Arm Care is About More Than Just the Arm

What comes to mind when you hear “arm care”? Most baseball and softball players probably think about rotator cuff exercises using resistance bands and light dumbbells, external rotations, the Thrower’s 10, or shoulder mobility. But throwing isn’t just a movement of the shoulder; it involves the entire body.

I like to think about throwing like cracking a whip. The crack doesn’t come from the very end of the whip alone - it comes from energy being transferred from the handle, through the entire length of the whip. Throwing works much in the same way. Throwing starts with the legs pushing off the ground and driving the body forward, then turns into rotation with the hips and torso transferring energy up through the body. The shoulder and arm are the last links with the arm unwinding and the wrist providing the last flick.

While most of the attention when it comes to throwers is on the shoulder and elbow due to the tremendous forces on these joints (and rightfully so), we should also think about arm care in a more global sense as well. Arm care isn’t just about strengthening the shoulder - it’s about building a body that’s prepared to tolerate the demands of throwing.

• Build a stronger athlete: Throwing starts from the ground up, so arm care shouldn’t stop at the shoulder. Developing strength through the legs, hips, and trunk helps create and transfer force through the body. We also shouldn’t overlook general upper body strength. Compound exercises like rows, presses, and pull-ups don’t just strengthen the larger muscles - they also challenge the rotator cuff while allowing us to use heavier loads than isolated exercises alone. Isolation exercises still have an important place, but they should complement, not replace, a well-rounded strength program.

• Build work capacity: Arm care is about maintaining the quality of your throws throughout a practice, game, or tournament. As fatigue builds, movement quality can change, and recovery between innings or games becomes more important. Good aerobic fitness won’t make you throw harder, but it helps you recover between bouts of high-intensity effort so you can continue performing throughout the day.

• Build throwing capacity: As mentioned in last week’s blog, throwing is a skill of its own and a unique demand on the body. Therefore, it needs to be developed and progressed on its own. Being a strong athlete with good conditioning provides the foundation, but it doesn’t automatically prepare your arm for throwing. Having a progressive throwing program that manages your workload is just as important to arm care as the strengthening exercises. Nothing can replace throwing.

• Recovery: I’ve talked about recovery before, but it is an often overlooked aspect. We tend to focus on all of the things we add to get better (e.g. resistance training, long toss, weighted balls), while overlooking the things that actually allow our body to adapt to training; and even then, we tend to focus on fancy gadgets rather than the low-hanging fruit of sleep, nutrition, hydration, and managing stress.

As a baseball and softball player, you are more than just an arm, shoulder, or elbow. You are an athlete, and while the arm is the bread and butter, you need to remember that the rest of your body is just as important to throwing. If you want a more resilient throwing arm, stop thinking only about your arm and start preparing your whole body.

The Gym Prepares You to Throw. It Doesn't Replace Throwing.

Many baseball players spend the off-season getting stronger in the gym, hoping it will improve their throwing performance and prepare their arm for baseball season. But when the first few throwing sessions arrive, it’s common for their arm to feel sore, heavy, or just not ready at the start. It’s easy to wonder, “I’ve been training all winter - why doesn’t my arm feel ready?” The answer is simple: the gym prepares you to throw, but it doesn’t replace throwing.

Why Strength Isn’t Enough

Don’t get me wrong, the gym is fantastic when it comes to training for baseball players. The gym builds muscular strength and power, muscle mass, and even improves the strength of tendons and bones. These adaptations raise your physical capacity and prepare your body to better tolerate the demands of baseball. Overall, this increases your ability to produce force and perform.

‍ ‍But throwing isn’t just about strength - its a skill with physical demands that can only be developed by throwing.

Why Throwing Is Different

Throwing a baseball is a very unique and specific skill. It involves the fastest rotational speeds in sport and enormous eccentric forces as the body rapidly decelerates the arm after ball release. This involves not just strength, but efficient mechanics with proper timing, coordination, and sequencing of the entire body. No gym exercise reproduces all of those simultaneously. I love using medicine ball throws, explosive movements, plyometrics, and heavy eccentrics as part of my rehab programming for baseball players. These exercises help bridge the gap because they expose the body to high forces and fast movements. But they still don’t reproduce the unique demands of throwing.

‍ ‍No exercise recreates throwing as well as throwing itself. Think of the gym and throwing as two separate forms of training. The gym develops the physical qualities that support throwing, while throwing develops the specific movement patterns and tissue adaptations required to throw. They’re complementary, but neither replaces the other.

Our bodies adapt specifically to the stresses we place on them. If we squat regularly, our lower body will certainly get stronger, but we’ll also get really good and efficient at squatting. If you train for 100m sprints, you’re going to get really good at short-distance sprinting, but this won’t translate to being able to run a marathon. So when you throw consistently, your arm gradually adapts to tolerate the unique speeds and forces experienced with throwing. These adaptations cannot be fully developed any other way.

This is the reason players often feel sore when they first begin throwing after an off-season despite working out in the gym. You may be physically stronger coming into the season, but your arm hasn’t experienced the unique forces of throwing for months. Even players who continue throwing during the off-season often see a rapid increase in throwing volume and intensity once preseason begins. Your arm simply needs time to adapt to the demands of throwing.

The Gym and Throwing Work Together

By all means, continue to work out in the gym. Lift heavy weights, build strength, build power, and incorporate your lower body and core to really get the most out of your throwing. But don’t expect the gym to completely prepare your arm for game demands. A gradual throwing progression is what teaches your arm to tolerate the unique demands of throwing.

‍ ‍The gym builds the qualities that support throwing. Throwing builds the specific adaptations required to throw.

What Should a Healthy Throwing Arm Feel Like?

We often assume that a healthy throwing arm should feel perfect. No soreness, tightness, or stiffness. So when our shoulder or elbow starts to ache after throwing, it’s easy to wonder if something is wrong. But that expectation isn’t realistic. A healthy throwing arm isn’t always a pain-free throwing arm.

First, it is important to realize that throwing a baseball, especially when pitching, is stressful on the arm. Humans evolved to throw, but not necessarily to throw a 5oz baseball at nearly 100 mph, 100 times every few days. Every throw places tremendous forces on the shoulder and elbow that are unique to throwing, making it hard to adapt to this outside of actual throwing.

Think about Usain Bolt and sprinting. We can’t expect someone trying to run as fast as humanly possible to finish every training session feeling completely fresh. Pitching is no different. Pitching places enormous stress on the arm, so some soreness is a normal consequence of asking your body to perform at such a high level.

The key question then becomes, is this behaving like normal throwing soreness? I touched upon this before but a general feeling of soreness or fatigue without a clear onset that settles within a day or two is what we’re looking for. This soreness is thought to come from fatigue in the muscles that repeatedly absorb and produce the high forces required for throwing. Once you’re done throwing and given the opportunity to rest, the soreness subsides as you recover. Your arm can be entirely healthy and prepared for the demands of throwing and still have some degree of soreness.

There is going to be some variability in how our arm feels game-to-game due to the many factors that can affect performance. Healthy throwing arms are going to have good days where everything feels smooth and effortless, and healthy throwing arms are going to have bad days. Healthy throwing arms can get sore or feel tight and stiff.

‍ ‍Healthy throwing arms recover.

Setting the right expectations is one of the best ways to avoid unnecessary worry. A healthy throwing arm isn’t one that never gets sore - it’s one that tolerates throwing, recovers well, and is ready to do it again. Don’t judge your arm by how it feels immediately after one outing. Judge it by how it responds over the next day or two, and by the overall trend across weeks of throwing. If your arm isn’t recovering the way you’d expect - or you’re unsure whether what you’re feeling is normal - then that’s a good time to book an assessment. The goal isn’t just to diagnose an injury, but to help you understand what’s normal, what’s not, and how to keep throwing with confidence.

How to Build a Better Arm Care Program

There are many exercise programs out there billed as arm care programs. Most of these rely heavily on bands or light dumbbell exercises, like the Thrower’s 10. These programs can be great for the early stages of rehab after an injury or surgery, but if you really want to strengthen your throwing arm, arm care needs to involve more than just bands and external rotations. Here are some things I think you should consider as part of your arm care routine.

Full Body Strength Matters for Throwing

Throwing and pitching are full body movements. Power starts with the legs and is transferred through the core, shoulder girdle, and ends at the wrist. Think of cracking a whip: the momentum starts at the handle, but the snap comes at the very end- that’s ball release. If you’re already doing some shoulder exercises but not incorporating your core and trunk, you’re missing out on some major development.

Compound Exercises Build a Stronger Throwing Arm

We typically think of arm care as isolation exercises for the rotator cuff, but any exercise involving movement of the shoulder is going to get the rotator cuff firing. Compound, multi-joint exercises allow you to train multiple muscles at once and allow for heavier loading. Think various types of rows, chest pressing, overhead pressing, and pull-ups. These exercises can help you build a lot of strength.

Rotator Cuff Training for Baseball Players

When most people think of rotator cuff training, they think of bands and light dumbbells. But the rotator cuff muscles are still muscles, and they can usually tolerate more load than people think. I also like training them in positions that better reflect throwing - around shoulder height and with a straighter arm to mimic ball release. Lateral raises and various T’s are some of my favourites, but I also like face-pulls for external rotation.

Train the Speed and Forces of Throwing

No exercise can fully recreate and prepare you for the forces generated during throwing, except for throwing itself. But power-based movements and eccentrics can still prepare the arm well because they emphasize speed and high force generation. Medicine balls are a favourite tool of mine, but you can also do traditional resistance exercises with lighter weight and higher speed. For eccentric exercises, you’re focusing on a slow, controlled lowering of the weight- these can create high levels of tension and are especially useful for building strength and force tolerance, but can also be very fatiguing.

Don’t Ignore the Biceps, Triceps and Forearm

The rotator cuff gets all of the attention, but don’t forget the other muscles. The biceps and triceps both attach into the shoulder socket, and therefore play a role in throwing. The biceps are especially important, as it acts as a 5th rotator cuff muscle providing extra stability, but also controls the elbow as we extend to ball release. The forearm muscles, especially the flexor muscles, are garnering more attention recently as a way to help mitigate elbow injuries like UCL tears.

Shoulder Mobility Still Matters

Throwing requires you to have excellent shoulder mobility, and this can decrease following a throwing session. Working on overhead mobility and external rotation through the pectoral and latissimus muscles can help restore range of motion loss over the course of a game and season.

Progressive Throwing is Part of Arm Care

We typically think of arm care as shoulder strengthening exercises, but we would be remiss if we didn’t consider the overall load and stress on the arm, with throwing being one of the biggest contributors. Here we want to make sure we avoid spikes in throwing volume and intensity by programming a progressive increase, and then allowing enough time between sessions.

Recovery is Part of Arm Care Too

It can feel like you always need to be doing something, but doing nothing can be just as important (link to blog). A workout is only as good as your ability to recover from it. Make sure you’re getting enough sleep, nutrition, hydration and relaxation (link to other blog) to support all of the work you’re putting in. A fatigued, overworked muscle is more prone to injury.

When Strength Testing Can Help

If you’re playing at a higher level and looking to up your game, or are currently dealing with an injury or pain with throwing, it would be valuable to get your shoulder strength tested to see if there are any deficits. In my experience, baseball players are often lacking strength in external rotation (relative to body weight and internal rotation), scaption (lateral raise) and grip. Testing can help identify where an athlete may need more attention instead of just guessing.

How to Build an Arm Care Routine

This may seem like a lot to consider, but arm care doesn’t need to be its own separate workout. It can be spread throughout your week depending on your schedule and training goals. Power exercises can be added early in sessions, compound lifts already train many important muscle groups, and a few targeted shoulder and forearm exercises can fill in the gaps. For example, grip strength can be added by trying to squeeze barbells or dumbbells as hard as you can or by emphasizing finger grip during certain exercises. The goal isn’t to cram everything into one day - it’s to consistently expose your arm to the demands of throwing over time.

This also isn’t to say I don’t like resistance bands or light weights. These tools can have their place, especially as part of your warm-up, or if you’re looking to get some time under tension with slow, controlled exercises as part of a lighter training day. The problem is when these tools ARE your arm care, and not just one part of it.

Final Thoughts on Arm Care for Baseball Players

Don’t think of arm care as just exercises for your shoulder; think of it as trying to build the strongest, most resilient arm you can. This includes full body strength, compound upper body exercises, shoulder and arm exercises specific to throwers, adequate mobility, progressive throwing and proper recovery. As much as I listed some go-to favourite exercises of mine, there really is no single right way- find exercises that target what you need and fit the demands of throwing. Stick to a routine, perform it consistently, and you should see your arm health improve. Arm care doesn’t need to be complicated.

Why Your Arm Is Sore After Throwing (What’s Normal and When to Worry)

It’s common for baseball and softball players, especially pitchers, to experience arm soreness after throwing. Even when you’ve built up properly, your arm can still feel fatigued or achy after a game or bullpen session. This type of soreness is different from injury-related pain. It reflects the physical demands of throwing, not necessarily a problem. Understanding why your arm gets sore can help you manage it properly and recognize when something more serious might be going on.

Why Throwing Is So Stressful on the Arm

Even with good mechanics, strength, conditioning and recovery, pitching is still stressful on the arm. This is due to the speed and forces generated during the throwing motion, particularly in the later phases. At ball release, the arm experiences a strong pulling (distractive) force, often exceeding body weight, that the shoulder muscles must control. Repeating this over the course of a game places a significant demand on the arm, even in well-conditioned athletes.

What Causes Arm Soreness After Throwing? (DOMS Explained)

Delayed onset muscle soreness is the stiffness and aching you feel after a new activity or a significant increase in workload. While we don’t fully understand it, the leading theory is that it results from small amounts of muscle damage and the body’s inflammatory response. Eccentric muscle actions, where muscles work to slow movement, are a major contributor. In throwing, the muscles of the shoulder girdle and arm work eccentrically to decelerate the arm after ball release. Over the course of an outing, this repeated demand can lead to soreness.

Does Lactic Acid Cause Arm Soreness?

Lactic acid is often blamed for muscle soreness, but this idea is outdated. Lactate (the correct term) does not cause the fatigue or burning sensation during activity, and it doesn’t explain soreness the next day. Lactate is cleared from the body relatively quickly. In pitching, the amount produced during a single throw is minimal and is typically cleared before the next pitch.

When Arm Soreness Is Normal (and When It’s Not)

It is normal for your shoulder and arm to be sore following pitching, and even into the next day. This is usually a general, fatigued soreness that improves within a day or two. Pay closer attention if you notice sharp or pinpoint pain, pain during throwing, loss of velocity or control, or soreness that continues to worsen over time. Soreness doesn’t mean something is wrong- it means your body was challenged, and this happens every time you step on the mound. But if that challenge exceeds what you’re prepared for, that’s when problems can develop.

Recovery Principles

There’s no magic cure for DOMS. The best approach is good, basic recovery: adequate sleep, nutrition and hydration, and appropriate spacing between throwing sessions. Lght physical activity can sometimes provide some temporary relief, but adding more work to an already fatigued arm usually just adds more stress. Recovery should support the system, not further stress it.

Some arm and shoulder soreness after throwing is completely normal. It reflects the high demands placed on the arm, even when you’re prepared well. Being sore isn’t a requirement for a good outing, and it’s not something to chase or avoid entirely. The key is understanding the difference between normal soreness and warning signs of overload. With proper training, recovery and monitoring, post-throwing soreness is simply part of the process, not a problem to fix.

Back Outside? Why Baseball Players Get Hurt Early in the Season (and How to Avoid It)

It’s that time of year again. The days are getting longer, the weather is improving, and baseball and softball teams across Ireland are starting to move from indoor sessions back outside. And with that comes a pretty common pattern. You’re throwing a bit harder, taking more swings, and running a bit more; it feels good to be back on a full field again. For the most part, nothing feels wrong in the moment. But then the next day, or a few sessions later, you start to notice a little bit of soreness, maybe something more specific, or something that lingers and starts to affect how you play. If that’s you, you haven’t done anything wrong, but your body is telling you something - it’s just not always obvious what.

Why Injuries Happen Early in a Baseball Season

The start of the baseball and softball season is one of the most common times for injuries to show up. Even at the professional level, a large portion of injuries happen during spring training and early in the season. This is because the demands of the game change quickly. Indoor training has its place, but it comes with less space, lower intensity, and more controlled movement. When you move outside, everything ramps up at once - throwing distance increases, effort increases, volume often increases, and the overall unpredictability of the game comes back. Even if you’ve been training all winter, this is still a jump that happens all at once, and your body has to deal with all of it at the same time.

It’s Not Damage- It’s a Load Problem

A lot of these early-season issues get labelled as “overuse injuries”, which can make it sound like something is worn out or damaged. Most of the time, though, that is not what is happening. A better way to think about it is this: your body is dealing with a mismatch between what you’re asking of it and what it’s currently prepared for. Your body adapts to the loads you put through it, which is the purpose of training. However, these adaptations take time. When your throwing, hitting, and running all increase at once, your body just hasn’t caught up yet. It becomes a matter of “too much, too soon.”

Why This Happens Even If You Trained All Winter

It can be frustrating when you have been training consistently, doing some throwing and hitting, and still have something flare up. Even if you’ve been doing baseball activities indoors, it’s more about what you are preparing for. Indoor work doesn’t fully prepare you for full-distance throws, game-speed effort and repeated high-intensity movements. So when these show up all at once, the jump in demand can be enough to tip things over.

Soreness vs. Injury: What’s Normal?

Some soreness early in the season is completely normal. That general, slightly stiff feeling a day or two after training is just your body responding to something new. When talking about overuse injuries though, it tends to feel a bit different:

• More specific to one area

• More noticeable with certain movements

• Sharper and/or more painful

• Something that builds over a few sessions

Even with these symptoms, it still doesn’t necessarily mean a tissue is damaged. In a lot of cases, it’s better to think of this as a sensitive or irritated area, rather than a broken one.

How to Avoid the ‘Too Much, Too Soon’ Trap

This is where things get tricky, because no one is counting every throw or swing, and there is no perfect formula for how much is “too much.” But there are a few principles that go a long way:

• You want to build, not spike. That means letting your throwing, hitting, and running increase gradually instead of all at once.

• The point at which you’re starting to feel some soreness or fatigue in a body part is usually a good time to start to wind down from activities for that session. It’s usually better to nip things in the bud.

• It’s tempting to go all out in those first few outdoor sessions, especially when you’re feeling good. But maxing out early is an easy way to create that mismatch between load and tolerance.

• Early on, consistency matters more than intensity. Getting regular exposure to the demands of the game is what helps your body adapt.

• Adding some basic strength work alongside your training can help build tolerance over time (especially if you’ve had issues in the past), but it doesn’t need to be complicated.

• It’s worth expecting some soreness. Trying to avoid it completely usually leads to doing too little, which doesn’t help your preparation either.

What To Do If Pain Starts to Show Up

If you do start to notice something more specific or limiting, the goal isn’t to ignore it - but it’s also not to shut everything down. Most of the time, the best approach is to adjust your activity rather than stop it. That might look like reducing how much you’re throwing or hitting, lowering the intensity or modifying what you’re doing for a short period. From there, you can gradually build things back up once it settles. It’s a simple idea, but an important one: settle things down first, then build them back up. If it’s not settling or is starting to affect how you’re able to play, that’s usually a good time to get it checked out by someone who understands baseball and softball.

You’re Not Broken

The start of the season is always a bit of a shock to the system. More volume, more intensity, more effort, all at once. This is a really common part of the early season, even for players who have done a lot of things right leading into it. If something flares up, it doesn’t mean you’re fragile or injury-prone, or you’ve done something wrong. More often than not, it just means your body hasn’t caught up to what you’re asking of it yet, and it needs a bit more time to get there.

If you’re not sure how to balance training and recovery, or something starts to feel off, that’s exactly what I help with - especially for baseball and softball athletes navigating the start of the season.