How to help youth baseball players throw correctly.
Fixing the low elbow thrower.
When you coach rec ball, such as Little League, some of your younger players will not have
learned how to throw a ball correctly.
One of the more difficult throwing motions to fix is the low elbow throw.
The best way to fix this is to not develop it in the first place.
Parents who play catch with their kids often demonstrate the wrong throwing method because
they don’t want to hurt the child by throwing the ball hard, so they drop their elbow and
lightly toss it.
Very young children SEE how you throw and emulate it.
They learn motion primarily by observation and copy.
If you want to teach your son to throw, go get some rocks and toss those suckers into
a lake or something of that nature.
This is a good example of how NOT to play catch with your son.
Here is a grandpa teaching his toddler grandson how to throw.
Notice he stops to demonstrate the correct throwing method, encourages HARD throws, and
uses praise praise praise.
It’s certainly more about FUN with grandpa, but he didn’t miss an opportunity to demonstrate
how to throw correctly.
When throwing a baseball the players elbow should cross at or above the shoulder.
The further the throw the higher the elbow typically is.
What can you do to help that youth player that keeps the elbow down?
After all you can’t go back in time to fix mistakes of the past.
There are two primary methods I’ve found very helpful.
Use your arm or bat to create a barrier.
Tell the player he needs to throw so that his elbow doesn’t hit your arm or bat.
Once they start to get the elbow up, they’ll shock themselves at how much harder they just
threw a baseball!
The second thing I would do is to teach them the Thumbs down motion.
If their thumb is under the ball as they bring it back, it’s very difficult to then drop
the elbow.
These two options together do wonders.
The next key will be to repeat this throwing motion correctly enough times to re-create
a new muscle memory.
Muscle memory is that part of your brain that never forgets how to ride a bike.
It took a lot of work to learn how to ride a bike, but once you learn, your brain does
all the work without you having to think about it.
With bad throwing mechanics, the brain learned wrong and if they don’t think about it,
they will revert back.
Repetition of the correct motion is needed enough times to re-write the connections in
the brain that tells you how to throw a baseball.
The longer and more often the player threw wrong, the longer and harder it will be to
fix it.
IT CAN be done, but without also training the parent or the person who can play catch
with them (or throw rocks into lakes) they won’t succeed because as a coach you simply
don’t have that much time to dedicate to one player.
If you are the parent watching this, then you probably have the time to work at it with
a LOT of patience.
There is no point being this guy…