About
I'm Jackson Thorne.
I am a former division 1 pitcher and a doctor of physical therapy student at George Washington University. After nearly a decade of forcing my way into college baseball as a below average high school pitcher, I eventually hit 92 mph and transferred to play D1 baseball. My journey began reading medical studies and listening to hundreds of hours of podcasts as a high school sophomore. By the time my college career ended I had worked at Driveline Baseball, Baseball Performance Center, IHT Human Performance, Atlantic Sports Performance, and 781 Evolution.
Vanguard Training Systems is an approach to developing athletes who explore their genetic ceiling by working both hard enough and smart enough to find out what their potential truly is. If you are willing to work harder than you ever have in your life, then I will give you the exact steps to reach your goals.
Why I coach the way I do.
I pitched 30 Division 1 innings with pronator tenosynovitis, a partial triceps tear, an ulnar avulsion fracture, and a bone spur that grew through both my UCL and my triceps tendon.
After a failed Tommy John surgery as a high school sophomore, I had to rehab myself during the Covid lockdowns and reached 86 mph one year after surgery.
I have a background in both doctorate level education and biohacking strategies used in alternative medicine. I can take the good from each and ignore the bad while many are stuck in their associated cults.
Similarly, my coaching strategy blends experiences and directly learning from every corner of this industry. I have learned from everyone, but regurgitate information from no one. Many of the cult like followings across any sector limit a coach's reach and breadth of tools to give each athlete exactly what is needed. Any predetermined strategy that requires a coach to repackage what worked for them in their career is setting you up for failure. Good coaching is good problem solving; I can solve any problem that is put in front of me and have done it for athletes I have trained across the country from Boston to Seattle and South Carolina to New Jersey. This is the beauty of my data backed training and rehab methodologies; I can identify what your low hanging fruits are and fix them, as opposed to telling you “you look stronger”.
- 92mph
- Fastball
- 4'5"
- Release height
- 95mph
- Pulldown
Why this isn't one facility's idea of training.
Every facility has its own philosophy, its own style, its own structure, and that is exactly why I sought out so many. I'm not a pawn of any single idea.
A program built inside one philosophy inherits its blind spots along with its strengths, and there's no way to see a blind spot from inside it.
- Driveline Baseball
- Pitching Trainer and High Performance Coach
- IHT Human Performance
- Strength and Rehab Coach
- 781 EVO
- Rehab Director
- Atlantic Sports Performance
- Director of Player Development
- Peak Performance Physical Therapy
- Internship
- George Washington University
- Doctoral Student, Physical Therapy
Two of those are motion capture labs I built and ran rather than booked time in: Driveline Baseball and Atlantic Sports Performance.
The piece I almost never see anyone else in this space touch is the functional neurology, the brain balancing I use to clear the compensations holding an athlete back before I ever load them heavier. I learned to work with it at IHT from Jared Slater, who took his own mentorship under Dr. Jared Burton, and Burton is the one who adapted the Carrick Institute's work into functional neurology for performance.
Endorsements
From the coaches I've worked under.
Endorsements from the coaches I've worked under are being gathered, and they will go here.
The ask
Apply to train harder than you've ever trained in your entire life.
The application is long on purpose. It's how both of us find out whether this is a fit.