![]() Posture is definitely a factor in baseball and softball. What can pitchers and their coaches do to protect their arms? But we need to do more research because we don’t really know how long it takes to regain strength to the degree it’s safe to pitch again. What we have seen is that as pitchers pitch more and don’t get as much rest between games, they get weaker. Then we ascertain their strength levels at the start of the next day and determine whether they recover their strength. Usually during a tournament, we compare these things at the beginning of a day of playing to these same measurements at the end of the day. We can correlate objective measures of strength and associate those with how the athletes say they feel. We also asked them how they felt, how tired they were and how much pain they were in. They push against it, and it gives us an objective measurement of strength. We used a device called a dynamometer that allows us to test strength. What did you find when you went to softball tournaments and evaluated pitchers as they pitched consecutive games on the same day or multiple games in a few days? Light activity, electronics OK during recovery Related: New concussion recommendations for kids If we limit pitches, get them more rest and give them more time to recover, it’s logical to think the injury risk will decline. There is some data suggesting that fatigue is a precursor to injury. Our study focused on pitchers because they are the ones who most commonly come to the doctor’s office with injuries. Meanwhile, the center fielder may only throw at peak effort four or five times in a game. ![]() She’s throwing 70 or 100 or 125 pitches in a game. On a fast-pitch softball team, the pitcher is the player doing most of the throwing. Why are pitchers more vulnerable to injury than players at other positions? Most don’t realize they’re putting the pitcher at risk, but it turns out that the windmill style of pitching that girls use isn’t as safe as some might think. Because there aren’t as many pitchers on most softball teams as there are on baseball teams, coaches tend to “ride” the ones who are successful. The idea that we should protect these softball pitchers hasn’t really caught on. The dogma involving throwing athletes is that the underhand pitch is thought to be safer, but there have been biomechanical studies in recent years indicating that the stresses on the shoulder are very similar, regardless of whether one is pitching overhand or underhand. Why doesn’t fast-pitch softball have pitching limits? Smith’s team recently evaluated pitchers before and during two- and three-day tournaments and found progressive increases in shoulder pain, fatigue and weakness. And when the researchers looked more closely, they found that part of the reason may be that softball pitchers frequently pitch several games in succession, particularly during tournaments. Studying pitchers in highly competitive softball leagues, Smith, an associate professor of orthopedics, and his colleagues found that 40 percent had some type of shoulder or arm injury during the season. ![]() They reported their findings in The American Journal of Sports Medicine. Smith, MD, and his colleagues evaluated more than 100 athletes, ages 14 to 18, to understand the risks faced by softball pitchers. ![]() In a pair of recent studies, sports medicine specialist Matthew V. Louis have found that although fast-pitch softball may be less risky, the potential for injury still exists. One reason is that softball pitchers throw underhand, a motion thought to stress the arm less than the overhand throws seen in baseball.īut researchers in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. But for girls playing fast-pitch softball, such guidelines are rare. Youth baseball leagues often have fairly strict limits on how many innings pitchers can pitch, or how many pitches a player can throw.
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