Alan Jaeger & Randy Sullivan - Return to Throwing Manual & Schedule 2.0

[00:00:04] Speaker A: Welcome to the abca's podcast. I'm your host, ryan brownlee. If you run a baseball facility, Swift is the only piece of software you need to manage and grow your business. From scheduling and payments to memberships and retail, Swift takes care of it all. Your coaches can use the app to manage their schedule on the go, and your customers have a sleek and fast way to book online lessons, rentals, camps, packages and more all in one spot. That's why hundreds of the best baseball facilities across the country rely on Swift. And now, with their upcoming AI Front desk, you can literally put your business on autopilot. Get started in minutes@run SwiftApp download. That's runswiftapp.com ABCA spend less time behind the Screen and more time on the field this episode is sponsored by Netting Pros. Netting Professionals are improving programs one facility at a time. Netting Professionals specializes in the design, fabrication and installation of custom netting for backstops, batting cages, dugouts, BP screens and ball carts. They also design and install digital graphic wall padding, windscreen turf, turf protectors, dugout benches, dugout cubbies, and more. Netting Professionals is an official partner of the ABCA and continues to provide quality products and services to many high school, college and professional fields, facilities and stadiums throughout the country. Netting Professionals are improving programs one facility at a time. Contact them today at 627 oh7 or infoettingpros.com visit them online at www.nettingpros.com or check out NettingPros on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn for all their latest products and projects. Make sure to let CEO Will Minor know that the ABCA sent you. Now on to the podcast. Next up on the ABCA podcast are Alan Jagger and Randy Sullivan. Jaeger is the CEO founder of Jaeger Sports and has been on the forefront of arm and mental health in the baseball community for over 30 years. Sullivan is the CEO founder of the Florida Baseball armory, author of eight books on baseball pitching, and also has over 30 years of experience in rehab and high performance of throwing athletes. They join us this week to discuss their free resource Return to Throwing manual and Schedule 2.0. Let's welcome Alan Jagger and Randy Sullivan to the podcast here with Alan Yeager, a longtime friend of the ABCA and I think probably fourth or fifth time you've been on the podcast with me, Randy Sullivan, first timer here, but CEO of the Florida Armory, which is great. Sign behind you by the way, but thank you for jumping on. [00:03:09] Speaker B: Appreciate you having us man. Thanks a lot. [00:03:11] Speaker C: Yeah Rhino. [00:03:13] Speaker A: Alan, how was the softball conference Amazing. [00:03:17] Speaker C: You know, it's cool because, you know, going to the ABC all these years, you know, it's cool to watch softball grow just like the ABC has grown. And so this year was, it was phenomenal. The exhibit hall was three or four times bigger than it was like five years ago when we were last at the nfca. And yeah. So, you know, it's just like baseball in the sense that it's cool watching the game grow. And it's also amazing like the ABCA where you meet so many new people across so many, you know, cross sections of the game and now it's just very inspiring, man. [00:03:49] Speaker A: We have a great working relationship with them actually. Fun fact, their executive director and Craig, our executive director were at Michigan together a long time ago. [00:03:59] Speaker C: No way. [00:04:00] Speaker A: Yeah, well, way back in the old days. Randy, Fun fact. Jake Odorizzi and Kyle Gibson both turned me down when I was a recruiting coordinator at Iowa. And then just Verlanders. My last year at JMU was Verlander's sophomore year at Old Dominion. We actually beat him. We beat him his sophomore year, but his. We won the league his freshman year, but we played them last. We hadn't seen him. It's a great story for people who don't know Verlander's story. He got mono his senior year of high school and so he didn't get drafted but he showed up fully formed at Old Dominion. Like when we saw him at the end of the year, he was 95 to 97 with breaking ball and change up that he has. And he struck us out 17 times and there was probably six professional hitters in that lineup that we had from freshmen to seniors. And I've never seen left handed hitters miss a change up. Yeah, that much like his change up. His Last pitch was 95. They wore him out. I mean he still kind of did. He, he did back then what he does now. It was early. You had to get to him, but if you didn't, you had no shot. Yeah, yeah, no shot. So he's a great guy. Jumping on here with me. [00:05:04] Speaker C: This is good. [00:05:05] Speaker A: You know, and, and you guys, this return to throwing manual 2.0 that you guys put together, I think and you know, and Alan, you and I have talked about this, I think as old baseball, the, the return to throwing protocol that your players would get after they got injured, it just didn't seem like it was good because of one, the initial throwing part is a lot, but then there's a lot of days off with it. And I think the other thing that sticks out is towards the end of this, there's a lot of no exercise days on the days that they throw. And I don't know what your guys thoughts are. When you just look at that blanket program that your players would get back then, it just didn't make sense in how you would actually train the arm to get. Get back healthy or, or injured or otherwise. What are your guys thoughts on that? Randy, you go first. [00:05:56] Speaker B: Yeah, we noticed. Al and I talked about it for years and you know, as a physical therapist for 30 years, we would get the orthopedic return to throwing protocol. And honestly it was the same universally for everybody. And it seems like it had been copied so many times that it was like crooked on the page and it was like old like. And you could barely read the writing. And Al and I talked about it like it was written. Now this, my business partner doesn't like when I tell this joke, but it was written when it was still okay to smoke cigarettes in the dugout. It's like a long time ago, right? And so how could it stay pertinent for that long when nothing changed, right? And so we began to talk about it. We thought, okay, I think we can do better. And one of the big pieces about it was that Alan mentioned this, that it just at 120ft, it just kind of stopped. And. And then you're supposed to go to the mound from there. And so Alan has a really funny story about where that arbitrary number came from that he can tell you. But I think that what we found that the protocol needed was first of all, it needed more clarity. It was just like one page with this many throws from this many feet for this many reps. It needed some clarity and it needed to be more holistic so that we're not just training the throwing, but you're training the body to prepare to throw and you're doing the recovery and the arm care and the preparation and the strength training that goes with it. So we kind of added all that within collaboration with a few other experts in the business. Kind of put in a holistic component to it. Made it more clear like, what's a throw? What's a pro hop? What's a massage throw? Alan did a great job of defining all that stuff and making it really clear that this is what you want to do. But in the same tone, we also were able to integrate a lot of individualization and freedom in the old protocol. The only criteria for advancing was time. And as we know, not everybody recovers at the same rate. Some Guys should go faster, some guys should go slower. And so it allowed us the freedom to individualize and personalize it. You can kind of move forward and back as you need to within the protocol. And then the last thing that I thought was really important was the transitions between phases. And the old protocol were really abrupt. We have a friend named Dr. Marcus Elliott from P3 Sports, and he. I was sitting at dinner with him one night, he said, randy, the number one predictor of injury is the delta. And that means the change. Remember in chemistry class, the delta was the change. And when I looked at that, I thought these changes were happening way too fast. You have to gradually change things. You can't change them abruptly. And that transition from 120 to the mountain, we thought was really quick. Even the changes between phases, you're going from this many feet to this many feet to this many feet. And so we integrated in some smooth transitions, what we call sort of just cool down mound pitches. Like, after you get out to a certain length, let's get used to getting back on the slope. One of the things about the old returning product, return to throwing protocol was that you were just never on the mound for so long that guys would get weird movement patterns because they hadn't been on slope in so long. So we start gradually introducing the mound as they go on and kind of feather in while we increase the distance, get them onto the mound gradually, and that way it's a little less abrupt transition. I think it was really critical. And then, of course, Alan did a great job of sort of putting it all pen to paper, and then remarkably, just started calling everybody he knows and put together this incredible coalition of people that support it and would help us to integrate it and help us to talk about it and help us to kind of overcome the inertia of, hey, it's working, so why would we change it? And he only, only Alan Jaeger could do that because of his reputation in the business and the friendship that he's made with everybody over the years. So I was just honored to be a part of it. I think it's been really great. We've had several guys go through it from stem to stern, from wire to wire when they got hurt. And it's been incredible. The results we're getting, case by case, just guys are coming out, not coming out where they used to be, like back to previous status, but better than they were before they started. [00:09:52] Speaker A: And what you got to add on that? [00:09:55] Speaker C: Well, I'm going to first start with a mic drop because, you know, it's almost like you can end the podcast now. I'm just, you know, Randy, Randy has this way of talking about complex topics and situations and simplifying it and being so clear. The things I'd add is, it's just hard to add much more. Number one, Randy and I just both believe so much in things like, which I really stole from him, which is variability, changing the release point, changing the body, changing movement patterns, adapting to the athleticism. So there's a section there which I love. It's called what happens beyond 120ft. And to Randy's point, these protocols, whether they're from the west coast or the east coast or in the middle of the country, they seem to all be. We've looked at so many of these from a lot of the top surgeons out there and they mean well. They're not trying to not have a good program out there. But to Randy's point, first of all, they're very, very old. Some of them essentially go back to the genesis of 50 years, 1974, 76 in there. And the main thing for me as someone who's been promoting long toss for 35 years, is that the magic, and that's what the section is called, the magic that happens beyond 120ft. It doesn't mean everybody has to go up to 350. You might have a 14 year old that's going to cap out at 210ft. But especially for athletes that are in college and professional baseball, especially as hard as they're throwing now, you know, a 90 mile an hour fastball essentially at 35, 40 degrees will go 270 to 300ft. So that just gives you a window into how far a ball will travel, like athletically, naturally, with some arc. And so the idea of 120ft for both of us, of course was a massive issue. And then getting them on a mound and what we would consider to be more robotic movements, you know, how much freedom and athleticism are you going to develop when you're throwing the ball only to 120ft, technically on a line like you're not really able to get much air because you're only going up to 120ft. So the piece I'd like to add is that this magic beyond 120ft, which for us is an extra four weeks that we built out, you don't have to go out to 300 plus feet like we built it out to. But man, and to Randy's point, everything we've done is progressive and adaptive and Individualized, so that if you are a 300 foot guy pre surgery, or 240 or 340, we've built that out and we've allotted the amount of time because we do not want you getting near a mound with full intent, really high adrenaline, full intent, until you're fully stretched out, or what we call fully opened up, fully athletic, you've touched your variability of your movements. And then I want to just add one other quick thing, which we'll probably get to anyway, as a byproduct of this podcast. But the reason 2.0 came out is I reached out to Rani. I had an epiphany, which is I was looking at old protocols. I was looking at our protocols even. And everything's based on three days a week to start with. And some protocols are four days a week. And I kept like, part of it is from the. And I know you're a huge meditation guy. You know, one of the principles that when you get into meditation and you really start getting in more into the flow and kind of the Zen of life is that life is really a continuum, right? It's flowing. We can talk about the future and the past. The truth of it is there's really no future and past, so to speak. There's just a flow. And so this idea of shoving three days into seven, because it's an artificial number, right? The earth goes around the sun 365 and a quarter days a year, which is why we have a leap year every fourth year. So now we're arbitrarily trying to fit three days of throwing in seven or four days. And so the other piece that we added, which we love, is that we start out every other day growing. We don't have a week calendar anymore. It's just every other day. And then by week five, because the distance is so short, we then go to a two days on one day off rhythm. And then week nine, which is two full months in, and they're still only out to 90 to maybe 120ft, not that far. We then go to a three days on one day off in that middle day, sort of a deload day. So the point is that this body is loving it because there's this natural rhythm and there's continuity and consistency and so. And that's the ideal way to train. So I think these little adjustments that we made to the 2.0 are actually massive. [00:14:35] Speaker A: Any talk of discomfort in there? I think that was a frustrating thing too, as a coach, because at any point in that protocol if there was any sort of discomfort, they would start back over. And I think that was a frustrating thing as a coach is like even guys that. That didn't have surgery but were banged up and trying to make their way back where our trainers were on that protocol, any sort of discomfort, then they would just completely shut it down. How do you guys address that issue with it? Or Randy, you guys that have gone through and have they had any discomfort at all? [00:15:06] Speaker B: Of course they have. I think part of the problem is that in the traditional approach, we spend 16 weeks of just letting things scar down before we ever even move in what looks like a throw. So in our process, and that scar gets gnarly. And so I used to teach a course on return to throwing rehab for physical therapist, and I had a slide and it showed a guy holding back vomit. And it said, prepare your patient for the moment when they stretch it out and they throw intent with some intent for the first time and they feel a pop. I'm like, the first time it happens, you're going to feel like you're going to throw up, and they're going to feel like they're going to throw up because you think you heard them. But really all it was was scar tissue coming loose that was allowed to organize random during that first 16 weeks. So in our process, we do it, we work really hard on getting the scar to organize better so it's not so gnarled up and we don't have those episodes. But also, you have to remember that pain is neither good nor bad. It's simply information. And it's the body telling you that something has gone away, that we don't want it to go. And so it doesn't mean we stop. It means we reorganize. We take a step back and we go, okay, what are the possible contributors to this pain? Let's eliminate those and let's gradually go out again. We never let what we can't do keep us from what we. From doing what we can. We want to. Want to keep the arm moving, keep it, keep it organizing. And if it tells us that it hurts, we respect it. We listen to it. We back up. We don't stop. We just go, all right, let's nudge up and see if we can get going again. I think we don't need to panic every time we report pain. It's going to happen because of all the scar tissue that forms in that first 16 weeks. And so by. By just listening to the. To the athlet and respecting pain, backing up and Beginning to reorganize movements. Do some other things that maybe don't involve throwing to get him prepared better for his body to support it, but then gradually return it back and try to creep up. We don't start over. We might back up a day or two, but we just kind of ease into it and kind of sneak up on it and let your body organize itself. [00:17:01] Speaker A: How are you attacking the legs along this process too? Because I think that's, that's an issue too with everybody focuses so much on the arm, but they forget about the lower half piece of this too. [00:17:13] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:17:13] Speaker A: So the lower half staying engaged. [00:17:15] Speaker B: Well, I have a lot of thoughts on that. Alan, you, you talk about a lot when you talk about crow hopping and that kind of stuff. So dig into that a little bit if you want. [00:17:23] Speaker C: Yeah, I'll be brief because I want you to dig into it too, Randy. I just wanted to add one piece also to what Randy was talking about, which is one of the most important things we do with our manual is we have this concept called massage throwing. We start off from day one. Another thing about these reprinted, you know, return to throwing programs, they're generally four or five pages long. Some are a little longer, ours is 70. It doesn't mean more pages wins. But there's a 30 page education to. Before you even touch a ball, to Randy's point. And one of the most important things we talk about is what's called massage throwing. And we want, we talk in gory detail about this, about when you first come out and throw, get some air into it, throw with freedom, be athletic. You can even move your arm around, move your body around to your point, Ryan. So that they're building this sort of freedom, range of motion, relaxation, even including the mind. From day one, we talk so much about low intent throwing. Right. Massage swing is what we call it. So the setbacks for us, the pain is so minimized. And if they do have, quote, unquote, some pain, to Randy's point, we're in a position where they can sort of back off. It might be a day or two. The issue with the other protocols is they're so linear. Not that because they're supposed to be linear, but it's just what happens when you come out after not touching the ball for six months and you're in a, you know, you're in a clinic. You know, you're going to tend to throw the ball 30ft away or 45ft away. You're probably going to throw it on a line. You're, you're probably going to throw it pretty firmly. And now all of a sudden you're asking for problems because you're really in a tight world, you know, trying to. Instead of this relaxed world. That's one. As far as the legs go, I mean, Randy will talk more about. I think your question really has more to do with maybe the build up even before throwing. But to Randy's point, we also get deeply into how to, you know, being athletic and using the legs. Early on we talk about, as Randy mentioned, crow hopping, you know, you know, crow hopping off the back leg versus shuffling, you know, getting more ground forces. Right. Getting more support for the arm and getting more athletics. I think that's the piece I want to talk about. I'll let Randy talk maybe more about actually, you know, the training aspect of the lower half before the program starts. [00:19:58] Speaker B: Yeah. So we, we want to get the whole body organized to support the arm. You can't just use your arm and, and one of the problems when you just start throwing, if you're throwing and you're just throwing on a line, you're just kind of trying to use the same mechanics over and over again. And you really don't integrate the lower half until you get further out in distance. One of the things we do is we try to limit degrees of freedom, like control the complexity of the movement a little bit and then gradually release those degrees of freedom. And we use a lot of sort of throwing like activities that don't actually involve throwing to get the body ready. For example, we use med balls, we'll use aqua balls and things like that. We actually did a in in house study where we took the pulse sensors from Driveline. They used to be called modus. We put them on the elbow. We had guys throw baseballs as hard as they could. We had them throw in our training sock with a seven ounce ball, which was what Flysix said was the least amount of stress. And then we had him just do a fake throw with an aqua ball simulated throw. And if, let's say that the regular throw was 70 Newton meters of torque, the sock throw with a seven ounce ball was about half to 50%, about 40% of that. And so that was like 35 or 40. And the aqua ball throw, where we just got the lower half organized but held on with two hands to the aqua ball was three newton meters of torque on the elbow because of course the other arm is helping it. So you can then organize your lower half, get everything coordinated, get everything ready for support. When the arm is ready to accept the high intensity throws. And that speaks to the idea of not letting what you can't do keep you from doing what you can. Find a way to organize the lower half to prepare the body for the high intent throwing that's coming and then gradually introduce that. Just with regard to long toss. For a while around 2011, 2012, long toss got hit really hard. Alan. Alan's stuff got hit really hard because a study came out and it said long toss increases the stress on your elbow and it changes your mechanics. And I read the article and I reached out to Alan, I said, alan, this is not a negative. That's the value of long toss. Because every throw is just a little different and so it adds stress, which means your tissue has to adapt and you add it gradually and it changed your mechanics. You're not going the same way over and over and over again. The definition of overuse is to do something exactly the same way over and over again. Just take your foot and move it up and down like this during the entire podcast, the same movement. I promise you, things going to be sore by the end of the podcast, right? You got to keep moving it and changing it. And we use a lot of variability. I think that's the one thing that helps us with this long task is as you move out, every throw is just a little bit different and redistributes the stresses just a little bit differently so you're not exposing your body to the same stress over and over and over again. And we're able to use different modalities and methodologies to organize the lower half to get it ready to support. And we work in the gym. It's not like we have a strength program that Nunzio Signori wrote for us that goes along with it. [00:22:57] Speaker A: I was going to put that in at the end. He spoke. [00:22:59] Speaker B: That's really good. [00:23:00] Speaker A: Last year, shout out to. [00:23:01] Speaker B: Yeah, he's a man. He's a great guy. He's a great guy. And he wrote a really good strengthening program. One of the worst things about rehab is just the monotony and the boredom. The hardest part about total Tommy John rehab is the boredom. People just feel like they're not athletic, they're not an athlete, they're not involved and it just their self esteem is really shattered and we let them have the freedom to explore their athleticism and be athletic and actually get more athletic. Even though you can't throw, you can still become a more intense athlete, a better athlete, so that you can support the body when the arm is ready to accept the Stress. [00:23:36] Speaker A: I didn't pay attention to that 2011 research because our guys never got hurt and we long tossed all the time. So I was like, I'm not. I don't care what. I don't care what they're doing in a lab or what it says. I know the proofs in the pudding with our guys not getting injured. So we're going to keep doing it. [00:23:53] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:23:54] Speaker A: How do you guys figure out the five pieces of this? I mean, that's got to be probably the hardest part, the daunting part of this, of laying out what the outline was going to be for this and working through that together. Talk about that process for you guys. [00:24:10] Speaker C: Yeah, it was actually, to be honest with you, it was relatively straightforward, Ryan, because, number one, the return of throwing protocols have been in place for so long. So we took the original model. I leaned heavily on Randy's expertise in biomechanics, pt obviously pitching. But the bottom line is that we just sort of went back and forth and sort of looked at what was there. And we knew right away that we needed to make some adaptations to the original protocols early on. But the main piece was how do we want to build this out past 120, which was not much different than what we would normally do to stretch a player out in the healthy population. And then similar to what we do with a healthy population, as they started getting into their max distance and they started integrating the pull down phase, more of the high intent throwing, we just sort of integrated mountain work similar to what we do with a healthy arm. But we again looked at some of the protocols that was in place. And so, yeah, I think all we really did, Ryan, is we took sort of the infrastructure, what's been out there for years, and we just made it our own. And we made it individualized, as Randy said earlier, which again, cannot be overstated. These protocols that you get, they're 10 months, whatever. They are not 10 months, sorry, they're 28 weeks, seven months, whatever they are, they're pretty homogenous. Right. Like you're just doing this program. And I think really to your point, Ryan, the main thing that we did is we needed to massage it back and forth with both what's it was really more about what's in place and then how do we make it our own. And then I think the heavy lifting was really the 120 and beyond and making sure that we progressively did that. Right. That we progressively brought the mountain, the pull down phase in. Right. We brought the MOUNT integration piece in. Right. But a Lot of this is, look, Randy and I have joked about this many times. We have 65 years or so between us of on field experience. Right. So. And we're both massively into feedback. Like, we love feedback. We ask questions. We have loads of experience through loads of our friends that have integrated. So stuff that you just talked about, you know, what you did as a coach, you know, you did at a high level for a very, very long time. You know, this is the kind of, these are the kind of conversations we've had. By the way, the people in the coalition, every single person I asked but one, and even that one person someone in the organization joined, said yes because everybody is so exasperated with what's out there and really believes in what we're doing. So long story short is that yes, it still took quite a while to your point, to get to where we got to. That's why there's even a 2.0 that came out after the original version. But I think fortunately a lot of it was from the structure that was in place, but most of it was really from Randy and I in our experience. [00:27:11] Speaker A: Well, and you know, the other things with this, it's good to have it a more holistic approach because like I said, there's no talk of warm up in here. There's no talk of how to get your body ready to go from a dynamic warm up. There's no talk of recovery stuff in here. And it's nice. And I'm thinking more about maybe the younger kid or a high school kid or a youth kid that doesn't have the expertise around them and the team of people to help them through it. Where it needs to be a place where somebody, the layperson can go and get the right information. That's all in one spot. [00:27:46] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I think that that a lot of the holistic approach, the different people that we brought in to help contribute to it was really valuable. And I think that just over like Alan and I, I'm the kind of like night guy over here on the East Coast. I, I, I, I stay up really late and so on his time he'll call me. It'll be like 12, you know, 12:00am 1:00 clock in the morning, my time. And we just have these long conversations about the nature of things. Right. And one thing we did with the structure is that we didn't want to like come in guns blazing and say, blow up the whole thing. Okay. We didn't need to pick a fight with anybody. We didn't need to create friction. So we tried to stay within the structure of the traditional protocol and just expand it and smooth it. It's just like we had this concrete slab that we started feathering out. And let's just make it smoother within sort of the same framework, but let's make the edges a little smoother and LinkedIn it a little bit. And a lot of late night conversations to do that. And Alan would just write and write and write and write and send it to me, and I would review it and send it back with a few things. But he did most of the heavy lifting there. And then just talking to other people around the country going, hey, what do you see? One of the things we came across in the medical industry, and we, you know, I'm in the medical profession and sometimes we resist change because we have research, right? And when we looked at the research on return to throwing, all but one or two of the studies that were done defined successful result as I threw one pitch at the prior level before I got hurt, at the same level I was before I got her. So you could be a double A pitcher, go out after your Tommy John rehab for 18 months, throw one pitch, even if you threw it off the backstop and never pitched again, success. We won. And to me and Alan, that bar was way too low. These guys, when they got hurt, were on a trajectory of improvement. They were trying to get to a level. And you're telling me that we're going to take them out of the system for 18 months and then drop them in right back where they were before and call it a success. If we're going to go through this for 18 months, we need to come out better. So we had to look at it differently, say we need to be better at this process so that we don't bring them back where they were, that it's no longer recovery, rehabilitation, it's resurgence. It's, I'm coming back better than I ever was. Lookout world, here I am. And that's what I love about this protocol, because the goal is not to come back where you were. It's come back way better than you were before you started. And I think it, I think it's been really successful so far with the. [00:30:20] Speaker A: Guys we've had and Nolan rape with the plyometric progression. [00:30:24] Speaker B: Really good, really good. Nolan's a great guy, too. And Ben Brewster with the, with the radar gun and how we, how we use it to kind of monitor perceived intent and all that really helps everything. [00:30:35] Speaker A: So let me ask you, Randy, and the percentage of the pitchers that come through your Facility. How many of them? Long toss? [00:30:43] Speaker B: In my facility? Yeah, almost all of them. I mean, I can't. I mean, if they don't want to, I don't make them. But you know, we say, hey, look, long toss is great, let's use it as a tool. It's not the only thing we do. We, we, we also do other things to organize the body. But just about every single guy, I mean, if they want to go out, we have a long toss lane with like these signs that have markers for the distances. And if they want to go out and throw out there, they're free to do it whenever they want as part of their warmup and ramp up. Sometimes we do that and then we integrate some drill work to kind of get them moving in the right direction, you know, as far as their movement patterns are concerned. But yeah, I mean, none of them are against it. I mean some of them, just about all of them will do it to some degree. So yeah, I don't. [00:31:28] Speaker A: Alan and I have had a good conversation about. That's why, I think that's why Latin pictures don't get hurt very often. [00:31:34] Speaker B: We've had to be a contributor for sure. Could be, it could be a contributor. [00:31:37] Speaker A: For sure on my part. But yeah, just watching as many pro Latin guys stretch it out from foul pole to foul, it seems to be a common theme for them. [00:31:50] Speaker C: Well, and also, I don't know the numbers, but I looked this up, it might have been 10 years ago, but it's astounding. The Dominican Republic at the time had 15 million people on the island and it was 7.5% in the major leagues and it was like 12 and a half percent in the minor leagues. I mean it just doesn't. And then, and then you mentioned the Dominican or the Latins, I'll add the Japanese in there. And, and obviously, and I just did a podcast, was really cool with pitching ninja and Masa Niwa, who, who's a reporter, well known reporter I guess in Japan. And so, and yes, Koshin and the whole high school tournament, you know, gets blown up as far as how many pitches they make in there. But generally speaking, and it helps that they're on a seven day or six day rotation in the major leagues there, but still they train, they condition, you know, they're legendary for the discipline and the reps that they do and, and. [00:32:52] Speaker A: The different mobility exercises. [00:32:55] Speaker C: Yeah. And so to me it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not ironic. It's not a coincidence. You know, there's a reason why now ironically it's gotten better. But when the Japanese pitchers were first coming over here, there was a list of them that were breaking down. Of course right away the easy thing to do is say, well they threw too much in Japan. And it's of course the opposite. They got monitored back then. It wasn't called it yet, but we call it now workload management. Which my line about workload management is you're managing the health, conditioning, endurance right out of the arm. So they came here. Yes, the five day, you could say also contributed to it. But I feel like that they were used to just tons of throwing, tons of throwing and they got here and they got managed with how much throwing. And I. And my favorite, one of my favorite terms is deconditioning. You know, they just simply got deconditioned here and then they were in a world of trouble. So it seems like now first of all the culture's changes for his long toss and individuality anyway. But it also seems like when they Japanese pitchers come here and I've seen the same thing with the Latins, they're left alone. I don't think, you know, Yamamoto or Ohtani or any of these pitchers, I don't think they're being told. I could actually find out pretty quickly from the Dodgers, but I kind of already know. Like they, you know, Mark Pryor is not telling Yamamoto how much throwing he should do per day or Sasaki or Ohtani. [00:34:33] Speaker A: So anyway, Alan, any other differences between this and. And the year round throwing manual? What are some of the other. [00:34:41] Speaker C: Just to Randy's. What was that? [00:34:44] Speaker A: Any other differences between. [00:34:46] Speaker C: I'd say just, just to Randy's point, you know, this is how had to be formatted. We agreed that we needed to stay more in sync with the original protocols. Although we, you know, Randy talks about smoothing out and expanding. But be honest with you, with the 2.0 version we continue to get really much further away from, you know, a lot of even the basic tenants of the original programs. But no, I'd say that the main difference is that this is return to throwing and it's a process and it's slow and conservative for the right reasons. You know, where a year round manual could be something that is it might be four or five weeks to really get in great shape even starting from scratch if you do it right. So yeah, I'd say that kind of two different animals from the point of view of the return to throw is really. It's a six, seven month process and the year round manual is really more just how do you navigate the entire year off season in season downtime? Like, how do you navigate all of that stuff? [00:35:51] Speaker A: And Randy, for you, as far as from a biomechanical standpoint, how many of these guys it was? Red flags or just general? It's gonna happen for some guys that had pretty good biomechanics, and it just happens for some guys. [00:36:06] Speaker B: Yeah. I think that one of the problems is that in the world of biomechanics, everybody thinks they, they know what, what mechanics are and nobody can agree what's good or bad. Right. And so we kind of look, we kind of zoom out from the details of what most people call mechanics, and we look at athleticism principles, these. These principles that are common to football and basketball and tennis. We had the LA Chargers quarterbacks, and we taught them the same stuff we teach our pitchers. We had a beach volleyball player come in. We taught her the same stuff we teach our pitchers. We had a pro golfer come in. We taught him the same stuff we teach our pitchers. It's about movement principles and it's not about mechanics. The problem with biomechanics is there's no bio in it. It's just mechanics. And it assumes that we're made of metal and rivets and held together, and we operate under the laws of Newtonian physics. And the truth is we're not cadavers and we're not robots. Right? And all the studies that tell us everything that we do about biomechanics are done on cadavers or using simulated robots, and we're neither one. So you have to take into account that we're these adaptive organisms that can adapt to any stresses that we place under it. If you think about it, we've been trying to manage injury by limiting exposure to stress through workload management for about two and a half decades. And what they told us would, it would decrease the amount of injuries. And it actually has increased. And there are a lot of contributors to that. I think that, you know, we just got back from. We went over to train a team in Japan. We were. Spent a week over there. And our guys in our program throw a lot, we condition the arm, we gradually add stress, but we are not afraid to expose our guys to gradually introducing stress over a long period of time. And over in Japan, they didn't bat an eye because they throw a lot. Okay, so we fit right in over there. I think that we have to look at, hey, we're not getting anywhere limiting exposure to stress. I think we got to be better at, tolerating it. And so we got to condition our guys better to tolerate the stress. Obviously, with a generation that has been limited in their exposure to stress, we can't do it suddenly. We have to gradually build it up. But over time, we want our guys to throw a lot. Logan Gilbert comes in here and trains with us in the off season, and he'll be in house for five and a half hours, training, working out, and after a while, we just leave him in the lab and walk away because he's over there throwing. He'll throw these epic, you know, 150 pitch bullpen sessions that we just. We don't have enough people to stand by and watch him anymore. He's just exploring, doing his own thing, not always having intent, but always conditioning his to tolerate a lot of stress. And he's been pretty healthy. First setback in the big leagues this year for a little bit, but no big deal. But a lot of our guys throw a lot, but they don't throw a lot the same way. We add a lot of variability and. [00:39:00] Speaker A: They learn how to pace themselves. Yeah, and that's the thing. Logan Gilbert knows he's going to probably throw that many. He's going to pace himself to get through that. Just, he's not throwing rockets like the old days when a starter knew he's going to have to probably throw 120 at some point and do it five days later. He was gonna pace himself to be able to get to that 120 pitches. He wasn't gonna let it rip. Pitch one to get to 120, he's gonna be able to pace himself. And I think that's where. That's where we've lost it because we've basically turned our starters into relievers. They know every five days they can air it. They can let it rip from. From pitch one to pitch 50 or 60 or whenever they're out of there, they can pretty much let it rip, like, because they know they have to. They don't have to pace themselves. You can check me on my thinking on that, but that's just my thoughts. Like I said, I'm not a medical professional, but I have watched a lot of baseball over the years. [00:39:51] Speaker C: No, you're right on. And also because they're throwing with such max effort so often, that's how they're used to training. In other words, the next day when they recover, they're not thinking about long tossing and stretching out, to Randy's point, just conditioning as long as they want. Whatever feels good, even if it's super low intent. And so now it's like what I call the perfect storm in the wrong direction, right? I call it a negative cycle instead of a positive cycle. Now the recovery maybe is not so great because they're not as well conditioned as they used to be. So they're not going to want to throw as much because they're probably tighter, right? And then maybe the next day they already want to get on Rapsoda. They already want to start checking the shape of their pitches, right. And their spin rate. So now they need to start throwing with more intent again. So they're kind of in this high intent sort of start, start and stop and shock in the arm. And to me, it's pretty, pretty straightforward. I mean, I've had this conversation a million times. I'm sure you both have too. It's not that complicated. While we have the arm injuries, we've lost the conditioning piece, we've deconditioned the arm, we're doing a lot of shocking. And I just want to say one other thing about Randy said, because to me, we had a camp out here for about 15 years, for two months, January, February, before spring training, right. We had them for pitchers and hitters. And when our pitchers started getting into great long toss shape and they'd come in even on bullpen days, even if it wasn't a bullpen day, they'd stay out there on flat ground forever. I mean, it might have been 70%, 80% effort. They might have thrown 100 changeups. And to me, there's something to be said about, like with Logan, that freedom to just explore and, and play catch and throw and play catch, you know, how come no one's talking about. A major league organization did a study about 10 years ago and on average the catchers were making because of all the bullpens, like 450 or 500 throws a day. And we know this is common with catchers, and we rarely hear about catchers having TJ or shoulder reconstructions. That's not a coincidence. They're making a lot of throws. Now, you can say they're making a lot of throws without a lot of intent, but that's to me, is to your point, Ryan. This is where we've lost our way. And there's no question in my mind the correlation with these injuries going up. There's a few things, but the main piece is we have lost the feel for conditioning. We're in this workload management world now, and we're into the high intent throwing, like every pitch world, of course. [00:42:29] Speaker A: And General fitness, too. I'm sorry, We. We conditioned a lot more back in the old days, too. We did, and I know there's people that run you through the ringer on that, but we did our general fitness level as baseball players in the past. Now it stunk, you know, and there were some mental. Mental toughness pieces to that, too, but it didn't. It did stink sometimes. But you know what? The position players never really got hurt, and the pitchers never really got hurt that much either, because I just think gen. Overall, general fitness was better for them, too. Now they're way more athletic. I love watching them pitch and hit. Now they're way more athletic than we were in the old days. But there are some general fitness principles to that, too. Alan, how was the Thanksgiving zoom call? [00:43:12] Speaker C: Amazing. You know, I just. I get very touched by the feedback. I get very touched by the people like Randy, who I reach out to, and it's a very tricky day. The day after Thanksgiving, it's the hotel holidays, and I just get blown away how fast people say yes. And. And Jay Johnson, who spoke first, he said something that sort of symbolized the whole day, which is. Which was cool, is one of the first things he said. He's like. It says a lot to me about all the coaches that are on this call the day after Thanksgiving at, you know, 10 in the morning when, you know, you could be a lot of other places with your family or There's a lot of things going on. And. And so I think that, to me, is one of the. I get goosebumps, really, just thinking about that, how much people care about the teaching and how much people care about learning. So to answer your question, man, it was unbelievable. We had Nunzio. We mentioned Nunzio was on there. And Randy and I did a piece on this, and we had a mental skills panel. It was really, really cool and just grateful for all the people that just show up, man, and want to help. [00:44:16] Speaker A: Randy, what'd you think? [00:44:18] Speaker B: Oh, I loved it. I loved it. It was. I've done. It's the second or third time I've done it. I love it. It's a great way. I mean, what. I'm also. I'm not going shopping on Friday, so, you know, it's fun. And you get to hang around a lot of cool coaches and listen to a lot of people really talking and the people. You resonate with, people that are. It's like sitting in a locker room and listen to guys chop it up a little bit. It's so fun. And also inspirational. Education you learn something every time. Every, every guy that talks, you learn something from them and gives you a little perspective on what you're doing, gives you a little bit of depth in what you're doing. And it was really, really cool. I got to talk a lot about not just the return to throwing protocol, but how in this world of data and technology, we have this huge integrated lab that's one of the most technologically advanced in the world. But we're lost in chasing numbers. And we forgot that the movement of the body creates those numbers and we forgot to train the athlete. We started chasing the number instead of chasing the movement. And so we do this annual skill acquisition Summit every January, January 24th and 25th this year. And the theme this year is how movement creates data. How you don't get a ball to the ball doesn't invent its movement, its velocity, its command, its shape. It inherits it from how the body moves. And when you put the bio back in biomechanics, you can really dig down into being precise about how you train the body to be able to tolerate the stresses that we're talking about and to create the kinds of shapes and movements that we want. I think in today's world, one of the problems is that we don't allow freedom to explore. We have. Everybody has all this technology and I go to spring training and every single bullpen is tracked and monitored on repsodo or trackman. And it goes up to the front office and it becomes a situation where every, every workout is a tryout and we never get to just practice, we never get to explore, try new things. It's like, I gotta throw it and look at the data and see if the data got better and call it improvement. And I don't think we get there like that. I think we have to put the bio back in biomechanics. We have to put freedom and exploration back into training. We have to put self organization and self regulation back in it. And at the end of the day, I think that progress is actually as a coach, as a player development specialist, it comes from humility, understanding that I'm not smarter than your body. And I don't know exactly how this movement should look or what numbers you should be able to create. I'm going to create an environment that allows your body to explore and find it on your own. And I'm humble enough to say that at the end of the day, I'm not. I don't know what it's going to look like. I'm just going to Let your body find it. I'm going to keep it within the guardrails and let you explore. And I think that's what the return to throwing manual does. It gives you the guardrails, but it lets you have the freedom to explore within it. And that's pretty special. [00:47:06] Speaker A: Matt Myers and I talked about it this summer. He was here in Greensboro, but we've gotten away from. It's an over the rubber day for you as a pitcher where you can tinker around and if it's an over the mount over the plate day, then yeah, we're going to, we're going to test your metrics, we're going to see if you can get guys out. But we have lost a little bit of that where it's an over the rubber day where, yeah, you can, you can tinker around and mess with things and it's not as big a deal of what your numbers are saying. [00:47:30] Speaker C: Yeah, amen, man. I mean it just gets back to, it gets back to what we used to do in the old, I hate to say it in the old days, but let's face it, you know, when there wasn't computers, there wasn't cell phones, we were outside playing, we were outside being creative. And I think to both of what you were saying is that we've lost the creative piece because to Randy's point, right, we're constantly looking and looking and there's numbers and numbers and measurements and measurements and people watching and people. And then there's data people that are right. And it's sort of like what happened to the exploration piece. And like I said again with our camp that we did with our professional guys, not to mention lessons I did forever, we had people come out to a lesson for the first time. Granted they were in good shape, but we might be out there for an hour. And it's not all throwing and it's definitely not all high intent throwing, but it's just a session, It's a long toss session, it's talking, it's coming in, it's doing some flat ground stuff. I love the word Randy used. It's exploration and man, I feel like it saddens me to be honest with you, when you think about these kids are a prisoner in a way to these, to the tech and I. And I feel like it's. There's this unbelievable amount of creative juices that are trying to come out and it's almost like we've teched it out of the players, right. And it's like I have to, I need, I'M going to coin that line. We've teched it out of the players. We've, we. Well, I have used that with the linear 120 program. I used to say something like, you know, if you want to suck the athleticism out of an athlete, you know, put them on a linear 120 program. Same idea. Only we're. Now we're doing it with the tech. But that's the part that I think saddens me the most, is that these, these kids just have. And maybe the coach is to a point because they're now locked into the tech. Exploration, Randy. I'm going to start using that word more often. Exploration, Randy. [00:49:31] Speaker B: It's. [00:49:31] Speaker A: Go ahead. [00:49:32] Speaker B: It's really important. [00:49:32] Speaker C: Go ahead. [00:49:32] Speaker B: No, go ahead. [00:49:33] Speaker A: Yeah, you have to answer this one. Everybody has to. And Alan's answer this one multiple times. Do you have a fail forward moment? You have something you thought was going to set you back, but looking back now, it helped you move forward. Could be personally or professionally. [00:49:48] Speaker B: Feel for a moment. Yeah. When I first started training pitchers, I got a lot. We were being, we were unorthodox and we were, we were criticized heavily by a lot of people about our approach because it was, it was not traditional. And at first it used to really hurt me when people criticized me because I thought, wait, I'm just trying to help people, you know, Then I realized that the criticism was the, the, the cost, the, the price you pay for the privilege of working with these great athletes and, and making the connections that you do. So when I, when I got through the idea that stop taking things personal and just, or into the athlete, I think it's really important to, as a coach to note that every person that comes in front of you is the most important person in someone's life. And you want to honor that like you need to, you need to understand that whether, no matter what skill level, no matter where they come from, no other background is that person is the most important person in someone's life. And I got here, I started in this business because my own son was, was struggling. He was 79 miler, Lefty, who couldn't get recruited, and we had to teach him to throw harder. And everybody in baseball said, you can't teach it. It's a gift. And I'm like, so we're just supposed to give up? We're just supposed to quit, right? He wants to play college baseball. I had the greatest experience of my life playing college baseball. We refused to take that as an answer. And we started looking around and I, I'M like, okay, we have to find our own way to do this. And began to explore. And, you know, he graduated from high school at 79 and went to junior college for two years and came out throwing 93. And we knew we were onto something. I said, this, this. This is going to help a lot of people. And so fail forward. Personally, of course, I've had a lot of those. Okay, falling on my face so many times. Professionally, I think that I've always approached this thing with a. With a sense of humility and also willingness to say, hey, we got that wrong. We've tried some things with players that didn't work. We tried some players things with players that went south. We tried some new, innovative things that we thought were the answer to everything. And after a long period of time, we were like, this isn't helping anyone. No one's getting better. We need to abandon it and move on to the next step. To the next step. To the next step. For me, the biggest epiphany was the day I heard my friend Franz Bosch speak for the first time. And I didn't understand half of what he was saying, but I thought, we're doing this wrong. We got it. I got to figure out a better way. And so it's been a joy to understand that and to. To be able to go, you know what? Let's just keep growing and moving forward. And the learning experience has been incredible. It's been. It's been amazing. [00:52:30] Speaker A: So, Randy, for somebody listening and when you say non traditional, what would that meaning? [00:52:38] Speaker B: Mechanical, like, do it like this. Up, down and out, get to the positions, get to the T, get to this, get to that, get to this. Use the same method of training that everyone's always used. Instead, we had to find our own way and go, you know what? I'm gonna let each guy explore their own athleticism, and I'm gonna create an environment that helps it emerge instead of trying to dictate how they move. And I think that comes down to understanding that the truth is everybody does a little different. There's no one way to do it. And it would be arrogant for me to tell an athlete, you got to do it this way. My job is to create an environment and let their body find their best way and let them discover themselves instead of trying to dictate who they are. [00:53:18] Speaker A: And, Randy, you're in good shape. You got any morning or evening routines for listeners? Something you go to every day? [00:53:26] Speaker B: Okay. I'm 62 years old and started getting out of shape for a while. Looked At a picture of me, like a family photo at Christmas. I'm like, oh, my gosh, that's terrible. And I thought, I'm so busy. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm making a business, I'm going. I don't have time to work out. And then it occurred to me, I own a gym. You're telling me you can't? And so the staff laughs at me because I do what I call drive by workouts. If I'm in between clients and running back and forth to go out to the training mouse or out to the hitting cages, and I walk past the gym, I'll do a set and then go to the office and come back out and do another one. And I thought, well, whoever said you had to do it all at once, right? You can do it in little pieces. [00:54:05] Speaker A: And the research is coming out. That's actually the best way to do it. Like, it's short bursts throughout the day. [00:54:10] Speaker B: Yeah, that's what I do. So I just do. They laugh at me. Another drive by Marina, stopping and waiting to do a set and then go. Because I got to go do a podcast or something, make a video or train a picture or do analysis. But I'm always running back and forth. And every time I walk past the gym, I just try to pick something up and lift it and move it, you know, so, you know, it speaks to the idea that of. Of the throwing program that Alan touched on. We started throwing more often. And one of the foundational principles in physical therapy and rehab is that you always increase the frequency of an exercise or activity before you increase the intensity of it. So do it more often, less intense, and then get used to adding. Then add the intensity. Always increase the frequency before you increase the intensity. I'm just working out frequently throughout the day, and I had to start stopping myself from trying to break new records in the weight room because I'm like, why are you doing this? You're 62. There's no point. Adding more weight to the bar isn't going to be all that beneficial. Let's just get our sets in and get our reps in and move on. [00:55:13] Speaker A: I stick with my old man workouts now. [00:55:16] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:55:18] Speaker A: I tell people all the time when you get to this age, and if you're sore, you're doing it wrong. Yeah. If you're sore the next day, you're not doing something right. You're either not warming up properly, you're not cooling down properly, or you're overextending yourself in the weight room, which you don't need to do, do. [00:55:33] Speaker B: And I tell everybody, look, I have the greatest job in the world. I get to go to work every day and act like a 12 year old around a bunch of young guys. And so it keeps me young. You know, it's the old use it or lose it kind of thing. Like if you're out there moving and just, just don't stop is my, my point there. We just don't stop. Keep moving. Motion, movement is healing lotion. You're, you're the, you know, the body was made to move. So keep moving. And you don't have to do it all at once. You can just get in what you can whenever you can. [00:56:02] Speaker A: Alan I've added in emotional freedom techniques and Kundalini Yoga. Now nice mornings, people look at me funky in the weight room when I'm doing emotional freedom techniques and, and Kundalini, especially Breath of Fire. Breath of Fire is a Kundalini breathing exercise that it's a passive inhale, aggressive exhale. So people look at me, but I don't care. Like I feel, feel much better mentally afterwards. [00:56:29] Speaker C: What is, sorry, what is the, what is emotional freedom exercise? Huh? [00:56:35] Speaker A: It's tapping. Part of it, part of it is it's cross body stuff. They're neural rewiring exercises. So a lot of it's cross body stuff. Some of its hands out front tucking hands out front tucking north and south. It doesn't take very long, but I just know I feel better in between the ears after I get done doing it. [00:56:54] Speaker C: Yeah, I had a good buddy that started getting into that about 10, 15 years ago. And you know who else is really into that is Tom Hanson. [00:57:03] Speaker A: Yes, he does a good job. Good friend of mine, throwing program talk that I give that the one I gave in New Jersey. It has tapping in the beginning and just talking about it because Oregon State's players, when they were on their run through back to back national championships, you could see their pitchers in between innings tapping their hot spots on their face. What are some final thoughts, YouTube? Before I let you go, you, you. [00:57:26] Speaker B: Said something about like you're in the gym and people are looking at you funny and you know, as I've gotten older I, you know, we can all agree that, that it doesn't matter what people think about me, right? I don't care what people think about me. What I've learned as I've gotten older is that what really matters is what I think they think about me and I have total control of that. [00:57:44] Speaker A: Or I love the quote. It's none of Your business what people think of you. [00:57:50] Speaker B: That's a really good point. [00:57:52] Speaker A: It's a stoicism thing. It's like it really is none of your business what somebody thinks or says about you. It's none of your business. [00:57:58] Speaker B: You're right. Very good. Very good point. Very good point. [00:58:01] Speaker A: What are some final thoughts? You two just put a bow on this. [00:58:06] Speaker C: You gave me a. Let me think if I can come up with it. Eleanor Roosevelt has a. A great line about this, which is, I can't believe. I can't remember. Anyway, I'll try to think about it, but it's. It has something to do with the same idea that it's. [00:58:25] Speaker B: It's. [00:58:25] Speaker C: It's what other people think of you is. It's your choice as to whether that matters, sort of to what you both were saying. I just tweeted it out ironically recently. My final thoughts are, number one, gratitude, brother. Thank you for doing this. You know, Granny and I, this manual, we haven't mentioned it yet. It's free on both of our sites. You know, it's a passion project. We been doing this a long time. We both feel like the game has given us a ton. And so for us, this was something that we just felt for the kids out there in the world that may not be aware now, there wasn't an alternative way to do the rehab program. So for us, getting the word out, doing podcasts with such reputable people as yourself and abca, like, for us is. And again, we're just grateful. And I would just say, you know, in closing, that, yeah, for those that are going through rehab, anybody listening to this podcast, the first thing we would both highly recommend you do, no matter what, is you're going to get your throwing program from your surgeon or your PT and just download ours. Download ours again. It's free. And just compare. And then maybe ask the question, you know, of your pt. The one thing that I've gotten from everybody and Randy's also, you know, he says so many nice things about me in this space. Randy's done a lot too, believe me, and he's gotten some key people also in our coalition. And it's just so clear to us that the people we're talking to, that with what's been going on out there with rehab compared to now, like, they see our manual as really massive change for the better. And. And we just want to. This is part of why we love these podcasts is we're just trying to bring awareness and education out there. But I just hope that people now, they Realize they have a choice. And at the end of the day, we feel like our manual to Randy. Randy uses this. I wrote it down. I made. I can't help it. I have notes here from today. Rehab versus Resurgence. You know, the original return to play. That's what it was called, right? The return to throwing program is called return to Play. And something Randy mentioned early on is that we don't want return to play. Our goal is return to peak performance. [01:00:47] Speaker B: We. [01:00:48] Speaker C: We feel strongly based on our experience and the way this beautiful progression now goes. Over the course of 28 weeks or so, these players are coming back in beast mode. They are beasts, and they are healthy, strong, durable, with feel, with athleticism, with mental freedom. And they're happy because they're in tune with their bodies, and they know that they're in just a really great place. And so I think that's my final thoughts again, is. Thank you, buddy, for having us on. [01:01:19] Speaker A: Randy, anything else to add? [01:01:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I just want to echo that. Thanks for having us on Honored man. It's the first time I've been on your podcast. It's great. You're a good dude. It's a lot of fun. You know, hopefully I'll run into you again, and we're gonna be friends for life. I love it. I could see you hanging out and be in a good Hank, so I appreciate that. I think that the final thought about what we're talking about today, to me, it just kind of occurred to me during the podcast, it comes down to freedom and humility. Like, allow your body the freedom to explore and find your way to do it. And as a coach, have the humility, and as an athlete, have the humility to understand that your body is way smarter than we are and it knows what it needs more than we do. And if I can just create an environment to let you discover that I've done a world of good for you. You've done a world of good for yourself. Stop trying to put yourself in a box. Be free. Be humble. Listen to your body. It's giving you all the signs you need to. And you can learn to do this in your way, and you'll. You'll achieve some great goals just by having freedom and humility. [01:02:20] Speaker A: Adds to more conversations of the convention now. [01:02:23] Speaker C: Alan, what was that? [01:02:25] Speaker A: It adds to more conversations at the convention for you now. [01:02:29] Speaker C: Hey, by the way, quick side note is Sarge and I were talking about this at the nfca, and we were laughing. Randy, you don't know this, but I was on a panel with let's see John Savage, Sean Cole. [01:02:45] Speaker A: Scott was my first year on the abca. I think that was my first year on the ABCA side in Nashville. [01:02:51] Speaker C: Yep. So we're on a panel, and Randy, you're gonna laugh. It was freezing in there. We were on stage, and I was joking with the guys. And so when the first question came to me or to comment on something, and I saw Ryan over to the right, I think I saw you. [01:03:10] Speaker B: Right. [01:03:10] Speaker C: But I said, hey, can somebody get the ac? First of all, I said, sarge, can you bring me my jacket? And I might have texted that to him, but I said, can someone turn the AC down? Luckily, all this is new. [01:03:21] Speaker A: Like, I didn't have it all down. Now I just call the climate control people. I'm like, hey, the room's too hot. Like, or too cold or too hot, so we can get it done. But I'm like, I'm flying by the seat of my pants, and in 2020, just trying to get through that thing. And now it's. This is my seventh one now. So on the. On the staff side, but I know I have the number to call now in case we run into any climate control issues. [01:03:48] Speaker C: That was my introduction, Randy, to Ryan. I mean, I'm sorry to joke we met before that, but that was sort of like. That was like a one of our shared moments. It's an eight, you know what happens at the ABCA kind of factor. And I'll never forget Sarah's and I were laughing about, man, can you believe? I was actually, I can't believe I did it, but I was. That's how cold we were. [01:04:08] Speaker B: All right, you two. [01:04:09] Speaker A: Merry Christmas. [01:04:10] Speaker B: Thanks. Merry Christmas. [01:04:12] Speaker A: Thank you very much for coming on. So thank you both. [01:04:15] Speaker B: Thank you. [01:04:16] Speaker A: Yep. [01:04:16] Speaker B: All right. [01:04:17] Speaker C: Thank you, man. Appreciate you, brother. Happy holidays. [01:04:20] Speaker A: Arm health is something I'm very passionate about. It was great to connect with Alan and Randy on this very important topic. It's awesome they put together a free resource for the baseball community. Looking forward to seeing them both in Columbus. Thanks again to John Litchfield, Zach Hale, and Matt west in the ABC office for all the help on the podcast. Feel free to reach out to me via email rbrownleebca.org Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok Coachbeca or direct message me via the Myvis app. This is Ryan Brownlee signing off the American Baseball Coaches Association. Thanks and leave it better for those behind you. [01:05:04] Speaker B: And you know that way. [01:05:07] Speaker A: Yep. Wait for another day. [01:05:13] Speaker B: And the world will always return as your love will never for your name and you know that. Wait Wait for another day.