Why Weighted Balls Will Create More Injuries And Poor Pitching Mechanics

by Dick Mills on December 02, 2004

I got a call yesterday from the mother of a high school baseblal pitcher who is taking lessons from a pitching instructor who is having him throw weighted baseballs. To me that is a big red flag that the pitching instructor does not fully understand pitching mechanics.

It is far easier to have a pitcher throw weighted baseballs or do long toss or put him in the weight room or have him do a bunch of time wasting drills than to point out what his problems are and working during each lesson to fix them.

I also asked her if the instructor had ever videotaped her son and explained exactly what was wrong and how he was going to go about fixing her son's faults. He did not. Another red flag should go up. Those lessons will be very expensive because this pitcher is not going to learn very much about how mechanics produces pitching velocity.

The problem with weighted baseballs is not so much the injury factor from throwing the extra weight but the idea that goes into the pitcher's mind that velocity comes from adding more strength to the arm.

That is a bad message since the larger majority of youth and high school baseball pitchers do not throw harder because of a lack of arm strength but rather because they do not know how to use their lower body to develop explosiveness that is the key to creating more arm speed. The lower body gets it all going. If lower body mechanics are poor that pitcher is going to have to try to get more from his arm…which usually ends up as an arm injury.

The lower body is the key…not the pitching arm. The right-fielder who can throw the ball from the warning track to home on the fly tells me that he really knows how to use his body to deliver his arm. He has an explosive body…not just a good arm.

For pitchers to just go out and make a lot of throws using weighted balls without them understanding proper weight shift or how to move from their back leg to their front leg…is going to teach them how to throw with poor mechanics. And that is what will produce more arm injuries.

The large majority of those peddling training aids or magic bullets like weighted baseballs should be a red flag that they do not fully understand the biomechanics of baseball pitching.

99.99% of all professonal baseball pitchers did not gain velocity by throwing weighted baseballs or going into the weight room to get bigger and stronger. They got it from throwing with explosive mechanics a lot of the time from the mound.