We have just wrapped up our seasons a few weeks ago. Our body is tired, sore, bruised, tight, and about every other adjective a person can use to describe being worn out. However, now is the start of another season, the offseason. Now is the time that we get the opportunity to start preparing for the following year in hopes of feeling even better than we did the season before. This is a great time for those athletes that had injuries during the season to recharge their batteries and take an active approach to mitigating the issues.
Even though we think of the offseason as a great time to rest (which it is), it doesn’t mean that sitting around for a few months will magically make things go away. It is more beneficial to take an ACTIVE approach to recovery. Our ultimate goal for the offseason – restore or achieve optimal movement and prevent risk for injury.
There are many different factors that play into arm health in the season, the biggest being the throwing volume. However, there are other things that pertain to the arm that are directly and indirectly impacting whether an athlete will have pain or not. The name of the game is all about reducing the risk factors for injury to the best of our ability.
Besides throwing volume, there are other areas that cause our arm to work harder, leading to more shoulder/elbow injuries throughout the year. Things like limited spinal rotation to the throwing side, lack of t-spine/upper back extension, limitations in shoulder blade/shoulder mobility, lack of core control, low back stiffness, improper sequencing, and tight hamstrings just to name a few. There are many research studies that dive into how these issues play into shoulder and elbow pain from The Journal of Strength, The National Library of Medicine, and more! This goes back to something we have said time and time again – ARM CARE IS ABOUT MORE THAN JUST TAKING CARE OF THE ARM! Also, arm care should be ever evolving. It is constantly progressing or regressing depending on the time of the year. We should never continue to do the exact same exercises with the exact same sets, reps, resistance year-round. The offseason is a great way to hit the reset button and get back on track. Let’s dive into this a little bit deeper.
Without diving into a whole years’ worth of strength and conditioning, let’s just focus on the offseason. Now, let me preface by saying this – if you play multiple sports, PLAY MULTIPLE SPORTS. This has such a great carryover for building a better athlete. Now, back to the programming.
When we enter an offseason, there are a few weeks stretch where it should be truly an active recovery. We are heavily focused on mobility work to get rid of any tightness or range of motion restrictions to get us back to neutral. This includes recovery work like foam rolling, lacrosse ball soft tissue mobilizations, stretching, mobility drills, or getting worked on by a professional.
After those first few weeks, we start diving into higher repetition exercises, but with low weight. We are not trying to max out our muscles at this point. We are trying to prime the body to regain work capacity so that we can get stronger in the later months. During this time, the athlete is doing very low to moderate overhead work with their arms pertaining to their sport (playing catch, etc.). This intensity should stay relatively low however.
After that, we move onto the next block where we start decreasing repetitions, increasing weight, and slowly starting to ramp up throwing or other sport specific drills. When we get closer to the season, we decrease reps even more, increase to higher weight, and really take a deeper dive into the sport specific movements like throwing. Klein, et. al, has a great example of a good strength and conditioning program in the study below.
If there are no breaks, the athlete is going to get wore out and continue to have overuse injuries. It will be almost impossible to achieve optimal performance. If the athlete does nothing until the following season, they essentially are just hoping for the best, but this is not going to be surprising if there are pain or issues along the way.
This is a topic where we can go down 5 different avenues. If there is one take-away to be had, make sure you take advantage of your offseason by having an ACTIVE approach, not just resting, and hoping for the best. Help your body help you!
To learn more about our approach to the off season, request an appointment!
