Fixing A Late Arm Action | Pitching Drill Series

Here's a crazy before and after progress in one session with remote athlete Johnny Davis.

As you'll notice from the first clip, he had a major arm timing issue where his arm was very late upon initiation of torso rotation. This led to him achieving late and limited shoulder layback, and effectively applying force to the baseball over a very limited range of motion.

After testing his mobility to make sure it wasn't a movement restriction (it wasn't), we got to work with some patterning drills and took a backwards chaining approach.

First step was to help him feel the arm relax into layback and pull into release around the plane of his shoulders. He really wanted to muscle this up and drop his elbow, so we had to emphasize low effort and relaxing.

The arm, we explained, should lag behind the shoulders as they begin to rotate. This will further intensify the scap load and stretch the pec, which will then reflexively fire into release. Muscling up early will prevent getting into these deeper positions.

Later we added in the full arm path using a figure 8 drill and cued him to capture momentum on the downswing of the drill. This helped him merge the two patterns together and feel much more fluid and athletic.

From there, we added in the 1lb plyo ball and he transferred it directly to his throws from the Indian club.

The next step was adding in the lower half, so we started with the Indian club to cue this relaxed layback and pulling into release, coordinating the downswing with the back leg. He got it fairly quickly, and was then able to transfer it to the plyo ball throws.

As he gets more comfortable over the next sessions, we will drop the ball weight to the 5-7 oz range and challenge him to hold the patterns. The main cue for him is low effort, patient arm action and relax.

He'll need to internalize this new timing.

His feedback to me was the huge stretch and contraction he felt in his pec, feeling his scap really retract and tilt behind him, and feeling like his arm was super late and whippy.

He's applying force to the ball over nearly twice the range of motion as in the before clips, and displaying far better layback. No mobility work needed.


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