Not foreveryone.
I'll work with anyone who's willing to do the work exactly as I give it. High school to pro, it doesn't matter. If you want to find out how good you could possibly be, that's who I want.
What I'm looking for is someone who'll work as hard in the weight room, in the kitchen, with their sleep, and with their communication as they do on the field.
Where you're stuck
Why you're not throwing harder
Most of the time it's one of two things, and both are fixable.
Either you don't produce enough force yet,
or you produce plenty of it and lose it on the way to the ball.
Plenty of coaches will assess you for this, but if they can't read the assessment correctly then whatever they build off it isn't much better than a guess.
The low hanging fruit is usually obvious inside a day of looking.
The engine
At IHT, a first assessment usually lands around 5,500 watts. After consistent training the average sits around 6,500, and roughly a third are over 7,000.
By the textbooks and the studies, that third would be considered genetic freaks. But the odds of dozens of athletes in the top 0.1% of genetics all living within an hour of the same gym, and training at just that one gym, aren't very high. Chances are they weren't born this way.
Why I careabout the jump
Studies say the vertical jump doesn't predict velocity, but they're looking at the wrong thing. Ryan Aguirre's model uses four metrics off the same jump and lands within 2 mph of a professional pitcher's actual velocity, so what I'm looking at isn't how high you jumped, it's how you got there.
If you throw about what you're predicted to throw,your engine is your ceiling, and building it is what raises the velocity.
If you're predicted at 85 and you're throwing 91,you're getting more out of your body than it should give, which means you're less likely to make it through an entire season and more likely to lose velo and command as it goes on. Raising your force output greatly reduces your injury risk and raises your velocity floor, and that puts you at a much better chance at a velo jump.
If you're predicted at 91 and you're throwing 85,you already produce enough force to throw harder than you currently do, you just fail to express it. That might be a speed problem, or your arm might be unprepared enough to handle the stress of throwing that your brain refuses to send energy through it, or your mechanics might be bad enough that the energy can't be efficiently sent through your body.
Regardless of where the breakdown happens, this is solely a physics equation, and for a doctoral student who has thrown low 90s and worked at Driveline it's usually a pretty good equation. I've been able to solve it every time.
I coached 11 pitchers directly during a three month internship at Driveline while I was still in undergrad, and every single one of them threw harder.
The nervous system
Your brain's only goal is to survive. Not to throw hard.
Not to throw strikes. Not to throw a sweeper. Not to throw 105 pitches. Every output you produce is your brain organizing your entire system, not one muscle contracting.
So the first thing I look at is whether your brain is balanced. If it isn't, we activate what's underactive, inhibit what's overactive, and strengthen the muscles that got shut down. That's what gives the brain better sensory input, which is what lets you move efficiently instead of compensating around something.
If it's already balanced, we skip it and go straight to preparing your arm for what throwing actually asks of it.
And if you've already done endless arm care that didn't work, more arm care isn't the answer. The question is what adaptation that work was trying to build, and then whether the volume was too low to build it, too high to recover from, or whether you were chasing the wrong adaptation entirely.
Before I'd experienced any of this I was throwing 80 to 82 in bullpens, down from 88 to 90 at the start of that fall. Two days of it and I threw 85 to 87 that week, then 88 to 90 the week after, in less pain at 89 than I'd had at 81.
The difference
You'll actuallyget coached
I've trained at Tread and I've worked at Driveline, and I know both of those places about as well as anyone. You are never going to get the attention you need at either one. A coach carrying well over 100 athletes finishes a long day on the floor, opens his laptop to 300 or 400 messages, and the only thing he's thinking about is how fast he can get through them so he can go home.
The other version of this is worse in a different way. Plenty of coaches with small rosters have all the time in the world to individualize, and they do, but it doesn't matter how much effort goes into a program if the person writing it doesn't know what they're talking about.
You can improve someone's hip internal rotation by 15 degrees and put it in a report and it looks great. But does he actually use those 15 degrees in the throw? Is he better at throwing? Nobody signs up for training to get better at training, or to get better at an assessment for training. You signed up to be better on the field.
Results
I coached 11 pitchers directly during a three month internship at Driveline while I was still in undergrad, and every single one of them threw harder.
What it costs
Premium experience.Premium results.Premium price tag.Requires a premiumwork ethic.
Rehab adds $100 a month to any package.
Pay in full and take 5% off any subscription.
- Month to month
- $800per month
- I do not want to work with you for just one month. There are so few adaptations that can be made in a month that it is not truly worth either of our time. The only case I would recommend it is the dire one, where you need to peak for a specific event like a pro day. That is mostly taking what you already have inside you and making sure you express all of it when it counts.
- 3 months
- $650per month
- This is when we start to see some of our hard work come together, and the physical adaptations of training begin to appear on the field. We have removed your compensations, optimized the inputs and outputs to and from the brain, and can begin building a strong foundation. We start to see improvements in both health and performance.
- 6 months
- $550per month
- At this point I can build you into a significantly more capable and robust athlete, one who performs day in and day out at a higher level than he ever has before. You will likely notice that your recovery seems effortless and that performance comes easy to you.
- 12 months
- $450per month
- You will look back one year from now and be unrecognizable to your former self. You have removed all neural inhibitions, prepared the arm to throw hard, and can generate the force to display that. You have built the skills required to perform at a level formerly unimaginable to you. This is the commitment your future self thanks you for.
Every package starts the same way. You apply, and if it is a fit, you sign up and pay.
What happens next
n.01
Apply
You apply. If it's a fit, you sign up and pay.
n.02
Assessment
Then you go through the assessment. You'll film everything I ask for and send it over, and I'll go through all of it. The first week is usually general prep while I work through your submission, and then your individualized program starts.
n.03
Your week
In the offseason a week might be four to five lifts, seven throwing days, two or three of them at high intent, plus breathing work, correctives, isometrics and brain balancing. Some days that's four to six hours of work.
The application is long on purpose. It's how both of us find out whether this is a fit.