Reduce the Risk of Baseball Injury
In performance training, there is something called the Acute to Chronic Workload Ratio (ACWR). This ratio is calculated by dividing the previous week’s total training load by the average of the previous 28 day’s training load.
Previous week’s total load / Average of previous 28 day’s workload = ACWR
The sweet spot, to reduce the likelihood of injury, is an ACWR of 0.7-1.3.
What this basically means is you don’t want your training (aka throwing amount and intensity) to spike too quickly, and you also don’t want it to drop off too much either.
The crazy thing I just learned was that keeping the ACWR between 0.7-1.3 could reduce the likelihood of getting injured by 15X!
This is huge when it comes to talking about ways to reduce injury risk!
“So am i supposed to do a math equation every week to know if I’m doing this right?”
I know most of y’all would not want to break out the calculator every week (I wouldn’t either) so below I have three points that would probably work as general guidelines for the Spring and Summer.
My concerns:
Too quick of a ramp up between tryouts and games for high school players. If you aren’t already throwing, you are behind and better get going!
Winter Break and Spring Break. While these can be great to get away from baseball for a few days, it might cause a risk of injury if you stop throwing all together. My encouragement would be to continue to throw at least a few days during these breaks.
When Summer Ball gets going, it is critical to have a plan and to stick to it! We have always known that throwing for multiple teams is a bad idea, and this study might give insight as to why. If you pitch for multiple teams the ACWR is going to go up and increase the risk of injury! Don’t do it!
Don’t be the guy that gets hurt because you don’t follow this advice! I want y’all to stay healthy!
One extra game is not going to make or break your baseball career.
-Dr. Caleb
P.S. If you want to learn how we keep baseball players healthy during the season, click here.
The numbers I used in this study were from this article.
