Shoulder and elbow injuries are very common in baseball players especially in pitchers. It is hard to watch baseball news on TV without hearing the word "Tommy John surgery" these days. Even before this Major League Baseball season starts, there are already quite a few pitchers that are going to miss this season from Tommy John surgery. Tommy John surgery is a reconstructive surgery for a torn ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow. We have discussed this and its rehabilitation in our previous posts. And it seems like a more popular topic in baseball news lately because of its frequency and names of the players involved in this. There is an interesting article published a few years ago done on high school baseball pitchers and it found out that there was a positive correlation between pitch velocity and stress placed on the elbow. The faster the pitch velocity was, the more stress placed on the medial side of the elbow where UCL is, according to this study. So does this mean that pitchers that throw faster pitches will be more prone to elbow injury such as UCL sprain?! We do not know. But this may be something that we cannot ignore....
No comments:
Post a Comment