base of that essential guide, symmetric strength, because then they just get really super explosive.

Bobby Stevens: I have a question. Uh, because I work with a lot of younger guys and let’s say, I get a kid, you know, he’s an eighth grader freshmen. I guess the efficiency I see is aside from overall [00:15:00] strength is core strength. Like they just don’t have control of their body. They’re not strong. So what would you do with it, kids that are, let’s say like, not under the age of pre-teens 12 and under no, if you, if they brought you in, if you brought them into the gym, You know, what are some of the core exercises you would have them do?

Not core necessarily just overall like based exercises. You’d have these kids doing okay. Just to increase overall, like body awareness, some, give them some strength, like get them ready to start, you know, maybe experimenting in the weight room when they hit their teenage years and not be totally deficient, uh, strength wise.

Andrew Sacks: Sure. So usually the first exercise that we teach athletes is going to be a goblet squat, which is probably the most basic squat you could do. So you want to take just the old dumbbell out in front of your chest, you squat down and you stand up. So there’s a couple of reasons why I like that for beginners.

Number one is that if they [00:16:00] fail on a goblet squat, all they have to do is just drop the dumbbell. And they’re fine. Like if you take a young athlete and you give them the back squat to do. And they fell on a back squat and they could, they could get hurt pretty seriously. So it’s safe. And it also requires you to use your anterior core to support your body a little bit more than a back squat would.

So front squats, goblet squats are all gonna be a little bit more anterior core. Um, Demanding to the back squat wood, and then things like, um, things like planks are really good for starting out athletes, especially if they don’t have the body control and the core strength to really like him control their body and space.

So once they can do like a normal, good plank for maybe about 30, 45 seconds. Well, then start adding different things to the plank. Like maybe we’ll have them like lift up an arm or like lift up a leg. So we’re adding new challenges to the stabilization. So a lot of folks, they get carried away with the planks.

Like, they’ll start doing them for like five, 10 minutes at a time. Which I don’t think is, is much. I don’t think there’s much [00:17:00] benefit to that. So I think the best way to kind of, I guess, progress though, to just add different pieces to it. So add in some slight movement, add in some, some arms and legs moving.

Um, I think we want to do with athletes really quickly is teach them how to do a good hip hinge. Uh, prior to the easiest way to get hurt in a weight room is to throw your back out either dead lift thing. Or squatting or doing anything that involves like your hips basically. So teaching athletes, how to do a good Hinz right off the bat by doing Romanian deadlifts or by doing hip thrusts is always going to be a good idea.

Plus with history, right? Hip thrusts, you get the added benefit of building up glute strength. We’re just going to build up that overall core strength and body control like you were talking about. Um,

Dan Blewett: generally you want to have,

Andrew Sacks: sorry, go ahead, Dan.

Dan Blewett: So we’ve got a question on YouTube that pertains. I was just like waiting, just to throw in at the right time.

Uh, and I know the answer to this, but what, uh, how, how hard is it to teach hip hinge to kids? Kind of one of the [00:18:00] clunkier exercises.

Andrew Sacks: It is. Yeah, it’s, it’s tough to teach because it’s not like a super, Mmm, super intuitive knew it movement for a lot of people. So the idea is you want to bend at the waist.

You want to keep your use relatively stiff, but you gotta keep your back flat. And most people, when they go to bend over, if you were going to go pick something up off the ground, Most folks would round their back to do that because it’s easier, especially if you have tight hamstrings, which a lot of people do.

You’re going to run out of room to bend at the waist pretty quickly cause your hamstrings run out of room to stretch and you’ve got around your back. So it does. I think if I can just probably the hardest thing to teach. So from a movement standpoint, teaching a squat is not super difficult. Teaching a good push is not hard at all.

Teaching a good pool, not hard, but what we usually do is we’ll use. We have like a whole, I guess, kind of a sequence that we use with a stick and you guys might have seen this where you basically, you take a wooden dowel and you have the athlete place it [00:19:00] behind their back and they have to kind of hold it there and they have to maintain contact with their tailbone, their upper back and the back of their head.

And then what we can do is they can just kind of work through different types of hinges. We start kneeling on the ground, just kind of bending forward. Then we’ll pick them up on their feet. They’ll do the same thing. And the idea is to kind of give them that feedback of like, Hey, if you bent forward, like, did you maintain it?

Did you maintain all three contact points? And they can tell right away if they didn’t because the stick is like wobbling around. So that’s like kind of my quick, easy way to teach the hand is just use that stick as like a, I guess, like feedback for them. Cause it is hard to do and it does get frustrating sometimes, but don’t think you have to remember that, that it’s equally frustrating for the athlete too.

So you kind of have to just be encouraging eventually they’re going to get it, like it doesn’t, it’s not an impossible movement to do. Just take a little bit of practice. That’s all.

Dan Blewett: Yeah. We just found that, I guess maybe like 30% of kids just like, don’t get it where they’ll lock their knees and then round their back.

[00:20:00] Or then they’ll just squat. It’s one of the two, they can’t find the middle ground where their knees are slightly bent, but mostly stiff. And then their back stays flat. So we would just give them a lot of hip thrusts and sliding leg curls and just stuff like build their hamstrings up. And then, then as they get some strength there, it just like starts to get better.

And you still try to just try to keep coaching it. So, yeah, that’s what, it’s always been a challenge for sure.

Andrew Sacks: I do have one cue that, that seems to work like a charm every single time I use it and it’s really juvenile. And it’s kind of silly, but it works really well with kids. And what you have to do is you tell them, imagine like you’re trying to shoot a fart straight out behind you.

Like, as you do your hip hinge so that they squat down around their back, like the part goes into the ground. If they keep their hips up, it goes straight back and it’s worked literally every time I’ve used it. And it’s so stupid. I feel like an idiot for using it, but it works completely a hundred percent of the time.

Dan Blewett: Keep it simple, someone sharks. You’re going to get sued.

[00:21:00] Andrew Sacks: You’re a little loft in a fart before. I think

Dan Blewett: it was a very litigious society, man.

Andrew Sacks: I

Bobby Stevens: don’t know if he gets sued, but whoever cleans up the gym is going to be too happy with you.

Dan Blewett: Um,

Andrew Sacks: she makes sure you make sure you clearly, you don’t want the athlete to actually fart.

You have to imagine them to tell them to imagine. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Blewett: Got it. Got it. Um, What are some of the other difficult things that you want kids to learn as part of like their foundation? So when their training age is between like zero and one or two years, which training age, just like how many years have you been training?

So you could be, you could be 17, have a training age of one, or you could be 13, have a training age of two, or you could be 15, have a train age of five, depending on how old you’ve been, how long you’ve been at it. But what would you do for kids? What’s, what’s your foundation that you hope kids can get to?

Andrew Sacks: We want them to be able to do good guy. What squats with about 40 pounds of dumbbell weight, want them to be able to do a good hip hinge with a bar? So [00:22:00] 45 pounds? Um, I like them to be able to do good pushups. Pushups are another one that’s kind of tough sometimes. And I think part of the reason is like kids and I do push ups at a young age, but they don’t learn how to do that super well.

So you’re going to see a lot of like, back’s arching, like elbows, like flaring out to the side. That’s another one that we have to spend a little bit more time teaching usually we’ll do is we’ll and is a trick I learned from you, Dan, I think is we’ll take them and put them on like a Smith machine and just have the bar and like a certain height.

So they’re doing their pushups instead of like straight on the ground. Do the pushups at like kind of an incline. So gravity is less than effect on them. That’s going to have a piece to push up. So we want them to be able to brace their core, control their body, squeeze the glutes, tuck the elbows, retract the shoulder blades.

Like if you do a pushup correctly, there’s actually a lot of components that go into it. If you do it wrong, it’s, it’s really easy. Cause you’re not bracing your core. You’re not doing things properly. Um, but be able to do a good pushups on the floor is really important thing for athletes. I think, especially for throwing athletes, um, and to be able to do a good [00:23:00] rowing motion.

A lot of times what we’ll see is, especially in the younger athletes, when they go to row, they don’t have the ability to kind of like pull their shoulder blade back and retract. They get really like lat and tech dominant and they ended up kind of rolling their eyes up and forward, so okay. Teach them how to not do that properly.

Yeah, exactly. So we’re trying to teach them to kind of keep their shoulder blades back and retract the shoulder blades to use those trapezius muscles instead of using the last and the texture to just kind of round over. Um, so we’ll do seated rows for that. We’ll do dumbbell rows with use body rows.

Basically. It’s like an inverted row where you have the athlete kind of hanging upside down and they just kind of wrote their body up. So usually what we’ll do in the first couple of sessions is we’ll program in. The body Rose and programming, the pushups, the goblet squat, and the hip hinge. And we just keep working on those for, uh, until they get really good at them.

Then we’ll start branching out into other things. If an athlete doesn’t have the body control to do 10 good pushups, 10 good body rows, like they’re not going to have the body control to do a lot of the [00:24:00] more advanced stuff that we need them to do.

Dan Blewett: Yeah. And the thing with pushups is. Like the knee pushup, which obviously it shortens the lever.

So it seems like a good way to reduce weight, but it’s like humiliating to both boys and girls. Like girls don’t want to be doing girl pushups. You know, if they’re in the weight room, they’re like trying to get strong and they have goals. And boys certainly don’t want to be doing quote unquote, you know, the knee, the knee pushups, which some people call it, girl pushups.

So just putting them on the Smith machine or where their hands are on a bench or a box, or they can do them in their house, you know, with their hands on their countertop. It’s just like, it’s a full pushup, but just is like less humiliating. So I think that’s a good way to do it. Cause there’s always like the kids want to feel like they’re doing good things, right?

Like there,

Andrew Sacks: there’s not that stigma of it being like a girl pushup. You don’t see anybody get embarrassed by doing pushups on a bench, on a Smith machine. Now, if you tell them, you know, their needs and do pushup,

Dan Blewett: yeah.

Andrew Sacks: They want to do that. And ultimately like you want people to be comfortable in your jam.

You want them to do it. Enjoy being [00:25:00] there. If you’re, if you’re feeling embarrassed, cause what you’re making them do, then they’re not going to have a good time because it’s not going to work for you.

Dan Blewett: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a, it’s really interesting how. Especially with, especially with girls, like for us, with like female athletes, one of our big goals was just getting to do good pushups on the floor.

Cause that’s much more rare than I think parents realize, like not many girls can do good pushups on the ground with good form without like the, you know, like the eyeball pushups and then to be able to get a good chin up, which takes much, much longer. But those are really big milestones for, especially for female athletes and for a lot of boys too.

So, um, As far as, so let’s talk about some controversial stuff. So I love how fads come and go. And some trainers and especially some kind of outsiders in the industry, you know, there’s this big dark star company that a couple of years ago, all their videos were like, look how much we’re dead lifting.

We’re so tough. [00:26:00] Look, how much were bench pressing? Like we’re so tough. Pitchers can bench press. And it was like the sloppiest deadlifts with super round backs guys, like doing awful form. That’s going to come back to haunt them. At some point when they have a slipped disc and bench pressing is just like, is that really necessary?

There’s a million different ways to push. You could do dumbbell bench press. You could do incline bench, press, you get a different, there’s lots of different things where it just seemed like undue stress. So where do you fall on, uh, some of these fads that have you’ve maybe seen come and go over the last five years in training?

Andrew Sacks: Well, um,

Dan Blewett: cause a lot of that stuff faded away that I was mentioning, I was like, this is dumb. I know this is dumb because I’ve lived it both as a player and a coach it’s going to go away and sure enough, it just like, it just like quietly slipped out. Like yeah. It’s like,

Bobby Stevens: exactly. Are we talking CrossFit?

Dan Blewett: No.

Bobby Stevens: That’s what, [00:27:00] that’s the fat, that’s the immediate fat now that I think it’s like a fag, cause it’s still around, but

Dan Blewett: no, everyone that’s a big, favorite way to ball baseball company.

Andrew Sacks: Uh, so I think when it comes like lifting weights, like yes, like dead lift is going to be really important. I don’t think that’s ever going to go away.

Like that’s not a fad. Um, the thing with bench pressing, I think maybe was like an overcorrection. Based on a lot of what people were hearing from like other really prominent baseball trainers and physical therapists and doctors where I was saying like, don’t do this, it’s dangerous. And I think anytime that you get somebody with a strong viewpoint that has a lot of followers, there’s always going to be somebody who is going to take the devil’s advocate position.

They’re going to push the other way. Um, I don’t think that doing barbell bench press is that beneficial for baseball player. I think you can get a lot. I think you get the exact same stimulus out of doing like a [00:28:00] single arm dumbbell bench press, or even just a regular dumbbell bench press, but you can get a little bit more range of motion.

You get a little bit more like rotator cuff stabilization out of it. Potentially if you do a single arm dumbbell bench press, you have like the added challenge of like anti rotational course ability. So the bench resting, I think probably is going to die out at some point, just because not because it’s a fairly dangerous, because maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, I don’t know.

I haven’t really seen any research to show either way. I’ve heard lots of anecdotal evidence

Dan Blewett: being dangerous

Andrew Sacks: and a lot of times it’s been stigmatized. Yeah, for sure. Um, But I, I just, I just don’t know if it benefits baseball players that much where like you need to include it. So I think you have to like avoid it at all costs.

Maybe, maybe not. I think it depends on individual differences in the athlete. I think it depends on. Shoulder range of motion. I think it depends on rotator cuff stability and it’s like, anything else, like I [00:29:00] don’t like to throw blanket statements on anything. I think most things in the training world can be applicable and they can be useful to the right athlete.

They can also be really damaging and really harmful to the wrong athlete. So saying all pitches should bench press to me is silly saying no pitchers should ever bend for us to me is also silly. But I think for me, I’m a, I always want to err on the side of caution. So to me like doing a dumbbell bench press seems, I’ve always felt more comfortable with my shoulders being here with my hands, kind of like turned in versus being here.

So I’ve heard a lot of stories of powerlifters messing up their shoulders from benching. Does that mean it’s going to happen to a baseball player? Not necessarily, but at a certain point you have to wonder like, is, is the benefit worth the inherent risk that we, that we think they are that we think there is?

Dan Blewett: Well, and it’s all just goes back to having it’s like, look, we have how many different variations of a pushing exercise do we have? Like 20, 30, like so many. [00:30:00] So it’s like, why do we have to use this one? Then that’s the big thing. It’s like, they’re all just different tools. And that was something that I learned early on in one of my internships when I was in college is like, Because I remember we, you know, I worked with this guy, Nick Tuenello, who’s a very prominent, uh, fitness coach.

He was a longtime personal trainer. He still is a personal trainer is mostly an educator. So he speaks at tons and tons of conferences around the world, you know, you know, Nick. Um, and when I was entering for him, he had this old elderly couple, one of which, uh, the wife, she had, I think two hip replacements and the husband had a frozen shoulder and at least one new year placement.

So I was watching them work out. And I was like, Nick, I’m like, like, what is like, tell me about the older guy. So he was doing a landmine press, which is you have an angled barbell, like the barbell, you take a 45 pound, an Olympic full-size barbell. You put one edge of it or end of it in the corner. And then it goes up and down.

You can push it at an angle. So a normal landmine press looks like this. Like you’re punching upward [00:31:00] kind of. And this guy, his arm was pretty much locked out. He was just kinda like wiggling his body like this. And I was like, Nick, um, I’m like, what’s, what’s up with him? Like, shouldn’t he use more range of motion?

He’s like, yeah. He’s a frozen shoulder. He’s like, so look like when you, I have limitations or you’re an athlete and you have things that you’re maybe trying to avoid. He’s like exercise just looks different to different people. He’s like, this is a 75 year old man. Who’s here can like, like clockwork twice a week.

He’s got limitations. His wife has limitations. This is, this is what a press looks like to him. So he’s moving his body. He’s getting some blood flow through his shoulder. He’s holding weight. Yeah. His arm, that’s going through his joints. He’s like, this is the best you can do. And it, and it’s good for him.

It’s better than not doing it. It’s and there’s other things that they do with them. Like that was the only, not the only pushing exercise, but it was just an example of the fact that there’s just different tools for different people. And being flexible and what good training looks [00:32:00] like is really important.

So that was a lesson that always stuck with me. And that’s why when people like, Oh, you gotta do this. Like screw you. You’re an idiot. No, you don’t like, and when you see something that looks like, ah, it might be a little, but too high on the risk reward scale, like doing these insane 600 pound round back deadlifts for baseball pitchers, like, do you really need to be doing that?

Are you really getting an extra, whatever pitching performance on the field from doing a absolute max effort, grinding, terrible form deadlift. No. Are you getting some good, good. Are you getting some benefit learning how to deadlift properly and then maybe getting to like 400 pounds, maybe 500 with good form.

Sure. But then there’s also diminishing returns. Like, do you, do you see, say you have a guy like me come in. I’m like 28 years old. I’m pretty like I have a long training age. I’m like eight and I’m like a 450 pound deadlift. Or do you need me to get to 550 pounds to be a better pitcher?

Andrew Sacks: No, no, no, no, no, no.

Dan Blewett: Yeah. There’s

Andrew Sacks: a, yeah. [00:33:00] Diminishing returns. So if I can take a guy, a baseball pitcher, like you said, and he deadlifts 450 pounds, like, is he really going to benefit from dead lifting 500? Like. Probably not. Yeah. His time would probably be better spent taking that strength and learning to apply it really quickly.

Like we talked about before. So it just kind of comes down to identifying what are people’s weak points. And I would argue that if you can deadlift 450 pounds, that’s probably not a weak point for you. So

Dan Blewett: it’s just

Andrew Sacks: that, there’s just no point to that.

Dan Blewett: Well, I think the problem nowadays is sorry, Bobby, because y’all all feel like, I mean, when you’ve lifted for a while, like 450 pound, Della is not that heavy, you know, and it’s, it’s relative to everyone else.

So like if you’re a division one athlete and you’re a junior senior, four 50 pound deadlift is pretty ordinary compared to the regular population. Like I go to a local gym. Very few people. There could Delo four 50 pounds, even though this is a CrossFit gym that I go to and I, I don’t do CrossFit. I just use it an open gym, but even they’re like not the main people [00:34:00] could do four 50, but in the athlete world, that’s pretty commonplace.

Then you’re like, well, if I want to be great, I should deadlift 600. It’s like, but, but now, cause there’s still just like, you just don’t know what’s going on either. Like how much force going through your elbows is bad for your elbows at some point, right? I mean, like powerlifters are pretty banged up people.

They’re not like the healthiest population. Even though they’re really strong, but anyway, I’m sorry, Bob, go ahead.

Bobby Stevens: I was going to say how much as to two trainers, you know, how much stock do you put into what an athlete and I have an anecdote to go with this. What an AF what makes an athlete feel good versus like the risk reward of maybe that exercise?

So my example

Dan Blewett: is,

Bobby Stevens: uh, I always worked out with a kid who his bench press needed to be. I forget the certain weight. He like, he needed to be able to rep, you know, five times, three 15. And we were both baseball players. Like my big exercise was always leg press. So like, if I, if my leg press wasn’t X weight, whether it was beneficial to me or [00:35:00] not performing on the field, confidence wise, I felt like I wasn’t strong.

And for him it was the bench press. So somebody walks in like, dang, and he’s like, look, I always dead lift 500 pounds. And Andrew you’re like, well, you’re dead lift 50 now. Like maybe we don’t need to focus on that. But how much of the account do you take into maybe like that’s like Dan needs that extra 50 pounds on his deadlifts to perform mentally as

Dan Blewett: being secure?

Yeah, we’ll see. Yeah. I mean,

Bobby Stevens: that’s, I feel like that’s a real thing. Like confidence is a real thing as far as strength wise. I mean, even in like currently, now I’m not training as a. Professional athlete anymore, but I feel weak if I can, if I don’t do exercises the same way I had, I could have done, even if I’m not necessarily overall weak, I still feel weak personally.

So like how much stock do you take in like an athlete’s psyche? Uh, even if that exercise maybe is bench press and you disagree with, uh, you know, the risk reward factor.

Dan Blewett: That’s a good question.

[00:36:00] Andrew Sacks: Yeah. I think. Yeah, that’s a tough one. Cause there’s definitely things that athletes sometimes want to do. Um, that I don’t know.

No, it’s going to be beneficial for them, but like you said, like they kind of need that site. Yeah.  I guess bumped of like being, do whatever it is. Like they think they need. So it kind of comes down to, and then kind of balancing what you want to do as a trainer and what the athlete wants to do or what the client wants to do, because most ultimately, if a client comes to you and you tell them, I know you like to do this and that, and I’m going to take away this and that.

So you can’t do anything you’d like to do, and you’re gonna do what I want all the time. If they’re not, they’re probably not going to listen to you and they’re not going to like it. So. It kind of comes down to, you can have to play like a give and take game. Like I have one athlete that I train and he’s really into using like a bunch of different gadgets.

So he has a bunch of different like pitching AIDS, um, like recovery tools, things like that. And some of it, like, I don’t necessarily think is going to help him. So I, and [00:37:00] I’ll tell him that I’ll say, look, I don’t think this is going to help with this problem. You’re trying to fix. But if you want to use it, like, go ahead.

Like if it makes you feel good and as long as it’s not taking time away, From something else that we need to do that is going to help you get better. In my opinion, like, I’m, I’m fine with it. Like if you want to use a, some kind of fancy recovery gun, like, I don’t think it’s gonna up your cover that much, but if you feel good and it’s going to help you perform in the weight room and perform in the field, I’d be AMI and have at it.

So I think it comes down to like being upfront with people and being honest about like what you think is going to be good for them versus what you think is not going to be helpful, but also. Just, just let them kind of do their thing a little bit, as long as it’s not like having a detrimental effect.

Like if somebody came in and they insisted that they had to squat 500 pounds, but they couldn’t squat with like good form, I would say, well, I understand. Yeah, I understand what you want to do. And I know it’s going to make you feel good. Good. But if you keep squatting with this bad form and keep going up, then what you’re gonna get hurt.

So [00:38:00] why don’t we like we’ll make a compromise, like we’ll work on your squat, but you gotta work with me. I’ll I’m going to reduce your weight. We’re going to fix your form. Then we’ll kind of go from there. So thanks. Sometimes you just have to compromise with athletes and just let them do what they think they need to do.

So they feel good and they don’t get mad at you for taking away what they like while also explaining what you want to do and why it’s good for them. I think if you can make a strong case for what you want to do and you know what you’re talking about and you have evidence to back you up and the athlete trusts you, then, then they’ll listen to you.

Dan Blewett: Yeah. And I’ll kind of mirror that, um, Answering the question with myself is that I can’t remember who told me it over the years, but someone was like, look, it’s just like, like cheat meals. You know, if you’re doing the right things most of the time, and your guy like wants to do some bicep curls, the end of his workout, like on Fridays, like as a coach, it’s like, let them do it.

Like, if that makes him happy and he’s like, it’s like, you know, your kid eats his brussel sprouts. So he gets to have dessert. You know, it’s like our three sets of bicep curls, or who does a couple of bench presses at the [00:39:00] end of the week, because he likes doing with his buddies and he’s had a good week of training.

Like, is that going to change like his body? And like, no. Right. And so that’s kind of the same thing. I can’t, again, I can’t remember who told me that over the years, but I always thought, yeah, that makes sense. Like, so yeah, they want to have like little garbage time, just like do things like, and that makes them excited to be that’s all right.

You know, even for me today, like I have to fight. To get out of my own mindset. Like I’ve always trained like an athlete and now I’m not an athlete and I’m just trying to not hate training. So I like do a little bit of bicep curls at the end. I’ll do a little bit of like forum girls, just like a little bit of like glamour work.

Cause I never did as a player. And so like, I can do this. Like, why not? It’s like easy to like bicep curls for people who don’t know the reason I was doing by some girls at the gym is cause they’re easy and they’re visible. It’s so easy to do by some girls it’s so easy. Like your heart rate doesn’t go up.

It’s just like, man. And you take that for granted. And like how much of that peripheral [00:40:00] stuff is just like shoulder raises. I mean they burn and stuff, but like, they’re just like, they don’t have the same effect on your body. Yeah.

Andrew Sacks: And extremely boring. Yeah.

Dan Blewett: Yeah,

Bobby Stevens: well, the biceps like mom’s biceps. I mean, you feel that the most after you do a set of three and you look in the mirror, like you feel like you get the pump in the quote unquote pump, you feel like you’re flexing, even when you’re

Andrew Sacks: not

Bobby Stevens: like it’s hard to get that in your legs.

Like, it’s, it’s hard to get that feeling in your back. It’s hard. It’s harder to get it in your chest. And it like, the bicep probably is the easiest in my amateur opinion. So just feel that pump. So plus like Dan, you said like, it’s the first thing someone notices when you walk up his arms, like they don’t notice like, man, this guy’s got.

This guy’s got great

Dan Blewett: quads. And the second, the second thing you notice is that they don’t have any lower body. And then you’re like, Oh, this guy is a loser, but I have plenty of lower [00:41:00] half, so I can do my biceps all I want and not feel and not look at a place. So anyway,

Andrew Sacks: what I want to, how much you can swap these days.

Dan Blewett: Uh, I’m still not, well, I think I told you the day I did two 85 front squat for three or two 75, I think I did two 85 or something for like three. And then I did two 75 back squat, first, five or six. And that was after. I mean, I’m on like week 10 of not having lifted for three years, essentially, but I still just hate

Andrew Sacks: amazingly how quick your strength comes back.

Isn’t it.

Dan Blewett: Well, I put on 10 pounds too, just recently. Like my, my sister, I saw her a couple of times recently. And, uh, she was like, you look a lot more muscular than you were. And this is just like me going from like completely deflated to like, back to like almost high school level too. Just like bumping up.

And then there’s like another level where another five or 10 pounds I’ll be back to like how [00:42:00] I looked when I was playing, I guess. But my, I have just like, it’s different, but I like put on weight super fast. So. No, no, no same. Oh man. Strength. The old man’s strength is very real. And also just like the lessons you learn, like, like people take for granted that the fact that part of the reason that I could just like throw two 75, which is again, is not a heavyweight, like for me thinking like, Oh two 75, like it’s not a good weight.

It’s a good way for the general population, but not, not for me. Two 75 was like a 25 rep back in the day. Um, but you take for granted how much, the reason a person could just like. Not have trained for a long time and just like throw more than their body weight on their back for a bunch. Is because your back has like some residual, like thickness and size to it.

You learn how to brace your core very well. Like you have good form. You learn how to use your diaphragm. Like you, you know, you just like, know all these technique, things that someone doesn’t have that technique. They, they are like 70 pounds less on the bar because they just like their body’s like, no, let’s not, let’s not do this.

You know what I [00:43:00] mean? So you don’t, you take for granted how much the bracing and all that stuff in squatting is important.

I’ve got,

Bobby Stevens: I’ve got another question. Cause I’m the amateur lifting guy here. So do you see a difference in kids that play multiple sports in the, at the younger level and their strength? Or is there any correlation with that? Cause my question stems from, we’ve got a few hockey players in my program and they seem to be significantly stronger at their relative age than the rest of the kids.

And this gets up to. They basically before kids started things. So basically like that preteen, you know, the 12 and under like the kids that are hockey players are significantly stronger. Do you find that as well? Like the kids that do some of that, like, like wrestle or gymnastics or anything, do you notice the strength difference and maybe just the basketball, baseball players that

Andrew Sacks: come in.

Wrestling and gymnastics. [00:44:00] Absolutely. Um, we just started training a 12 youth softball team and one of the girls on the team, uh, she has been wrestling for several years now and her strength levels compared to the rest of the team in her moving patterns are just way, way better, like way better core control.

She can do good pushups on the ground. She can do front squats, which is better than. I don’t know, probably 90% of 11 year old girls. Um, I think it kind of depends on like what the sport is, who the kids are playing like soccer, basketball, baseball. I don’t think you get the same kind of training stimulus that you would get from a sport like gymnastics or from wrestling where body control is like a really important part of both of those sports and the, like, you have to really strong to do them.

Like you can play soccer without being real strong. You can play basketball without being real strong. Um, Ultimately, I think that there’s not much of a difference between the multi-sport athletes and like the single, the single sport athletes, strength wise, [00:45:00] unless they’re doing a sport like wrestling or like Brazilian jujitsu or something like that.

But that’s that kind of stuff really seems to make a big difference for sure.

Bobby Stevens: Yeah. Hockey’s always the one that sticks out to me and I. You know, and being someone who’s been on the ice before, well, I mean, controlling yourself on skates, like the core strength. Yeah. They have having a stick in your hands.

Like it’s definitely physical sport, more so than, you know, swinging a bat or shooting free throws or anything like that. Yeah. Yeah. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cut you off.

Andrew Sacks: Yeah, just, just the gluten, the quad strain you build for skating around. Like that is probably tremendous, especially like hip abductors.

And that’s an area of weakness. We’ve seen a lot of young athletes, but if you’re skating around, like pushing out with your feet on every step, but you’ve got to have incredibly strong glutes and quads

Dan Blewett: and you’re under tension the whole time. Like you’re constantly, it’s almost like you’re like in a squat, like kind of the whole time.

Andrew Sacks: Exactly. Yeah. And if you look at like Olympic speed skaters, like those people’s legs are [00:46:00] massive. Just ginormous. So yeah, I would say speed skating hockey would be a sport you could definitely benefit from if you’re looking to build like lower body strength and core stability. Absolutely.

Dan Blewett: Yeah, go play hockey.

Andrew Sacks: Do you, I

Bobby Stevens: mean, my question just stems from the, I hate hearing, like, Oh, we want to keep, you know, we want to keep him multiple sports. He’s a multi-sport athlete. It’s like, that’s not what you think it is. Like kids that are super athletes that Excel at multiple sports are just better. Genetically than your son.

Probably like if your son wants to be the best baseball player, like it’s helping, he’s not going to go out and play for sports and all of a sudden be better at baseball because of it. Like, especially if he’s not genetically like a better athlete, then all these other kids, like he should focus, he should try and maximize in one sport as opposed to just spreading himself.

Then. But you do, but I, at least I see it and I don’t train kids and that in the gym essentially, but I see it in their performance, on the field, [00:47:00] based on the baseball field. If they’ve got a background in a sport where they have to use their body and it’s physically demanding, I mean, gymnastics sticks out to me cause we had a high school kid who has never, like, he’s never been in the weight room and I shook his hand.

And I mean, you could just tell the strength, he’s gotten his forearms. From moving his body around. I mean, it’s been in the gym, essentially working out his sport is a workout and a two hour long workout.

Andrew Sacks: Yeah. I think with the whole, like, Like playing multiple sports, like special specialization thing. I think like getting at, or getting kids into a lot of sports when they’re younger, especially between the ages of say like seven to like 12, 13, it definitely helps them learn different movement patterns.

It helps them not always be doing the same thing, especially with baseball where you really don’t want kids throwing year, round year after year. It’s good to have a different stimulus for your body. I think once you get to a certain age, I think once you reach like skeletal [00:48:00] maturity, I think any of the like neurological improvements you’re going to have from playing multiple sports year round, you’re probably not going to get that once you’re like late into your high school career.

So for young athletes, I think playing multiple sports is really important. And plus it’s just fun. It gives them a chance, like play different things to find out what they like to do. But once you get to high school, I think people get so caught up in like, Oh, like we need to be like multiple sport athletes, like college coaches.

They all want multiple sports athletes, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily the case. Um, and I talk about that. It’s a lot, like I said, I don’t like to make blanket statements so many times somebody says everyone should do this, or everyone should do that. Like a little like kind of red flag pops up for me.

But like you say, like there’s definitely athletes that like maybe if you’re a sophomore or a junior in high school, And like, you know, that you want to play baseball at the next level, but your baseball skills, aren’t where they need to be to get you to that next level. Like maybe it’s time to have a hard conversation with your parents and decide, Hey, I’m not going to play basketball this [00:49:00] winter.

Cause I want to play college baseball. So I’m going to focus on getting better for baseball for this spring. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think the problem is if parents push the kids into doing one sport all the time, That’s a huge problem. I think parents forcing their kids to play multiple sports all the time can also be a problem.

And I think it could just kind of comes down to like, what is the end goal? Like, are you doing this? Cause you want your kid to, like, you want to live vicariously through your kid or you think it’s really, what’s going to be best for them the longterm. So

Dan Blewett: that’s the

Andrew Sacks: conversation I have with parents sometimes, and it’s not always comfortable.

Um, But I think it is important to kind of have that in mind as you’re advising somebody on whether to play multiple sports or focus on one the age and the end goal and kind of where they’re at current.

Dan Blewett: Yeah. It’s, it’s a shame that the stories that people like Aaron judge are what fuel multiple sport.

Like it’s almost like propaganda, like, Oh, Aaron judge played three sports. Great it’s cause [00:50:00] he was like, yeah, he was a grown man when he was 15. And like that’s where developmental age comes into it. Like you talk about someone like Aaron judge, who was probably a monster throughout his. Just life. Right?

When he was a 12 year old, he was probably the size of 15 year old when he was 15. He was probably the size of an 18 year old when he was 17. He was probably the size of a 22 year old, you know? And then when he, and obviously today he’s like the size of like Thor, some giant person. So yeah, he can play three sports.

He can maybe be less skilled at all of them because he’s just physically dominant compared to everyone else. And he can, you know, you can pick up baseball and. Just seasonally and just be great at it. Like that’s. Yeah. And then someone like Bryce Harper probably could have played three sports too. Like, and just like been totally fine, but I only played one sport because, well, I mean, I was like, I’m athletic compared to other people, but I’m not compared athletic compared to either of you or like other pro athletes, but I just play one sport.

Cause I that’s all I liked. I didn’t, I had no desire to really play other [00:51:00] sports, which was also totally fine. Maybe exposes you to more injury, but like I played soccer until I was 14. Maybe I played tennis until I was 14 or 15. And then in high school, I was like, I’m done with all that. I’m not playing tennis during the spring, playing baseball, get out of here.

Smelly 10 tennis, tennis nerds. Get out of here.

Bobby Stevens: It kind of has to line up with your goals too, right? Like if you’ve got kids that are like, Oh, I want to play college baseball. Okay. Well you’re, you’re not there yet. And you’re not physically dominance at baseball. So focusing. Yeah. You have to go for broke.

Like you’re not. Just playing basketball and football and the two of them seasons isn’t gonna make any better at baseball at this point. Like these kids that are also as good as you are only playing baseball. Well, I mean, there’s, multi-sport is great. If you’re just a kid that wants to play sports in high school and wants to go to college for academics.

If you’re a kid who has goals, I mean, your, your goals. We talked about this in a previous show. Dan are just talking to a kid that I have in my program, like your [00:52:00] goals and what you’re doing to meet those goals are not lining up. Like they need to line up if you’re going to make it to the next level or whatever.

Dan Blewett: Yeah. So let’s talk about that real quick. Before we transition to some research stuff. So. Uh, say kids need to put on weight. Like they’re just, they need to get to 170 pounds probably before, like recruiting is like a serious thing for them. So, uh, what are some of the off seasons sports that are very counter to that?

Uh, I mean, these are somewhat obvious, but talk through it. And then what are some of the things that kids need to do to really be serious about putting on weight?

Andrew Sacks: Uh, biggest the sport that has probably the most negative effect on putting on weight. It’s going to be cross country. Um, any sport where you’re continuously moving around at a slow speed is not going to be good for muscle building, and it’s not going to be good for.

Building speed and explosiveness. Um, yeah, I’ve trained a fair amount of kids who like, they played baseball as their main sport. Uh, but then in the off season, they’re [00:53:00] doing cross country or they’re doing long distance swimming and I just kept the kind of what’s that my

Dan Blewett: basketball,

Andrew Sacks: um,

Dan Blewett: a lot of running,

Andrew Sacks: that’s what it was a lot of running, but it’s not nearly as much as you might think.

A lot of basketball is actually just kinda like standing around. That’s the same as stocker. Like I think Mike Boyle posted something about how, like, when you’re playing soccer, you’re sprinting for like, not very much time you’re jogging for actually a little bit of time. By the time you just kind of standing around, waiting for a player to pass you the ball.

So I don’t think basketball is necessarily a sport you have to avoid if you’re trying to get big or getting it get explosive. Um, but things where you’re, you’re moving at a low intensity and you’re moving slowly for a long time cross country and swimming. I think I’m probably going to be the two ones.

They’re going to be least beneficial and the most detrimental. But yeah, I have a couple of kids that come in and they tell me they run Costco. They run cross country, like get in shape for baseball. And they’re always pitchers. Cause they’ve [00:54:00] always heard that running long distance is good for pitching, which I, I don’t think I agree with that.

Especially if you’re running like multiple miles every single day. I don’t think that’s a good idea. So that’s a situation where I’ll have to sit down with the parents and the kid and explain, look like if you want to get bigger, you want to get stronger. You want to throw harder, like you may want to think about not doing cross country anymore.

And if they love it, like we talked about earlier, Bobby, like it’s something they love. I’m certainly not going to discourage them from doing it. Tell them they can’t do it. But my job is like kind of lay out the risks and the rewards of either outcome that you keep doing it. This is what’s going to happen.

You stop. This is what we can do. Um, it’d be equity.

Dan Blewett: I’m going to push back against basketball. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s still calories in calories out. And basketball practices are pretty grueling. I mean, you got a kid that wants to put on weight. I mean, would you advise him that he should run suicides for 45 minutes and that’s what’s happening in basketball practice a lot.

I mean, I struggled with that in the Midwest. Cause it’s back at, [00:55:00] or we were, kids could make three sports, like schools weren’t good enough. So they could play basketball, you know, they’re like five, seven. And they just like, couldn’t put on weight that way. Like they were just like basketball practices, five, six days a week.

We’re pretty tough. Lots and lots of baseline to baseline. Um, and I don’t know, we, we had a tough time helping kids put on weight that way, but you ask about

Bobby Stevens: a lot of conditioning in itself, but it’s also

Dan Blewett: agree that the sport itself, you can just be. Stan, there’s also the jumpers,

Andrew Sacks: but

Bobby Stevens: the, um, like what, uh, what the next question Dan asked you is like the blueprint of putting on weight, like their blueprint for putting on weight.

I’m sure these kids are waking up, going to school, not eating, you know, eating at lunch time, school ends and you go right to basketball practice and you eat at six o’clock. Like, that’s not really a blueprint to put on weight in general, where you’ve only had one meal from seven in the morning to six o’clock at night.

When then these kids were like, [00:56:00] well, I’m eating a lot in my one meal. Okay. Well, that’s not like, I guess the question is, you know, what’s the blueprint to put on weight. If a kid needs to put on 20 pounds from September 15th to March 1st to start off as normal baseball high school baseball season, what’s the blueprint to put on 20 to 25 pounds, uh, in an off season.

Andrew Sacks: The blueprint is mainly consistency. Um, one of the first things that we do with athletes when they come to train is, uh, I have like a, um, I have a spreadsheet that I put together, my computer, I can enter in their, their body weight, their age, their activity levels, all kinds of stuff. And it gives me a rough estimate of how many calories they burned per day, uh, called their total energy expenditure or their, um, Basal metabolic rate.

Uh, and then from there we can figure out, okay, if you want to gain X amount of weight between now and this time period, you have to gain X amount of pounds per week. So we know that if you want to gain one [00:57:00] pound a week, the rule of thumb is you want to have a Keller caloric surplus of 3,500 calories per week.

So that’s basically 500 calories a day. Of eating more calories, 500 more calories than you expend. Um, so for a lot of the kids, it just kind of comes down to having good habits and eating breakfast consistently eating lunch, consistently eating dinner consistently. And then what we’ll do is we’ll have them use an app where they can kind of track their food intake and over record their calories, protein, carbohydrates, fat.

Every, basically everything. And I can kind of look at that and I can see, okay, well you’re not getting the correct amount of calories. You’re not getting enough protein, whatever it is. And I can make suggestions on how to like what they can add to their diet. So when you’re a trainer, Or a strength coach.

You can’t really, you can’t right. Prescribe a diet for people, but that’s only something that nutritionists and dieticians can do. That’s not really in our scope of practice, but what we can do is we can estimate like how many calories people should eat per day and give them [00:58:00] suggestions on how to get there.

One of my most common things that I tell kids. If you’re trying, if you’re struggling to gain weight, it’s just carry around a big bag of trail mix with you. Cause again, a little handful of trail mix is about 250 calories. So even if you’re not having a great day eating, like maybe you’d miss breakfast at like five, 10 handfuls of trail mix, as you’re walking around between your, between lockers, uh, like during school.

And I just made those calories up. So it just kind of comes down to being, being consistent and actually like following through what you want to do. And like it’s an argument that I have with kids. Not frequently, but enough that it’s not infrequent where they just don’t want to wake up early and eat breakfast, then that’s you just gotta do it like that.

That’s all there is to it. Like if you want to get to that next level, you have to do it. And some kids will and some kids won’t, but at the end of the day, all you can really do is you can give them, like you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it true. Basically is what I’m saying. You can give them the tools to help themselves, [00:59:00] but ultimately it’s going to come down to whether or not the athlete.

Actually follows through on the advice that you give them. So it’s kind of out of your hands and in a certain sense,

Bobby Stevens: I think the misconception, how many calories you’re actually taking in

Dan Blewett: like

Bobby Stevens: actual calories versus perceived calories? Cause the kids, you know, kids are always like, well, I, you know, I had two chicken breasts at dinner and I had the vegetables.

It’s like, that’s not like when I say eats to a kid, I’m like, you need to eat a lot. I’m like, you need to eat until you’re full. And then eat a little bit more. Like

Dan Blewett: they need to almost

Andrew Sacks: feel, yeah,

Bobby Stevens: you need to feel like it needs to be uncomfortable and you need to consist, like if you’re hungry, probably waited too long

Dan Blewett: to eat.

Bobby Stevens: Like you almost need to, like, we use trail mix as an example. What I always tell kids, I’m like, look, take a whole loaf of bread, pull it out, make a bunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and then put it back in the bag and try and use it throughout the day. Try and finish it. I mean, I know it’s a lot and [01:00:00] it’s over.

If the goal is so far past, like probably what they should be doing, but you need to try and like, you know, finished two of those bags a week, or just add calories to your diet. Cause you’re probably not getting enough. And the amount of time that you go in between meals is a lot more new things. Like you’re not eating every other hour.

You’re eating like every five hours and kids do a lot. I mean, they don’t realize how much they’re burning. In school at practice. I mean, they’re moving around constantly. They’re having a high metabolism in general. Cause they’re younger. I mean, I’m not a nutritionist by any stretch, but I know that they’re moving around a lot and they’re burning a lot of calories.

Andrew Sacks: I think one of the most annoying things is that. Like the daily recommended calorie intake for a person is 2000 calories. So when I asked that, it’s like, how’s your, how’s your nutrition? Like, are you eating a lot? And like, Oh yeah, like I eat like 2,500 calories a day. That’s not anywhere near what you need.

Like, if you’re, if you’re [01:01:00] an athlete practicing five times a week, you’re probably going to need 4,000 calories depending on your body weight. But yeah. Where did that 2000 come from for just somebody who’s sedentary and does nothing. Well,

Dan Blewett: I love beautifully round numbers, like a hundred miles per hour is like the cutoff for throwing a baseball.

Why? You know, a hundred pitches pitch count why anytime there’s a beautifully round number it’s that you can know. It’s just arbitrary. And, you know, maybe there was science that said it was like 97 or 1900 calories. It’s like, let’s just make it around, like, okay. But there’s rarely. Yeah. Just like it smells fishy.

But yeah, I had the guy, this guy, John Berardi who owns the company, precision nutrition. Who’s a really great, I’m a nutritionist, uh, in like the sports nutrition area. But anyway, he, one of his stories when he was in college, she was like 125 pound freshman. He’s like, I’m tired of being this little scrawny.

You know, piece of crap. So he, he said his, and he was a bodybuilder, like on stage, like 170 [01:02:00] pounds a couple of years later. And he had an article. I don’t think it’s still on the web anymore, but I remember reading it when I was in college. And he said, what I did was when I was in college, I took every morning, six, a bag of six bagels, cut them in half.

Put peanut butter on, you know, between each one of them, which a bagels like 250 calories, typically, something like that. So that’s 1500 food. Yeah. 1500 calories. Plus the peanut butter. It’s like a 2000 calorie bag right there. And he’s like a jug of water, the gallon jug with like six scoops of protein in it.

And he said, my motto was that if I wasn’t chewing, I wasn’t growing. So he was just in class, just like. Sad eating peanut butter bagels and just like sipping protein. And he gained like 80 pounds over like a two year period and then cut down to whatever he went on stage at. But I mean, lifting really heavy and really, really hard while doing that is going to get results doing that, obviously without all that it’s going to make you just very obese.

But, um, but it does it, I mean, people don’t realize that. And this is what I’ve told [01:03:00] kids before, as well as like, say the difference between your signing bonus. Is a hundred thousand or a million. If you put on 20 pounds, could you do it? And they’re like, yup. I’m like, yeah, well, you don’t have that mindset today because you’re soft.

So either you want to put away either you, either you want to put on weight or you don’t, it’s like part of your job or it’s not. So they probably can’t do

Bobby Stevens: it. They pro they don’t,

Dan Blewett: they don’t have mentally,

Bobby Stevens: mentally, they don’t know how to put on that weight. Like I remember telling you gained weight in high school and it was.

I mean, like weighing myself every single day, like literally every day, morning and night. And if I lost just a little, it was, it was like, Oh my God. Yeah. I just wasted a day. And if I gained a little bit, it’s like, okay, this was a great day.

Dan Blewett: Well, and that’s a bad thing to do mentally because I mean, you go to the bathroom, you piss out a pound and a half every time he goes bathroom, you know what I mean?

So it’s like, I never watched away. You fluctuate a lot. Yeah. Classic view, or just go in your pants and then it stays on your body. [01:04:00] That’s right. Yeah. Body weight then. Yeah. You get credit for all of it.

Bobby Stevens: Yeah.

Dan Blewett: So let’s transition to, uh, research a little bit cause you and I I’ve at R R ire. Yeah. Some of the stuff that gets posted on the web, a lot of there’s just lots and lots of bad research because today everyone wants to be a researcher.

Like you’re a pitching guy. It’s like, Oh, here’s my research. I like to use the modus leave and I did this and it’s search. Right. Um, whereas real research is. Hard to do requires peer review requires a lot of, uh, knowledge. So you and I were complaining about a, like kind of study released by Tom house and one of his buddies at the NPA.

And it was honestly just junk. You want to take us through it a little

Andrew Sacks: bit? Sure. Um, yeah, I think that number one, doing, doing research is not the same as gathering data. Correct. Um, so I think when people say like I’ve been doing research, like. Not, not really, you you’ve been gathering data, but that’s not what, [01:05:00] what research really is.

Um, so basically this is kind of a long walk, but I didn’t take you back through this. So I was seeing a line a lot recently that like when you pitch, you should have your back foot in contact with the ground at ball release. Because what they’re saying is you want to have connection with the ground.

With your back foot. For what reason? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s like a stability thing, but I started wondering like, like, why is that? Like, why do people want that back for it on the ground? So I like just went back and like read some like research studies. About like, um, like ground reaction force on the back foot and the front foot, and like how much pressure is on the ground.

On the brat, on the back foot, watch a lot of videos of different pitchers pitching. And what I noticed was that a lot of baseball pitchers don’t have their foot on the ground. Man, they’ll be pitchers. Don’t have their foot on the ground at ball release and they’re successful. It’s like Justin Verlander, uh, Navy of all the, uh, Chris sail.

They don’t have their foot on the ground at ball release. Um, and the teachers that did. Like their foot was like [01:06:00] up on the toe and just like kind of dragging along the ground very lightly. So my point is like how connected to the ground are you? If you have enough, if you have so little weight on that back foot, that it can just drag lightly, just barely across the service and the mound argument is not, I would say not very.

Um, so to me, the argument that the back would have to stay down at the point of ball release. Doesn’t hold water from like a, from just a common sense standpoint. And a standpoint of me looking at actual pictures and seeing like how they throw. Um, so I was doing all this research and I was like learning about that.

And then literally like two days later, um, there was a post on the internet or on Twitter that I responded to, and it was a video of a boxer throwing a punch. And so he throws the punch. He lands upon his back foot is on the ground. Um, and the point that the poster was making, he was saying like, if, if you’re going to punch somebody as hard as you can, like you keep your back foot on the ground.

So why should throwing a pitch be any different? Well, I want, I don’t agree [01:07:00] because if I’m going to punch somebody as hard as I can, and I know that there’s no risk of them coming back at me, I’m going 400 that front foot. Like if you ever used one of those, um, like punching bag, like strength, testers, and like an arcade, like how do people hit that?

Then they’ll stand there and like hit off their back foot. They get a running start and they just nail that thing, like loaded onto the front leg. So. Not only that, but punching is not the same as pitching they’re different movements. Pitching has like a, more of a downward movement to it punching it’s more just straight around or like you’re punching up a lot of times too.

So to me, that, that argument is, is that doesn’t make sense. So I responded to that post with my own posts, where I showed that look like MLB pitchers. They don’t all keep their foot on the ground. So it’s not necessary to keep your foot on the ground. And I expected to get some pushback from that I didn’t expect was like a huge Twitter where to start to basically, um, one guy responded to me and he said he had some [01:08:00] research that he did between a drag line.

And pitching injuries. So I don’t know where the drag line is. I’m assuming it’s the line that your, that your foot makes once you leave the rubber, the line down the mountain. Yeah. So the word document that he sent me, um, it didn’t describe what a, what a drag line is. It didn’t describe what an acceptable dragline is, and that was the thing.

They were like, look, this amount of pitchers have what’s called an acceptable dragline. These folks

Dan Blewett: don’t have it.

Andrew Sacks: Yeah. So once that’s like by language, and it’s not even explaining like what is appropriate versus not appropriate. So that’s, to me, it was kind of a red flag and actually got like a message from, I worked for an MLB team and they’re like analytics department.

Uh, and we, we were talking about it a little bit and he agreed with me too. Um, but basically they kind of went back and they saw like, They took like all the pictures that were on the disabled list in 2019 or 2018, whatever it [01:09:00] was. And they’re like, all right, 30% of all pitchers have an acceptable dragline, which means intuitively I mean, 70%.

Don’t right. So basically 2.3 times as many pitchers have an unacceptable drag line as an acceptable drag line, 2.3 times. Right? So they went back and they showed these percentages of people that were injured in each group. And they’re like, Oh look, um, 8% of pitchers, uh, had, uh, accessible dragline and 8% of them got hurt.

And like a 24% of these guys with the, uh, unacceptable dragline got hurt. And that sounds like, like a huge increase, but still you think like, Oh wait a minute, like, like eight times, 2.3 that’s 19%. So you’re dealing with different sample sizes, which you don’t do that in research. And when you can, when you compare it to different sample sizes, like say you compare a group of 300 people to a group of a hundred people.

If their injury rate is a hundred percent, [01:10:00] that means that their injury rate is 1%. I mean, one guy got hurt in the hundred, a hundred size group. Three guys got hurt in 300 group. So it’s possible you could mislead people into thinking that there’s a three times bigger risk of being injured when you’re just kind of playing around with the percentages that it’s easy to kind of mislead people with data like that, especially when you don’t give like the raw numbers you just playing with percentages.

So I didn’t, I don’t like that. I don’t like when people, it seems like they have an agenda. And it seems like they’re trying to lie with statistics to try to like, fit, to fit what they want the numbers to say. So that’s what I got upset

Dan Blewett: about. Yeah. And there’s a lot of it out there and the unfortunate thing, and this has been going for like a lot of years now, is that people say research.

And they don’t release exactly what they did. Most people aren’t qualified to like comb through it and say, Oh, this is why this isn’t maybe valid at all. Or here’s some problems with your methodology. And so then people just like, Oh, this [01:11:00] guy did research and he found this and that’s all they have. Like, it’s just like a story, you know, and really tagline of a news story.

Exactly. But

Bobby Stevens: actually reading what the news is or whatever the story is. Okay. So you have you too have a lot of, uh, research. Data collecting data like we’re on the, on that side.

Dan Blewett: I won’t, I won’t say that I have, I have a double major in college. I was philosophy and psychology. So I know enough in both disciplines to know when people are not askers exercising, sound logic or deductive reasoning or good experimental design in general.

I’m not a researcher. And I don’t, I don’t do research. I don’t purport to do that. And that’s my biggest problem. It’s like, okay. These other people, there’s a lot of other pitching people are hitting people who are like, you’re not qualified to do research either, but you’re trying to, and you’re doing it badly and you’re misleading people and that’s the problem, you know?

And so like with this one, like the first thing, when Andrew sent me this study, it’s like, They, they literally called it inappropriate dragline versus it’s like, [01:12:00] you’re already presupposing that it’s you. And you’re trying to mislead people that it’s correct. It’s like saying we’re going to test broccoli versus chocolate and see which one’s the healthy food.

And you’re like, so we’re going to put, or we’re gonna touch the vegetables versus candy. So we’re going to put the vegetables in a group called healthy food and the candy and a group called unhealthy food. So we, what we, what we found was that the unhealthy foods it’s like, you’ve already, you’re already telling me that’s what you think of the conclusion is.

Right. And that’s what they did. They call it an appropriate dragline, which. Like, I have a lot of respect for Tom house. He’s done tremendous things for the industry and like little errors like that are like, dude, what are you doing? Like, you know, better than that, like, you, you clearly know better to then use that language.

Like you’ve been around a long time and again, guy, father is pitching house, like

Bobby Stevens: the isn’t he the poster child for changing his philosophy, like every two years on what is correct and pitching. And what’s not.

Dan Blewett: I mean, look, anyone who’s [01:13:00] been in an industry for 30 years is going to change a lot. So I, again, I think the vast majority of what we do today, we owe to Tom house to the ESMI to a lot of these people who are ahead of their time and pioneers of all this.

But, but everyone is still held the same standards today as they were before, where it’s like, look, this is not, this is not good. This is like misleading. And this is what this has done in a poor way. And that was my issue. Um, a lot of the stuff that he’s done is, is great.

Andrew Sacks: Absolutely. Yeah. Like I have a book by Tom house on pitching that.

Yeah. But that was very formative for me in my earlier years. Like learning how to like throw baseballs. Like he’s a really, really sharp guy. Um, but my, my other thing with this is like, my point was that the foot doesn’t have to be down at ball release. And they sent me a study about like drag lines.

That’s not the same thing. Yeah.

Dan Blewett: Cause your drag is going to change depending on the way your hips move. So some people’s draglines quickly sweeps out some kind of it like an ass and you know, there’s [01:14:00] definitely like a, you know, your hips are, you’re going to stride out. Then your hips are going to rotate and turn over.

And so your foot is going to be kind of like an extension of like what your hips do. It’s going to drag on the ground if it’s on the back. But like, and the one thing to. For for that. I remind myself as that just because major leaguers do a thing doesn’t mean they couldn’t be better. What they’re doing.

They’re like when you throw 95 miles per hour at age 21, no one keeps striving to get you to throw 98. Not really. So to say, like, if you throw just a premium velocity at an early age, people stop trying to screw with you and they drop trying, stop trying to perfect you. So it is, it is possible that Justin Verlander, his mechanics could improve a little bit and maybe if his back foot stay on the ground, he might throw another mile, power harder.

Like we don’t know that for sure. And no one’s ever going to test it, but the fact does remain that when so many major leaguers are major leaguers, like literally the best on the planet. And they’re like relatively staying relatively healthy, like guys like Justin Verlander and many others who are bigly veterans, [01:15:00] their bodies have proven that they can like do it and stay healthy.

Um, There’s something to be said for that. Cause it’s not like, like you said, if 70% of big leaguers do this wrong thing, is it really wrong? That’s the thing, like, what are we, what are we saying wrong? It’s essentially the right thing. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So you have to find the balance of like, could they be better or is this just like a completely acceptable thing to do so, yeah.

Andrew Sacks: And I think with the whole foot down thing, When I, it doesn’t matter if the foot is down. I don’t think, I think what matters is like, if you’re making an attempt to keep the foot down. So some guys, whether it’s because of a, like a hip extension range of motion that they just don’t have. They just can’t keep that back for that.

They don’t have the range of motion to do it, but like, if you look at Verlander, for example, like he doesn’t keep the back foot down, but his back leg stays fairly straight. And what I think is happening there is his right. Glute is [01:16:00] contracting hard as you throwing the ball, which is driving his leg back straight.

Um, but he doesn’t actually stay on the ground zone. Maybe he doesn’t have the mobility to do that. But the idea is that his right clues can tracking hard to provide stability to his pelvis when he throws that’s an important thing with throwing and hitting is you have to be able to stabilize your pelvis and you have to resist rotation and you have to be able to decelerate.

And I think one of the main things that happens with these elite throwers is they decelerate their pelvis really well. Cause that, that glute. Contract’s really hard now, whether that results in their foot staying on the ground or not. I think maybe it depends on, uh, their stride direction. And I think it depends on their hip range of motion.

So if you take somebody that doesn’t have the requisite hip range of motion and you try to force them to keep their back foot on the ground, I think that could actually be pretty, pretty damaging because now they’re not gonna be able to get all the way down to their front foot when they’re throwing, they won’t be able to like rotate properly.

So I think. The idea of forcing people to [01:17:00] keep the back foot down is not a good idea, but I think the idea of teaching people to stabilize their pelvis is a good idea, but the foot staying down is a result of you stabilizing your pelvis and having the requisite range of motion. It’s not because you’re forcing your foot to stay down, if that makes sense.

Dan Blewett: Well, and, and for people listening, you should be clear that we’re talking about like the back foot off. I like small amounts. I think all of us here would agree that like I’ve trained pitchers, who their front knee is like almost hitting their, their stride knee or their back knees. I’m like, they’re way off the ground, like leg and 90 degrees.

They’re like a foot off the ground. That’s the result of like bad mechanics of poor weight shift. Like everything’s flying forward way too soon. That’s not what we’re talking about. But like when you see like a lot of these big league pitchers and I’d encourage anyone listening to go on YouTube and just Google slow motion.

And name a major leaguer. You’ll see, like when some of these guys have their foot off the ground, it’s a small amount. Whereas with youth players, again, you’ve probably seen them. [01:18:00] And I have certainly seen them. Sometimes they could, their back leg is like flying forward and it’s because they don’t know how to use their hips, their, you know, their weights leaking.

They’re doing lots of things they need to fix. And when you fix those, typically their back foot will stay. Okay. Not ever be like completely on the ground again, but it’ll get a lot closer and that backlog will be more extended, which is what we want. Yeah, well,

Bobby Stevens: it’s a, it’s kind of like a, it’s something that happens that’s going to happen naturally.

Like when you’re teaching kids out of throw, right. You’re not, if you’re teaching them like, Hey, try and keep that back foot on the ground. As you’re throwing, like you’re probably going to affect things in his throw that are

Dan Blewett: going to be detrimental to

Bobby Stevens: either the velocity, the accuracy, just the movement of his own body, as opposed to like, Hey, take this ball, throw it and let’s watch what your body does.

And then try and like. Fix the

Dan Blewett: problem and like a

Bobby Stevens: pro, I want to say proactive way. It’s probably the incorrect word, but similar to teaching, hitting, like I’ll say something to try and get a kids hold [01:19:00] by, ready to re move how I want it to move without telling them exactly what I want him to do. Cause if he’s focusing on the one aspect that I need them to change, it might change three other aspects of his swing that I don’t want to change, or it might change the intent of the swing or.

You know, certain avid, like you didn’t want to take certain avenues to get them to the correct, you know, the, the end goal without effecting everything he’s already doing correctly. Um, and anything, I think, you know, if he’s shooting free throws and you’re like, Hey, you need to finish, you know, through the, through the basketball.

Well, they’re just trying to finish the basketball. They’re probably gonna shoot the ball way off where they’re trying to actually make it. Whereas a kid who makes free throws consistently. Okay. We need you to do something a little bit different. You’re probably gonna make them be more consistently, like let’s try and get them to that point as opposed to getting him to focus on what he does wrong.

Dan Blewett: Yeah. Well, and back to point a little bit ago, analogies can be helpful tools to help people understand. Like for [01:20:00] me, some of the side work that I do is in a. Like the aerospace sector and some of the content stuff that I do. And I have a tough time having no background understanding like airflow and like the way it interacts with like, like I am like writing technical stuff and I like don’t understand it.

So it helps me to get analogies to like, Oh, okay. It’s kind of like this. And then you can like fit with the terminology, but like in baseball there, that punching analogy. And it like makes sense, but it, but it’s probably not really that applicable. There’s some similarities, but not many of the other one that was really problematic that I wrote an article a long time ago was, um, comparing.

There was the, basically like the case for holds, which have since pretty much lost favor. I know now, but people were saying, Oh, you should do holds, like, you should put a weight on your hand or like, hold onto the ball after you throw, because tennis players don’t have arm problems. Right. And it’s like on the surface, you’re like, why did I think [01:21:00] about that?

But then when you really think about it, which is what I wrote in the article, I’m like, okay, Let’s think of some other things in tennis that might be accounting for the fact that they don’t have arm problems. Number one, they hit back hands. We don’t throw anything backwards in baseball, right? Maybe that’s working muscles in a more balanced way that we don’t get in baseball.

So we definitely can’t say that it’s just holding onto the racket anymore because there’s another major variable. That could be accounting for it. Right. Also the tennis swing, the tennis serve is much different than a baseball throw. It’s absolutely not the same motion. I looked it up on slow motion. Not even it’s much more like a volleyball surf.

Like you go up the shoulder externally rotates within the elbow comes in front and right. You hit it more like a tricep press. This is like, That one on the surface gained a lot of traction. I wrote that article as a counterpoint. I’m like, no, this is not a good analogy. Just not there’s way too many other variables at play to say, we should do this in baseball because tennis is doing this.

It’s a good idea to think about in general, like, Oh, maybe there’s merit to this, but to say that this is a good reason now there’s a lot of other stuff going on. So analogies are

Bobby Stevens: for sure. [01:22:00] Well, I’m sure if tennis, I’m sure this swinging the motion of tennis is going to strengthen the awkward thing and your shoulder different angles.

Right. Holding onto the racket, backhand forehand, but it’s not a, it’s not an apples to apples comparison by any stretch.

Dan Blewett: No. And you’re trying to say, this is the, they’re basically trying to extract the one variable, which is holding onto a thing after you release it, after you hit the ball, that was the one variable they said was the important one.

Whereas like there’s so many other variables here, backhands again, like all this other stuff. How can you say that’s the one variable when there’s so many other play, like there’s no way you can isolate them to, to, to compare the injury injury rates between these. Two sports, tennis players, not athletes and baseball players.

Um, so Andrew, as we wrap up, where can people follow up with you and, uh, how can they keep in touch with what you’re doing on the web? And do you have any programs, hint, hint with a good buddy of you coming, coming out soon.

Andrew Sacks: Yeah. Funny, you should mention that we do, um, [01:23:00] uh, Dan blue and I are working on a online training program called early work for baseball and softball players.

Um, it’s a remote training program. It’s really good. I handle all the programming. Dan doesn’t touch it. That’s how you know, it’s good. Dan handles all the handles, all the technological stuff. I handle the training. Uh, we’re going to be coming out with that shortly. As soon as we finished up taking videos, all the exercises we can upload to the internet for you guys.

Um, you can follow me on Twitter. I’m Andrew underscore sax, I think, uh, on Instagram I’m coach underscore Andrew underscore Sachs. Uh, you can also follow the prime sports performance, uh, Instagram account. Um, I don’t think I have a Facebook, but you can, you can try to look me up on there. Maybe I’ll accept your friend request.

Maybe I won’t. Um, but yeah, just keep your eyes open for the early work training app. Coming out with a coach. Dan blew it and Andrew Sachs should be, should be pretty good. Yeah,

Dan Blewett: this whole podcast was just a promotion. It was just, no,

Bobby Stevens: I [01:24:00] set this podcast up, not knowing Dan and Andrew were best friends for 30 years.

Dan Blewett: Yeah. Bobby just was like, looking at who was fighting each other on the web. And I was like,

Bobby Stevens: that’s honestly, that’s all I was doing. I was just, I was, I

Dan Blewett: was

Bobby Stevens: creeping. I was like creeping on Twitter, trying to see like, Oh, who’s arguing with who let’s have them on the podcast. And it’s

Andrew Sacks: weird that Bobby’s texted me about this instead of Dan, but

Dan Blewett: yeah.

And I was like, wait, you know, I know him, right. And he’s like, no,

Andrew Sacks: I’ve, I’ve known Dan for longer than I’ve known anybody in my life besides my parents. I think.

Bobby Stevens: Yeah. And you’re welcome for having you on the podcast that Dan was, you know what, and now that I think about it, Dan was against this from the start

Andrew Sacks: and I had to reach out, Oh my God.

The ultimate betrayal.

Dan Blewett: Yeah, exactly. Then I got pumpkin spice creamer in my coffee today and I really came around the basic, the basic side of me. That was pacified.

[01:25:00] Andrew Sacks: When you got your video and you got your pumpkin spice and your hard, huh?

Dan Blewett: Who am I? Why now? Yeah. Hoodies and going advice. Well, thank you you for being here, be sure to check out and for those, uh, for those of you don’t know, Andrew’s, Instagram’s really good.

He puts out lots of consistent training content on his Instagram, especially, and he puts a lot of on Twitter as well, but she definitely give him a follow on both of those. There’s lots of helpful info. It’s not just a, you know, him re tweeting baseball or Orioles info or any of that. Like, there’s actually a lot of really good content from both of his accounts.

So be sure to follow him there. Um, and yeah, again, this was not a promotion, but. He, and I do have a training for coming out soon. So if you are looking for a really good strength program, jump on my email list, you can find, um, ways to sign up with that on my website. And you’ll be informed of when a launch is probably a couple of weeks.

We actually have a lot of the videos done, but not all of them. So anyway. All right. Thanks for being here. We will see you on Friday for our next installment of the morning. Brush back. Say goodbye, Bobby.

Bobby Stevens: Yeah. [01:26:00]