CaCO3Girl posted:roothog66 posted:Here's another example of why I take anything Andrews says with a grain of salt:
"Dr. Andrews actually said that kids throwing harder than 85 miles per hour in high school are going beyond the "developmental properties" of the human body at that age and that going over that is a major risk factor." How would he possibly come up with that number? The problem is that when someone when his credentials makes comments, it's hard to shift out what he's actually basing on scientific study and knowledge and what's simple speculation biased with a slant toward low-risk evaluation. Someone said it earlier, but throwing is bad on the arm, period. Andrews emphasis is on the risk side rather than the reward side and understandably so. His job isn't to build big league pitchers. His job is just to fix the damage, so he's naturally going to be on the low risk side of the equation.
I read his study. He came up with that number by testing stress on cadaver arms. Supposedly, a "normal" person can only handle the stress of pitching 85mph without it breaking, or being severely damaged.
The thing that always bugged me with that assertion though is that it is SOOO obvious that players who throw over that are genetically unique. They aren't the norm. We have said on here a thousand times that you can't train kids to throw as hard as they do today. All the training in the world won't work unless the genetics are there to back it up.
There is a LHP senior in my son's high school that wants to pitch at the next level SOOO bad. He does strength training, weekly pitching lessons, he's about 5'11 200#'s, he wants it so much, but he's only hitting around 75. It's obvious his genetics just aren't there.
I originally addressed the cadaver study in the previous post, but withdrew it because it's difficult to quickly explain. However, most researchers agree that this test on the ucl's of cadavers is useless because of factors it didn't take into account. What it basically found was that, if you don't take into account genetic differences in bone and muscle structure and focus solely on tensile strength of ucl's, you get a calculation that shows that, generally, every kids arm should basically fall off his body when his fastball reaches 81 mph. This, of course, does not and cannot, take into account supporting muscles and the stress affect variances of different mechanical models. In other words, there are thousands of important factors this test ignores.