Jesse Howell - Pitching Performance Coach

They’ve been calling kids “built different” for a hundred years.

Scouts call it a projectable frame.

Your grandpa said a kid was built for it.

They were all looking at the same thing nobody could measure it.

Here’s one piece of it. Look at where the bottom ribs come together under the breastbone.

Some kids are narrow through there.

When they rotate, the turn stays flat and tight, and they carry their weight high.

Some are wide.

The turn happens more on an angle, and they sit lower.

Neither is better.

They’re two different ways of getting through a rotation, and they don’t ask for the same things in the weight room.

Most offseason programs are built for one of them and handed to both.

Everybody squats the same, everybody chases max strength, everybody gets the same plan.

That’s how a kid ends up stronger, beat up, and throwing what he threw last summer.

And most kids land somewhere in the middle, which is exactly why you can’t call it from the bleachers.

When you understand what you’re seeing the solutions become more obvious.

The mistake people make is thinking there’s a cookbook for this stuff. It’s more of a framework than a set of rules.

Comment SHAPE and I’ll send you the free guide what to look at before you buy another offseason program.

Youth pitcher arm soreness after tournaments isn’t always from throwing too much.

It’s from throwing more than his body can recover from.

The pattern I see every year:

Takes months off from throwing.

Ramp up too fast to get game ready.

A ton of throwing Saturday. A ton more Sunday.

Almost nothing during the week.

You can’t build intensity before you’ve built volume.

When both go up at the same time, that’s when arms get hurt.

A well structured training plan and throwing program builds capacity step by step, so throwing builds him up instead of breaking him down.

That means high days, low days, and a plan for the weekdays between tournaments.

If his arm gets sore every time he ramps back up, comment AUDIT and I’ll send you my free 4-minute Velo Audit.

Baseball pitching coach in Central Oregon(Bend and Redmond), and working with pitchers remotely nationwide.

(Sharp pain, numbness, or pain that won’t go away? Please see a doctor or PT first.)

After tournaments, does your son throw during the week?

There’s a belief in youth baseball that if a pitcher doesn’t add 20 pounds every offseason, he’s falling behind on velocity.

The rosters don’t back that up.

Pitchers are the tallest position in baseball, around 6’3” on average, and one of the lightest professional athletes anywhere at that height.

Same height as an NFL quarterback. Close to a hundred pounds lighter than an offensive lineman.

Rugby forwards stand about the same and carry 40-plus more.
I know the comeback. Chapman.

He carries real size now and he’s still running it up there at an age most guys are done.

Fair. But he built that across a whole career, a few pounds at a time, on a body that had already proven it could handle the last few.

He didn’t show up to camp one winter 30 pounds heavier. Nobody pulls up what those guys looked like at 16 either, and at 16 they looked a lot like your son probably does.

That’s what gets lost.

A fifteen-year build turns into an offseason goal, and a high school kid ends up carrying weight his body hasn’t earned.

He should get bigger. He should get a lot stronger. Just not 30 pounds by March.
Weight he can’t control is inertia.

It slows down the rotation that makes the ball go, and it shows up in stress on his arm when he can’t decelerate it.

DM VELO with his height, weight, and velo. I’ll tell you whether more size is even his problem.

Your son’s front foot lands in a different spot every pitch. Stop trying to fix the foot.

It’s the most common thing parents notice because it’s the easiest thing to see.

So the fix is always the same draw a line on the ground, a towel drill, a mark to hit, drill the landing until it repeats.

He’ll hit it on flat ground and still land all over the place on a mound.

By the time that foot lands, the pitch is basically over.

Where it lands is the result of what the back hip did two-tenths of a second earlier.

If he isn’t loading into that hip and moving in one clear direction, his body improvises a landing spot every single time.

That’s not inconsistency. That’s a body solving the problem it was given, slightly differently on every rep.

It shows up in the miss pattern too.

Up and arm side, down and glove side. That combination almost always gets called a command problem.

It’s a direction problem.

Clean up the direction and the foot stops needing to be coached.

It lands where it lands because everything upstream of it finally agrees.

If he’s already lifting, already throwing, already doing arm care and working with a pitching coach, and the mechanics still won’t hold up you haven’t failed him.

He’s been handed the wrong problem to solve.

DM VELO with his age and level and we’ll find 15 minutes. You tell me what you’re seeing, I’ll tell you what I’d want to look at before fall ball.

“Should pitchers bench press?” is one of those baseball training questions that sounds simple until you actually have to coach somebody.

The answer isn’t yes or no.

The pecs and the rest of the upper body absolutely need to produce and tolerate high levels of force during throwing.

So yes, upper body strength matters but probably not the way most people think.

But your body doesn’t care whether that adaptation came from a barbell bench press, dumbbell press, push-up, cable press or some other variation.
The exercise is just the tool.

What matters is whether that tool makes sense for the athlete in front of you.

A young pitcher who needs to add muscle and strength may respond really well to barbell benching.

A pitcher who already has plenty of strength, is deep into the season, has a lot of throwing volume, or doesn’t tolerate that setup well may need something different.

That’s not being “anti-bench.”

That’s just coaching.

The part social media tends to skip is that exercises create stress.

And the same stress can be useful at one point in the year and unnecessary at another.

That’s why I care a lot less about whether an exercise is “good” or “bad” and a lot more about:

Who is doing it?
Why are we doing it?
How much are we doing?
And what else is the athlete already trying to recover from?

Coaches love to give lower body plyometrics and they know the importance of training the stretch reflex cycle but for some reason they don’t always apply the same principles to upper body training which for a baseball pitcher is a huge mistake.

If you’re a parent or pitcher who feels like every coach online is giving you a different answer, you probably don’t need another list of exercises.

You need someone to help you figure out which information actually applies to you.

That’s exactly what the assessment process is for.
DM me “ASSESSMENT” if you want help figuring out what should actually be prioritized in your training.