What is the OAI Program?

Welcome to the Overhead Athletic Institute

What is the OAI Program?

Our program has been created, adapted, altered, and perfected through years of clinical and practical experience rehabilitating and training injured and non-injured athletes to perform better and more safely on the field

In the years preceding our program, we investigated, witnessed, and scrutinized every program we could find looking for individuals who truly understood sport specific training and injury prevention in overhead athletes. During our investigation it became painstakingly clear that there were many individuals who just branded themselves as experts in the field that had created programs which were questionable in their validity as to actually being able to accomplish what they claimed their programs could do.

Our program utilizes the principles of core stability, mobility super imposed on rotational stability, functional power, plyometric activation, and skill specific speed.

Training one before the other can lead to compensations that actually decrease your ability to produce speed and eventually reinforce bad habits. These bad habits are exactly why people end up in physical therapy with RTC injuries, UCL strains (Tommy John), Little Leaguers elbow, bicep tendonitis, labral tears, and a host of other injuries related to bad biomechanics.

Perfect performance of our exercises and continual self-assessment are the only way that you can maximize your outcome with our program. We will show how to do the exercise, why we are doing it the way we are doing it, why it is important, and how it is related to the overhead throwing motion.

The key to velocity is biomechanics

Each athlete is unique, but the formula for throwing the ball efficiently is the same. Where you create velocity is a product of how you use your body throughout the individual phases of the throwing motion. Understanding what to do and when needs to be understood and felt by the athlete so they can reproduce it without thinking about it. That requires perfect repetition. Kinesthetic awareness is the minds ability to know what the body is doing and where it is in three dimensional space. The throwing motion is a complex combined movement pattern. The mind teaches the body and the body teaches the mind. We learn perfect performance through repetition and success. At the OAI we understand what positions you need to repeat and why you need to repeat them.

Why OAI?

In order to train a biomechanically efficient throwing motion it is necessary to understand the importance of each individual phase.

Each phase leads to the next. Our BSMA evaluation and corrective exercise program train the entire athlete. We give athletes the tools to prepare their body for the movements required to deliver the ball towards its intended target without structural or functional deficits. Our phase specific program creates the correct neuromuscular coordination required to throw much harder. Understanding the forces on the shoulder and elbow during each of the stress producing phases gives us the knowledge to train YOU!

There are core absolutes in the throwing motion that must be understood and perfected to allow an athlete to maximize their performance.

Rotator Cuff Complete (Free Exercises)

Our mission is to keep athletes safe and this is just one way we can prove it to you!

The rotator cuff and scapula make up the shoulder complex. The stresses of the throwing motion on the shoulder are greater than any other athletic activity.

The muscles of the RTC are very small and perform a very specific task.

During the throwing motion they are responsible for stabilizing and centering the head of the humerus in the socket.

What is the OAI Program?

Welcome to the Overhead Athletic Institute