Why OAI

Welcome to the Overhead Athletic

Why OAI

We believe that an exercise and conditioning program that is based on clinical experience with athletes and rehabilitating them to full functional status substantiates ourselves as the obvious choice for individuals looking to improve performance on the field. We are certain that after you initiate our program, you will see the irrefutable difference between programs designed by individuals that claim to know exercise and conditioning principles and professionals whose job it is to rehabilitate injured athletes.

Our program is based on neurophysiology, postural restoration, biomechanics, periodicity, sports specific performance enhancement, and injury prevention.

Strength has been thoroughly investigated in clinical orthopedic research and shown not to be related to the speed of movement. To improve pitching speed, it is necessary to train the body for speed. Simply put, the only way to increase the speed of the arm and body is to train it to move faster. The best way to train for this speed is to be functionally strong throughout your entire kinetic chain. In order to accelerate a ball efficiently you need functional stability. Then you must superimpose skill specific mobility on that core rotational stability. This is one of the main principles in orthopedic physical therapy. Our entire program has been designed by observing and understanding all of the compensations that we see in Overhead Athletes’ throwing motions that rob them of power and make them susceptible to injury. We start every athlete with a Sports Specific Functional Movement Analysis (SSFMA) that gives you an opportunity to see your own weaknesses and use corrective exercises we have designed to eliminate those imbalances.

I believe it is impossible to train an athlete safely in the throwing motion without it.

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF WHEN PICKING AN OVERHEAD THROWING PROGRAM?

There are individuals on the web right now former professional pitchers, college athletes, strength and conditioning coaches that are all trying to invalidate each other in order to substantiate their programs. Many of these individuals use disparaging comments about the specificity of speed training, weighted ball usage, weighted vests, how none of them work to create velocity and then offer a program of weight training or conditioning that is non-specific and in no way related to the necessary muscular balance and functional stability required to accelerate a ball with any force. They also site clinical research to validate the programs they offer. We purchased these programs, contacted these individuals and inquired as to the relevance of the clinical research to their programs and found a surprising lack of understanding of the principles behind the research they cited or the intended purpose of the clinical research in the first place. We find this interesting that the same individuals that say weight training doesn’t work offer weight-training programs. There is only one way to accelerate a ball efficiently and that is to have rotational core stability. Exercises that have nothing to do with rotational core stability do not correlate to baseball and have no functional transference to the movement patterns necessary to throw the ball effectively.

Some of these other websites offer video analysis. We were very interested in their ability to recognize functional deficits and biomechanical faults in the throwing motion.

We sent them video of a few of our athletes who had sustained injuries, been discharged from physical therapy, and we now participating in our OAI throwing program. We were contacted back and given informal instruction that did not address any of the compensations or mechanical insufficiencies that we had recognized. What we received was a generic application of imitating professionals that were viewed by these individuals to have correct mechanics. Many of the faults of the throwers that we sent in were obvious from a clinical perspective. We were not surprised to find out that these individuals did not understand the physiology of the throwing motion, nor did they understand how each of the phases of the throwing motion are connected and that many of the compensations we observed were a result of structural and functional strength deficits that predisposed the athlete to the compensations that they had in their throwing motion. This was of great concern to us and it should be to you as well. Just because someone says they know throwing mechanics, have worked with pitchers before, or have a website doesn’t mean they know precisely what they are talking about.

It is impossible to just tell an athlete that they should throw like Josh Bard, Roger Clemens, or Greg Maddux without first addressing weaknesses or imbalances that need to be corrected with the clinical application of exercise.