» 5 Drills for dynamic trunk reduction

5 drills for dynamic trunk deceleration

By Eric Cressey on November 11, 2022 at 10:09 pm

Today’s guest post comes from Cressey Sports Performance – Florida coach, Eduardo Valle.

Coaches and athletes are often fixated on power production And forget about balls Exploitation, or recession. Slowness is an important quality for athletes to possess, as it will help them stay within themselves while performing a task and reduce the risk of injury. A pitcher or a hitter that can’t cut back can spin wildly out of control. A rotator cuff that doesn’t slow down your arm’s movement is a recipe for an arm injury. A hitter who doesn’t slow down enough can’t check his swing. There are countless more examples – and this is why we take slow training so seriously. With that in mind, here are five non-traditional drills to implement dynamic trunk decay into your training.

1. Anti-rotation landmine windmill: With this drill, you’re trying to control the weight on the way down without rotating through your hips, as this will promote trunk flexion without engaging the hips. This is a good strengthening exercise because you then have to rotate to the center and repeat on the other side. Choose your weight carefully, because it’s easy to cheat.

2. Split Stance High to Low Aquabag Chop (over front foot): It’s a more dynamic exercise overall and one that transfers immediately to the field, as each baseball player throws and needs to be able to slow down properly to avoid spinning out of control or missing their target. This will help athletes learn how to absorb energy into that lead hip.

3. Palf Press Corrosion with: This exercise is reactive in nature. You’re going to set-up like a normal bench press and then you release and quickly grab the handle again. This will challenge your core to quickly stop your trunk from going into over-rotation.

4. Proteus Straight Arm Anti-Rotation: This is a more dynamic progression from the Landmine Anti-Rotation Drill that I demonstrated earlier. Here, we’re going to rotate our upper body as fast as possible and stop immediately at end-range. It’s very challenging because if you can’t stop properly, you’ll just lose your balance and fall sideways. We want to make sure that our trunk can stop itself independently of our hips so that everything doesn’t put too much pressure or rely too much on our hips while working together.

5. Proteus Split Stance High to Low Chop (over front leg): Like the aquabug chop, we’re going through a modified throwing motion, trying to apply as much power as possible. If we are able to properly exploit our high output here, we will be able to have more success on the mound by maintaining good posture after the pitch instead of spinning uncontrollably.

Light/quick drills here usually work well as part of the “pre-work”. In other words, we’ll integrate them after the warm-up and before we get to our lifts for the day. They pair well as fillers in medicine ball drills. Conversely, if the loads are heavy, they are best combined as support exercises during strength training.

About the author

Eduardo Valle is a strength and conditioning coach from Cressey Sports Performance – Florida. He graduated from the University of Virginia with a BS.Ed in Kinesiology. A certified strength and conditioning specialist through the NSCA, Eduardo also serves as part of the UVA sports medicine staff as an athletic training student; This experience helped shape his approach to exercise as medicine is an integral part of both injury reduction and performance enhancement. She is currently in a master’s program at Florida Atlantic University in exercise science and health promotion. You can follow him on Instagram @edu_valle2.

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