Oblique Strains in Baseball: 2011 Update

Written on March 29, 2011 at 6:56 am, by Eric Cressey

Just over three years ago, during a period where oblique strains were on the rise in professional baseball and the USA Today profiled this “new” injury, I wrote an article on what I perceived to be the causes of the issue.  Check it out: Oblique Strains and Rotational Power.

This year, the topic has come back to the forefront, as players like Joba Chamberlain, Sergio Mitre, Curtis Granderson, and Brian Wilson have experienced the injury this spring training alone.

While my thoughts from the initial article are still very much applicable, I do have some additional thoughts on the matter for 2011:

1. Is anyone surprised that the rise in oblique injuries in baseball is paralleled by the exponential rise in hip injuries and lower back pain? I don’t care whether you work in a factory or play a professional sport; violent, repetitive, and persistently unilateral-dominant rotation (especially if it is uncontrolled) will eventually chew up a hip, low back, or oblique; it’s just a matter of where people break down.

In other words, pro athletes are generating a tremendous amount of power from the hips – moreso, in fact, than they ever have before thanks to the advances in strength training, nutrition, supplementation, and, unfortunately, in some cases, illegal “pharmaceutical interventions.”  Assuming mechanics are relative good (as they should be in a professional athlete), rotate a hip faster and you’ll improve bat speed and throwing velocity; it’s that simple.  This force production alone is enough to chew up a labrum, irritate a hip capsule, and deliver enough localized eccentric stress to cause a loss in range of motion.  The Cliff’s Notes version is that we’ve increased hip strength and power (more on this in a bit), but most folks have overlooked tissue quality (foam rolling, massage, and more focal approaches like Active Release and Graston) and mobility training.

If the hips stiffen up, the lumbar spine will move excessively in all planes of motion – and, in turn, affect the positioning of the thoracic spine.  Throw off the thoracic spine, and you’ll negatively impact scapular (and shoulder), respiratory (via the rib cage), and cervical spine.  Hips that are strong – but have short or stiff musculature can throw off the whole shebang.

2. “Strong” isn’t a detailed enough description. I think that it goes beyond that, as you have to consider that a big part of this is a discrepancy between concentric and eccentric strength.  Concentrically, you have the trailing leg hip generating tremendous rotational power, and eccentrically, you have the lead leg musculature decelerating that rotation.

Moreover, because the front hip can’t be expected to dissipate all that rotational velocity – and because the thoracic spine is rotating from the drive of the upper extremities – you put the muscles acting at the lumbar spine in a situation where they must provide incredible stiffness to resist rotation.  It is essentially the opposite of being between a rock and a hard place; they are the rock between two moving parts.  Structurally, though, they’re well equipped to handle this responsibility; just look at how the line of pull of each of these muscles (as well as the tendinous inscriptions of the rectus abdominus) runs horizontally to resist rotation.  That’s eccentric control.

How do we train it?  Definitely not with sit-ups, crunches, or sidebends.  The former are too sagittal plane oriented and not particularly functional at all.  The latter really doesn’t reflect the stability-oriented nature of our “core.”  The bulk of our oblique strain prevention core training program should be movements that resist rotation:

While on the topic, it’s also important to resist lumbar hypextension, as poor anterior core strength can allow the rib cage to flare up (increases the stretch on the most commonly injured area of the obliques: at the attachment to the 11th rib on the non-throwing side) and even interfere with ideal respiratory function (the diaphragm can’t take  on its optimal dome shape, so we overuse accessory breathing muscles like pec minor, sternocleidomastoid, scalenes, etc).

So, to recap: I don’t think oblique strains are a new injury epidemic or the result of team doctors just getting better with diagnostics.  Rather, I think that we’re talking about a movement dysfunction that has been prevalent for quite some time – but we just happen to have had several of them in a short amount of time that has made the media more alert to the issue.  The truth is that if we worried more about “inefficiency” and not pathology,” journalists could have “broken” this story a long time ago.

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Random Friday Thoughts: 7/17/09

Written on July 17, 2009 at 5:01 am, by Eric Cressey

1. I started this week off with a bang with a few good (and goofy) YouTube clips in my newsletter, so there’s no reason to shy away from a continuation of the awesomeness in this blog.

2. Tony Gentilcore got the day off from work today.  He claimed it was to go see the filming of the next Functional Strength Coach seminar, but we all know it was just a front for his regular ol’ “weird ninja dude in the woods” routine.  Glad you enjoyed your alone time, big guy.

2. Congratulations to CP athlete and New York Mets minor leaguer Tim Stronach (St. Lucie Mets: High A), who just missed both a perfect game and no-hitter on Wednesday.  “Stro” took a perfect game into the 8th inning, and then lost the no-no with one out in the 9th.  The wildest part is that Tim didn’t even know until the day before that he’d be making the start.

Stronach packed 21 pounds on his 6-5 frame this off-season with loads of hard work at Cressey Performance, and deserves all the success that comes his way.  Great job, Tim!

3. I received an email with the following question yesterday: “I play basketball. I watch how guys lose lots of weight and bodyfat preparing for the combine. How do they do that?”

Answer: The overwhelming majority of college basketball players I’ve encountered live on sugary sports drinks, chicken wings, pizza, and booze.  Simply cleaning up their diets for a month or two will work wonders even if training is held constant.  Did you expect something more revolutionary?

4. Here’s another study showing that swinging a heavy bat prior to regular hitting is an inferior warm-up protocol as compared to swinging the normal bat or an underweighted bat.  Researchers  “suggested that when preparing to hit, 5 warm-up swings with either a light or normal bat will allow a player to achieve the greatest velocity of their normal bat.”  This is in complete contrast to the use of weighted baseballs to increase throwing velocity; I love ‘em when used with the right population.

5.  Huh?  What?  Come again?

6. I went back through Jim Smith’s Accelerated Muscular Development today to check up on how he approaches formatting for e-books (as we prepare some for the upcoming project’s release).  While I was looking it over, I got to thinking about how it never ceases to amaze me how thorough Smitty is with his products; he just seems to cover everything.  I’ve said it before: this is a great resource; I’d highly recommend you check it out.

Injury Prevention for Pitchers

Written on January 24, 2009 at 9:07 pm, by Eric Cressey

In last week’s newsletter, I observed that there are a lot of folks out there who think that weight training is unnecessary and plyometrics are sufficient for injury prevention and performance enhancement in pitchers. While a system like this might hold some merit in a population such as football where many athletes already have a large strength foundation, it doesn’t work as well in a baseball population, which doesn’t have that same foundation.

To illustrate my point, I’m going to touch on a concept – static-spring proficiency – that I covered at length in my Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual.  Essentially, you have “static” athletes, “spring” athletes, and everything in between the two.  You can use a series of performance tests and evaluate an athlete’s training history to get an appreciation for where each athlete falls on this continuum.

“Static” athletes tend to have a good strength foundation – so much, in fact, that they tend to “muscle” everything.  In other words, there is less efficient use of the stretch-shortening cycle to produce force.  An example might be a powerlifter attempting to go out and play basketball.  In order to improve, a “static” athlete needs to focus on improving reactive ability.

“Spring” athletes are great at using stored elastic energy in tendons to produce power.  An example would be a basketball or volleyball player who has been jumping for years and years to develop spring, but without much attention to building the underlying strength needed to best use it.  So, obviously, to improve, these athletes need to enhance muscular strength while maintaining their great elastic qualities.

Here’s an excerpt from my Off-Season Manual that personifies this in the world of baseball:

“The modern era of baseball is a great example, as we’ve had several homerun hitters who have all been successful – albeit by very different means.

“At the ‘spring’ end of the continuum, we have hitters like Gary Sheffield and Vladimir Guerrero demonstrating incredible bat speed. The ball absolutely rockets off their bats; they aren’t ‘muscling’ their homeruns at all. Doing a lot of extra training for bat speed would be overkill for these guys; they’ll improve their power numbers by increasing maximal strength alone.

“At the other end of the spectrum, we have ‘static’ homerun hitters like Mark McGwire and Jeff Bagwell, both of whom were well known for taking weight training very seriously. These guys are the ones ‘muscling’ baseballs out of the ballpark; the ball almost seems to sit on the barrel of the bat for a split-second before they “flip it” 500 feet. Getting stronger might help these guys a bit, but getting more spring by focusing on bat speed with reactive training (e.g., plyometrics, sprinting, medicine ball throws, ballistic push-ups, etc.) would be a more sure-fire means to improvement.

“Then, we have the ‘middle-of-the-road’ guys like Barry Bonds and Manny Ramirez. They possess an excellent blend of static and spring, so they need to train some of both to continue improving physically.

“Bonds is actually a good example of how an athlete’s position on the static-spring continuum can change over the course of a career. When he started out, he was definitely a ‘spring’ guy, hitting most of his homeruns with pure bat speed. As Bonds’ career progressed, his maximal strength improved due to neural adaptations and increased cross sectional area (more muscle mass).

“In light of the media attention surrounding the use of performance-enhancing substances in baseball, I should mention how he increased his muscle mass isn’t the issue in question in the discussion at hand. The point is that he did increase muscle mass, which increased maximal strength, which favorably affected performance. The performance enhancing substances question really isn’t of concern to this discussion.”

Now, here’s where it gets interesting – and where you get a bit more time to think about this.

Obviously, even to the most casual observer, not all baseball players are like Manny Ramirez, Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Jeff Bagwell, Gary Sheffield, and Vladimir Guerrero.  This isn’t rocket science; they are/were a heck of a lot more skilled and experienced than the overwhelming majority of the professional baseball world, and certainly all of the amateur ranks.

How are they different?  And, why can’t we just assume what might work for some of them will work for those aiming to reach the levels they’ve attained?

Well, you’ll just have to think about that until Newsletter 141…

New Blog Content

Random Friday Thoughts
Sunday Thoughts
Push-ups for Baseball Players
Stuff You Should Read

All the Best,

EC

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