Why Do We Use Plyocare Balls at Complete Athlete?
Why Do We Use Plyocare Balls at Complete Athlete?
The standard line that we use to argue for the use of plyocare balls is that they improve arm strength and mechanics. These sand-filled rubber balls are fairly malleable and weigh from 100 grams to 2000 g. These balls are used with constraint-focused drills to improve the movement patterns of pitching and throwing a baseball.
Plyocare balls and the associated drills are effective at improving an athlete’s throwing skills because they challenge proprioception. The constraints that each drill imposes on the athlete (they have to do specific footwork and position their bodies a certain way) change their body awareness. Over time, enough repetitions are done so that the athlete develops more awareness of their body in space. As we are improving their body awareness and mechanics, we want to train their ability to produce power efficiently using plyometrics. Using traditional plyometrics to train baseball athletes helps with their overall athleticism and explosiveness with their entire bodies. However, we do plyometric training that is specific to baseball. We bring in various weighted balls, plyometric balls, and throwing drills to train baseball skills plyometrically.
The athlete training community currently uses injury prevention to measure the success of a training program. When plyocare balls were first introduced, they were sold as a tool for injury prevention. Many of the top trainers in the field used the theory of Training Load Manipulation to justify using heavy plyocare balls as a tool for injury prevention. The idea behind TLM is that varying the training load from day-to-day and week-to-week so that the body goes through stages of overload and underload will prevent the athlete from getting injured during a competition. A recent meta-analysis of TLM studies and training programs, from the Journal of Athletic Training[1], concludes that following and completing a training program alone does not correlate to injury prevention. Using the plyocare balls for throwing with the justification that they help with injury prevention is incorrect. They stress the tissues in the elbow and shoulder in the same way that throwing a baseball does. It is because of this fact, that plyocare balls are the appropriate tool for training plyometric throwing for baseball. Teaching your body to generate power with a heavier-than-a-baseball plyocare ball and teaching your body to move faster with a lighter-than-a-baseball plyocare ball is the best way to use plyocare balls in our training programs.
If we truly want to make programs that effectively prevent injuries, we need to focus on the tissue-specific stresses that the sport applies to the body. With this information, we can design programs that bolster the strain acceptance of those tissues. At Complete Athlete we run an all-encompassing program that trains their body to throw harder with plyometrics and take care of their arms with tissue-strengthening workouts at the end of throwing sessions.
We use plyocare balls a little differently in our programs. The majority of baseball programs use plyocare balls to warm up their athletes and prep them for their throwing training. For the most part, these plyocare routines are effective when the drills are done at low intensity. Because these drills are done as a warm-up, the programs rely on the athletes’ ability to self-regulate their intent and not burn out their arms before their throwing training.
At Complete Athlete, we noticed that a lot of our athletes struggle to regulate their throwing intensity while doing our plyocare drills. We invested time to experiment with doing a plyocare program after finishing throwing training. We found that when we did the plyocare drills after throwing, we could do the drills at a very high intensity and challenge our endurance while throwing. This gives us more options to program different ways to teach throwing at a low intensity. In our program, we use our C2 Performance bands to warm up our athletes’ bodies and instill the movement pattern that is involved with playing catch. The main benefit of using the C2 performance system is that it gets our athletes fully warmed up for throwing and we avoid the common pitfall of throwing to warm up. We give a lot of focus to the skill of playing catch in every session– every play in this game involves throwing the ball accurately. While we are not throwing just to warm up, on high-intensity plyocare days we use catch play to prepare our athletes for running our plyocare routine at maximum effort. Having our athletes go at maximum effort makes the focus of the plyocare session on reaching maximum velocity performance and improves arm durability.
The Complete Athletes get three instructions at the beginning of each plyocare session–what drills they are doing; which balls to use and how many throws per weight; and to throw the ball as hard as they possibly can.