josh constant retweetet
The Kelce brothers accidentally explained one of the longest-running training mistakes in professional sports in under 30 seconds.
A pitcher's delivery takes 1.5 seconds. The rest period before the next pitch is roughly 20 seconds. A starter who throws 100 pitches in a game produces somewhere between 2 and 3 minutes of total physical exertion across a 3-hour window. The work-to-rest ratio is approximately 1:20.
That ratio maps almost perfectly to the ATP-CP energy system, the anaerobic pathway that powers movements lasting under 10 seconds. Sprinting. Jumping. Swinging a bat. Throwing a 97 mph fastball. Every meaningful action in baseball lives in this system.
Distance running trains the opposite system. Aerobic metabolism. Slow-twitch muscle fibers. Type I fibers that are smaller, produce less force, and prioritize fatigue resistance over power output. Elite sprinters carry 60-80% fast-twitch fibers. Elite endurance athletes carry 60-95% slow-twitch. A 2008 study on collegiate baseball players found that combining endurance training with power training produced measurable drops in power output.
You are literally remodeling the engine in the wrong direction. Training the aerobic system when every sport-specific action runs on anaerobic fuel.
The tradition started decades ago because games last 3 hours and coaches confused game duration with physical demand. A game lasting 3 hours does not mean the athlete is exerting for 3 hours. A pitcher standing on the mound between pitches is recovering, not working. The correct training analog is a sprinter who runs 100 meters, walks back, and goes again.
Driveline Baseball, Eric Cressey, and every major sports science program has been publishing this data for over a decade. Strength coaches at the MLB level largely moved to sprint-based and med ball protocols years ago. But the foul-pole-to-foul-pole jog still persists at the high school and college level because the coaches who played in the 90s trained that way and never updated.
The Kelces just explained it to 3 million people faster than any journal ever could.
Gerry DeFilippo@Challenger_ST
Jason & Travis Kelce talking about the ridiculousness of baseball conditioning… “It makes no sense.” “You should be running SPRINTS or doing base running. Not running foul pole to foul pole.” STOP treating baseball players like marathoners
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