Hunter Bigge Pitches Fast(er)
The story I’m about to tell you is exceptional. It proves what is possible.
Hunter Bigge is a Harvard alum and minor league pitcher for the Cubs. For the entirety of the 2021-22 off-season, his max velocity hovered between 91-93 mph. He also had shoulder pain. Then he had two sessions at Apiros, one with me and one with Aaron Quinn. When he returned to the mound the next day, his velocity jumped to 94-96 and his pain disappeared.
So, what happened? Did we sprinkle fairy dust on his arm? Maybe we gave him some of that special Space Jam juice?
Aaron and I did three things:
We helped him unlearn popular and useless concepts.
We replaced those with ones we know to be true and effective.
We made him aware of behaviors that held him back.
When I asked about the faster pitches, he had this to say, “Best I’ve felt after a [throwing] session, not exhausted." He continued, saying it was "the craziest pitching experience I’ve ever had. I was mind blown that I threw way harder and wasn’t super amped [up].”
Let me tell you Hunter’s story.
SCAPULAR LOADING
In our first session, he revealed to me that he had some chronic shoulder pain. Nothing crazy, but not something he could ignore. During most evaluations, I know where to start within the first ten minutes. With Hunter, I didn’t. Even thirty minutes later, there was nothing that jumped out to me as a problem. That’s rare. So why the discomfort?
His discomfort had to be due to either something in his pitching mechanics and/or a specific capacity of his muscles/tendons. From the pitching videos he texted me, I had a suspicion it was how he cocked his arm to throw, but needed to see it in person. Turns out, I was right. Watch the video below to see what I saw, hear my explanation, and see the changes we made. (You need to watch the video for the next paragraph to make any sense.)
As I mentioned in that linked clip, it’s commonly said that throwing, or hitting a volleyball, should be whip-like. Yet the techniques and cues prescribed by coaches inhibit whippy motion—which is only one of many paradoxical behaviors I see within the coaching realm. The end of the whip snaps as a product of inertia, meaning it stays at rest until acted upon by the handle. The handle is (almost always) the hips rotating. The shoulder and arm just need to be in relatively good positions to receive the force from the hips so they advance forward. What “good” means is highly contentious throughout all sports. Some people think what Hunter used to do was great. But Aaron, I, and all of our success stories, would say otherwise.
Sucked-In Stomach Strikes Again!
If you’ve followed me on Instagram for a while, you know I am not a fan of sucked in stomachs. Which means you can probably guess what I thought when I caught this frame of Hunter’s throwing: Me no likey. Must change.
I don’t like it for a number of reasons. In no particular order, they are:
No other animal on earth does it.
No babies or indigenous tribe members do it.
If you want to cut down a tree, you “suck in its stomach” with an ax.
Nature deals with forces and optimizes volume to surface area ratios by using cylindrical shapes. See: cylindrical bones, limbs, necks, spines, root systems, tree trunks, plant stems, and molars. Hollow out any of these cylinders and you’ll see the system fail.
By principle alone, if sucking in one’s stomach was a useful strategy to stabilize the spine, then we would have evolved that way, and applying a tourniquet to a thigh should stabilize the femur.
All right, enough of that. Back to Hunter. If his obliques aren’t tugging his ribs to keep them flush with his abdominal wall, they aren’t helping him rotate and throw as much as they could. Showing him this image and asking him to simply push his stomach out more was enough to improve the shape of his torso. We did several other things to progress his body and his throwing, but that’s reserved for sessions with Aaron or I, and taught in my course.
CONCLUSION
These two simple but fundamental changes improved his throwing speed and sensations. All in all, Hunter had just four sessions before he left for spring training. Two with me and two with Aaron. How many practice and movement sessions has he had in the last year trying to remedy these problems? Countless.
I’ll be the first person to tell you that just because he made these great improvements once doesn’t mean we had solved the problem. We need to see sustained improvement over time. And we have. Hunter's pitching velocity is consistently higher. He reached 95-97 mph against batters in spring training. His shoulder feels better and better, and he has to exert less energy to do it all. These are huge wins and the ones we aim for at Apiros.
Hunter graduated with a physics degree from Harvard. He’s a smart dude. I loved using physics language with him. He had tried to solve his problems several ways with several different coaches, but because perpetually pinching shoulder blades and sucking in stomachs are so pervasive, no one noticed what he needed and his problem persisted. As soon as I explained it to him in terms of physics, a fundamental framework, it clicked. Then he wondered the same thing all Apiros athletes do: Why aren’t more people doing this?
Here’s one of the cultural problems I’m trying to solve: Not enough movement coaches understand skills and not enough skill coaches understand useful movements. Aaron and I were able to solve his problem and pain quickly because we have an understanding of pitching skill and know how humans evolved to move. Hunter helped too, as he was already an exceptional athlete who could learn and adapt fast.
How many other athletes are out there, needlessly suffering or stuttering through easily solvable problems? (Too many.) How many other athletes are like Hunter, smart, adaptable, and ready to change? I’d bet there are thousands, if not tens of thousands of athletes who could evolve overnight like he did. They just need coaches who can guide them.
If you’re a coach and want to learn this stuff too, I have a book coming out as well as a course for coaches. If you’re an athlete like Hunter, apply for training.