- How did I know that Tom Brady needed
a little help with his front-side elbow?
Cause he was missing high and low.
When you miss right and left, it's your head.
When you miss high and low,
it's your front side, elbow in his case.
Tom House, Thomas R. House, PH.D, Performance Analyst.
[smooth music]
My two Hall of Famers are Brady and Brees.
People don't realize how hard they
work to get one percent better.
There's a lot of technology out there.
We're one of the few facilities in the world
where we can actually give you a deliverable.
We work with all rotational athletes.
Any throwing or striking sport.
But me personally, I'm working with
the elite NFL quarterbacks, and a lot of the elite
Major League Baseball pitchers.
Rotational athletes, throwers and strikers,
are all the same animal.
The only thing that might change is
the timing of the weight transfer.
Virtually everything else is the same.
If you can teach hitting, you can teach pitching.
If you can analyze quarterbacking,
you can analyze hitting a volleyball.
In effect, we are now helping all athletes,
male and female, no matter what the age,
in any rotational sport that's out there, even cricket.
Alright, so it's all good stuff.
It's all science-based, it's objectively researched.
It's a deliverable, it's a measurable, and defendable.
What I've found with the elite elite.
They are very receptive,
if they can understand what you're telling them,
and they think it's going to improve them.
The cool thing about working with the older guys,
they're in a window of trainability where
they're done with their growth and they're done
with their weight gain, so they're basically
reinforcing the mechanical efficiencies
they got to get to their elite level.
And they're just sustaining that with
process is what it boils down to.
Anybody know what this thing is right here?
It's a tester, it's a pulse oximeter.
What the hell is it for?
Do you have any idea at all?
We're gonna see what your blood oxygen level is.
When I retired as a professional pitcher/coach in baseball
I went up to USC, and signed a 10 year deal
where I was a pitching coach for five of the years
and a researchist for the whole 10.
And that's really where we started pulling all
the pieces together that I got as a player and a coach.
We did the research on the weighted balls
and velocity improvement, fixing GIRD,
a whole bunch of studies
on biomechanical efficiency and recovery.
I was doing it for me personally I had to know why.
And then when I became a coach, I wanted to make sure
what I gave to a kid was actually
something that could help him.
Not some opinion about this is
what they did in my generation.
I wanted it to be real stuff.
And I think we succeeded.
Tom House Sports started earlier this year
as a way to put an umbrella over the pitching,
quarterbacking, hitting, golfing.
We started off with just our eyes and video.
And then we realized that there
are things the human eye can't see.
You can see probably about 34, 32 frames a second.
But most of the activities with a quarterback or a pitcher,
that count, take place at about 1/250th of a second.
Biomechanics briefly are laws of physics
applied to the human body.
Human bodies move, but they have to move
based on the same physics that a car drives and birds fly.
We've been able to identify,
through ISP and motion analysis,
the efficiencies that are necessary
for a kid to throw or swing efficiently.
The easiest way to talk about kinematic sequencing
think of legs, hips, shoulders, arms implement.
And then, the mechanics of the actual skill itself
balance and posture basically keep your eyes level.
Hip and shoulder separation
to leg shoulder rotation, torque.
We got lucky, about 15 years ago we were
doing motion analysis on elite athletes.
Drew Brees and Greg Maddux.
If you put their kinematic sequence
at a thousand frames a second, overlapped 'em,
except for the timing and the weight shift.
It was exactly the same,
legs, hips, shoulders, arms implement.
With the same mechanics across the board.
I mean the graphs were carbon copies of each other.
And I started thinking to myself,
you know what, we may be able to take that
and see if we can help quarterbacks.
Everybody that comes to us, if they come for mechanics,
biomechanics, they're gonna get strength training,
nutrition, and mental emotional.
If they come for mental emotional, they're gonna get
mechanics, strength and nutrition.
In other words, we don't deal with an athlete
for one leg of the performance table.
We deal with all four legs.
So one of the things that I'm most proud of
in the people that I work with,
underneath the Tom House Sports umbrella,
is literally the coach tries to identify
right away how this athlete learns
and we tailor our information and instruction
to fit that athletes capacity.
[smooth music]
Drew initially came, his offensive coordinator,
he was with the Chargers at the time,
brought him in for some mental emotional work.
He was a little timid in the huddle,
and probably not as much of a presence
in the locker room as he should have been.
So it started off to be mental emotional.
But then, the last game of the season
he hurt his shoulder, a horrible injury.
Had to go see Dr. Andrews in Birmingham.
Dr. Andrews put his shoulder back together.
So from that point forward it became physical
to get him back to where he could throw a football again,
and then biomechanical to sustain it,
and it's just grown from there.
We actually have a series of tests and evaluations.
We call it screen test and assess for movement efficiencies.
And we look at their timing, their kinematic sequencing,
and then the variables that coaches teach.
Balance and posture, stride momentum,
opposite and equal, hip and shoulder separation.
Basically squaring it up from
the front side and release point.
Drew had an issue, his base was too broad.
So that when he took his stride, his weight shift
he wasn't generating the same foot pounds that he could
if he narrowed his stance up,
took a one foot stride in the time frame.
So our teach initially with him was to narrow his base,
to get more ground force production in the time frame,
to have more energy to get into the football,
so he could throw a long ball.
Not only be accurate short, but be able to
throw the ball 55 60 yards to stretch the field.
These guys were really good before they showed up.
Like Hall of Fame good, before they
even had anything to do with us.
Drew is still playing.
So what we did is we fixed small things.
So instead of being 92% efficient,
now they're sneaking up on 97 98% efficient.
And now that's long term health and performance.
Good for the athlete, good for the organization,
great for the sport.
The quarterback world is like
this really small little fraternity.
And Drew mentioned this to this guy,
and that guy mentioned this to that guy,
and all of a sudden it became 3DQB
and working with 28 of the top 32 in the NFL.
And their backups, about 50 collegiate quarterbacks,
and a couple hundred high school quarterbacks.
So, it wasn't well thought out,
it just kinda happened organically.
[smooth music]
So Drew's ended up being the base in his stride length.
Brady had everything good, except his front side
was too low and leading too quick.
The fix on that basically was
keep your front side, basically your hand
over your front foot and take a bite out of
whatever burger you have in your hand.
If you look at all the quarterbacks when they throw,
it all looks like they're taking
a bite out of their front hand.
It's basically keeping all your
energy going in one direction.
[smooth music]
How did I know that Tom Brady needed
a little help with his front side elbow?
Cause he was missing high and low.
When you miss right and left, it's your head.
When you miss high and low,
it's your front side, elbow in his case.
This is what you learn as you're capturing data
and you're looking at it going what are we seeing?
And then you look at what the data says
and what he's performing like,
and he was consistently too high or too low.
Never right or left.
We learned from baseball that
that's a front side elbow thing.
The issues that we have with most elite athletes
that are making a lot of money,
is that they're very reluctant to change
cause they're already on the elite level.
But if we can give them a compelling reason to change,
either through science-based, the research, and the why,
most of them change pretty quick.
And the cool thing about the elite guys,
you only have to show 'em once or twice, and they get it.
And they'll go home and do the work.
It boils down to repetition.
If you're dealing with a young athlete,
he's probably looking at 10,000 reps for mastery,
if he doesn't grow or gain any weight.
We're in a perfect world right now,
where the technology is allowing people to identify stuff
that's never been seen before.
The next piece of the puzzle,
after identification, is the solution.
And that's where we have a head start
because we started our science in the mid-80's.
All the stuff that's going on right now
is really cool stuff, but they're 10 years ago for me.
The people I was hanging out with embraced the technology
and we went down a lot of bad alleys
and made a lot of wrong decisions.
But we also came up with some stuff
that was really really good.
- [Interviewer] People have referred to you as
the quarterback whisperer and pitching guru.
How do you feel about these titles?
- That's their description, I'm just a coach.
If you go back to our mission statement.
Inform, instruct, inspire.
Master information, master instruction,
mentor a kid, make a difference.
Call it what you may, we're coaches.