Josh Gessner
@joshgessner • 46,391 subscribers
Co-founder: https://t.co/nbDchVYG2S
Shorts
Videos
Yoshinobu Yamamoto is able to throw in the upper nineties without lifting a single weight. Here’s how. I’m currently reading through his book, which explains his training, why he doesn’t lift, and why he throws javelins. I’m about halfway through, and one of the big things that stood out to me is his daily warmup routine. This routine includes back bridges, handstands, forward and backward rolls, side rolls, sidesteps, and lateral running. The whole point of this routine is to develop full body awareness so he’s able to move his body and be athletic in his pitching delivery. This routine originated from judo. It’s something I tried myself, and to my surprise, I struggled with most of these exercises. If you’re already at a high level, have a solid strength base, and have been lifting for a while, it might be worth trying these full body exercises. Focus on developing full body awareness and improving movement quality instead of continuing to hammer weights.
Josh Gessner48,227 views • 2 months ago
The Most Underrated Way to Gain 3–5 MPH. This might be the most underrated way to add three to five miles an hour. Almost nobody in baseball is talking about it. It’s called overcoming isometrics. When I first started training to throw a hundred, I thought getting stronger just meant lifting heavier. But throwing isn’t just about strength. It’s about how fast you can fire those muscles. You have to go from relaxed to full effort in a split second. I wasn’t training that at all. That’s when I found overcoming isos. Pushing as hard as possible against something that doesn’t move. It sounds simple, but it works. It teaches your nervous system to fire everything at once. It improves rate of force development and neural drive. That carries over to throwing harder, jumping higher, and sprinting faster. Once I added them in, my velocity jumped about three miles an hour in a few weeks. Here’s how I use them. Split stance isos that match my throwing position. That trains my lower body to put force into the ground. Trap bar iso pulls for total body force. Bench press isos for upper body power. My favorite is tempo isos. Relax for a second, then push as hard as possible for one to two seconds. Reset and repeat. It trains you to go from relaxed to max effort fast. That’s exactly what you need in the pitching delivery.
Josh Gessner28,052 views • 1 month ago
If you have the yips you need to watch this. I couldn’t throw a baseball 60 feet to save my life, and it wasn’t because of my body, it was because of my brain. I had the yips so bad I couldn’t even play catch. One thought kept destroying me the whole time. Everyone thinks I suck. Here’s what I didn’t know. Nobody was actually thinking about me. There’s a study called the Spotlight Effect that shows people think way less about you than you think they do. In the study, people wore embarrassing shirts and then guessed how many others noticed. They guessed 50 percent. The real number was less than 20 percent. Here’s why. Everyone’s too busy thinking about themselves to think about you. You think about yourself 99 percent of the time, and so does everyone else. That means all that anxiety about what other people think is just in your head. Once I realized nobody actually cared, I stopped caring what they thought. That’s when I finally got over the fear and started throwing freely again.
Josh Gessner50,966 views • 3 months ago
Don’t train like a pitcher, train like an Olympic sprinter. When I was with the Phillies throwing in the mid-90s, I thought sprinting was eyewash. I just wanted to get bigger and stronger. But here’s the thing—the key to throwing harder isn’t to get bigger or stronger. It’s to train your central nervous system to fire faster. And sprinting is one of the best tests for how well your CNS is firing. Look at Roki Sasaki, who throws 103 mph. When researchers studied him, they found he had similar characteristics to an Olympic sprinter. Or Aroldis Chapman beating Billy Hamilton in a race—when Hamilton was the fastest runner in the MLB. Or even Shohei Ohtani stealing 50 bases last year. They’re elite at throwing and sprinting because they’re so efficient at firing their CNS. So if you want to take advantage of this, here’s what you do: – 2–3x per week, incorporate sprint variations (acceleration, weighted, max effort). – Do ~10 sprints per session. – Add rate of force development, VBT, and impulse-type training into your routine. And if that sounds confusing, just comment SPRINT and I’ll send you the exact routine I’m using to throw 100 mph.
Josh Gessner114,602 views • 8 months ago
Stop accelerating down the mound. I’m sure you’ve heard the cue to accelerate down the mound. Get down the mound quickly. The mistake most people make, and the mistake I made when I was 16, was trying to force it. I was throwing slow, around 78 to 80 miles an hour. I thought I had to push off the rubber as hard as I could to accelerate my body down the mound. When I made the jump to throwing 90 plus to 95 as an 18 year old, the big change I made was this. Instead of pushing off the rubber to accelerate my center of mass down the mound, I let gravity pull me into the ground. That matters because when gravity pulls you into position without pushing, your back leg stays loaded and under you. Now the back leg can work underneath you. It can rotate you and pull the pelvis open. That pulls the spine and then propels the arm. The goal isn’t to force speed down the mound. The goal is to let gravity set up the back leg so it can accelerate the pelvis, which pulls the spine into the throw.
Josh Gessner40,124 views • 3 months ago
POV: you stopped lifting heavy and threw 98 MPH Up until I threw 95, and even in pro ball with the Phillies and Rangers, all I tried to do in the weight room was lift as heavy as I could. Now that I’m trying to throw 100 miles an hour, I’ve realized that’s not the most efficient way to train. This is something I see a lot of guys struggle with. They go to college, get bigger and stronger, but don’t throw harder. And they wonder why. The biggest reason is they’re not training rate of force development. In the pitching delivery, you only have milliseconds to produce force. If you can’t produce a high amount of force in that time, your velocity will be limited. Once I started incorporating rate of force development into my training, I began climbing into the 96, 97, 98 mile an hour range. My favorite ways to train this are overcoming isometrics, oscillatory work, explosive lifts, VBT-style training, ballistic barbell movements, and plyometrics. All of these teach you how to produce force fast, not just how much you can lift. I also created a full guide on this. If you want it, comment “guide” and I’ll send it to you.
Josh Gessner25,182 views • 2 months ago
This Back Leg Adjustment Got Me to 98 mph. What’s the best way to load into your back leg? When I threw 95, I tried to get as deep and load into my back leg as much as possible. The adjustment that got me to 98 was speeding up the drop into my back leg. I started dropping into that back leg as quickly as possible. The quicker you go down, the higher you can jump. That’s scientifically proven. That’s what we want to emulate in the pitching delivery with the back leg. We want to relax into it. We want to drop into it. By doing that we’re putting force into the ground not only vertically but horizontally as well. So to recap, you’re shifting your weight and then relaxing into your back leg. That’s what creates that burst of energy going forward.
Josh Gessner30,391 views • 2 months ago
POV: You throw through the target. This might be the most underrated cue in baseball for increasing pitching velocity. That cue is to throw through the target. One of the studies I read was from Tom House. What he said was that 80 percent of pitching velocity comes from the separation you create and the rotational aspects of throwing. The other 20 percent comes from how well you track toward the target and direct energy through it. This is something I made a mistake with. I created a delivery where I would pull off. I was trying to create so much power just from rotation. What was actually happening was that I was leaking a lot of energy off to the side instead of sending it through the target. Yamamoto is one of the best examples of this. I love watching him because when he throws, he doesn’t spin off at all. He lifts his leg and all of his energy goes toward the target. He even finishes by moving forward. Everything he does goes through the target rather than being purely rotational.
Josh Gessner42,091 views • 4 months ago
I went from 92 to 98 miles an hour by adjusting my drop. When I used to think about the drop phase in my delivery, I thought I needed to drop as hard as I could into my back leg. So that’s what I did. I dropped in, got into a squat position, and powered myself out of it. That got me to the low to mid nineties. What got me to 96, 97, and 98 was learning to create linear momentum during the drop. I started moving down the mound instead of just dropping straight down. One of the biggest things that helped was dropping into the inside of my back foot. Before, I would drop into the sole of my back foot. That put me in a very vertical shin angle and I’d go straight down. Then I had to push out of it. The simple adjustment I made was dropping into the inside of my back foot. That put me in a position where my shin wasn’t as vertical. It created a force vector that helped me get down the mound and build linear momentum instead of just going straight down. That linear momentum wasn’t powered by me. It was powered by gravity. I was able to use gravity to my advantage and throw harder with less effort.
Josh Gessner30,075 views • 3 months ago
Stop Pushing With Your Back Leg As I trained to throw harder, I thought I needed to create a ton of momentum down the mound and really push off the rubber. That was actually holding me back from gaining pitching velocity for a couple reasons. The first reason was that pushing made it really hard for my pelvis to fire because it put me in a worse position instead of a better one. When I was pushing, it also made me fly open. The fix was thinking about keeping everything back and letting the pelvis rotate instead of pushing with my back leg. Most of your linear momentum comes from the drift and the drop in your delivery and the back leg. The back leg does have a role in building linear momentum, but its more important role is putting you in a good position to rotate. To create separation between your pelvis and your rib cage. That separation is what gives you true hip to shoulder separation that you can actually fire from.
Josh Gessner37,598 views • 4 months ago
How to Create Rotation With the Back Leg How you want to actually create rotation with the back leg. For me and higher level guys, I don’t even like to think about rotation. If you feel your hips rotating, it’s probably too slow. This is such a violent, explosive movement that happens in milliseconds. You shouldn’t even be able to feel it. That’s why I think about it as a weight shift. When you’re putting force into the ground, into that X direction, most of your weight is on the back leg. Then once you create that impulse and it propels you forward, all you need to think about is getting to the front leg. That force naturally rotates the hips into foot plant. For a lot of higher level guys, this helps a lot. They don’t have to think about rotating the hips. Because that can actually mess things up. Instead, it’s just force into the ground and get to the front leg. The pelvis will rotate on its own.
Josh Gessner14,012 views • 1 month ago
POV: you throw through the target. This might be the most underrated cue in baseball for increasing pitching velocity. It’s the idea of throwing through the target. Tom House did a study on this. He found that 80 percent of pitching velocity comes from separation and rotation. The other 20 percent comes from how well you track toward the target and direct energy through it. I made this mistake for years. I built a delivery where I would pull off. I tried to create power with rotation alone. What actually happened was I leaked energy sideways instead of directing it through the target. One of my favorite examples is Yamamoto. He doesn’t spin off. All of his energy is directed through and toward the target. He even finishes going forward. Everything goes through the target, not just rotation. Here’s the key. You still need rotation. That’s 80 percent of your pitching velocity. You can throw about 80 percent of your velocity from your knees because of rotation. But if you don’t direct that energy through the target, you’re leaving velocity on the table.
Josh Gessner22,709 views • 3 months ago
80% of pitching velocity comes from rotation. The biggest mistake I see is guys trying to rotate by pushing hard down the mound. They try to push to create as much linear momentum as possible. That’s actually the wrong way to approach it. When you push, it becomes much harder to rotate effectively. Rotation is where most of your pitching velocity comes from. Hip to shoulder separation is responsible for about 80 percent of your velocity. If you take away from that separation, you’re taking away from your velocity. That’s why even from your knees you should be able to throw about 80 percent of your top velocity. What we want to do is maximize rotation and create as much separation as possible. Your pelvis fires toward the target while the ribcage, shoulders, and pec stay back. That stretch creates torque through your torso. That torque is what propels the arm through the throw. I created a full guide on this, so if you want it, comment guide below and I’ll send it over.
Josh Gessner18,338 views • 3 months ago
When I was in pro ball, even throwing in the mid 90s, I never did this. But I honestly think it’s one of the biggest things that’s going to help me get to 100 miles an hour. One of the most underrated ways to throw harder is to implement cross training. Now, cross training in terms of pitching just means you’ll be using something other than the baseball to throw. For example, you see Yamamoto in the big leagues right now. He attributes a lot of his velocity gains to javelin throwing, and he’s thrown the javelin for many, many years. There’s another pitcher who’s one of the best pitchers in college baseball right now in Japan who’s up to 102 miles an hour and attributes a lot of his success to throwing the volleyball and the volleyball teaching him how to move. For myself, I use a football to clean up my arm action. When you use different implements, it’ll give you a new stimulus. It can clean up a lot of the mechanics that you wouldn’t be able to with the baseball itself. For myself and my training to throw 100 miles an hour, I use all of these implements for my arm action. Now, I have a tendency of forearm flyout where my forearm flies out this way, and so I want to keep it a little bit more directed toward the plate. Some of the best ways to do this is to throw the javelin. Because to throw the javelin far, you can’t be flying out. You need to go straight through. The football as well needs to be straight through. Also, just hitting the volleyball. I love watching volleyball players hit the volleyball because the upper mechanics are so efficient. So if you feel stuck in your training, start incorporating cross training.
Josh Gessner29,140 views • 7 months ago
What’s the best way to load into your back leg. When I threw 95, I tried to get as deep as possible and load into my back leg as much as I could. The way I got to 98 was by speeding up the drop and getting into my back leg as quickly as possible. As I’m training to throw a hundred miles an hour, I’m starting to think about it differently. Instead of dropping into my back leg and getting as deep as possible, I like to feel more of an impulse. I’m putting force into the ground and the ground pushes back and gives me a burst of energy toward the plate. Studies have shown that the guys with the best impulse from their back leg throw the hardest. That means putting the most force into the ground for the longest amount of time. When you see this, you get guys like Shane McLanahan, Misiorowski, and Strider who look like they’re almost jumping down the mound. They’re really just putting so much force into the ground that it propels them forward. The key for me is I don’t want to put force into the ground by tensing up. I don’t want it to feel like a single leg squat. It should feel more like a max effort jump. The quicker I go down, the higher I’m able to jump. That lets me take better advantage of the stretch shortening cycle and improve my impulse.
Josh Gessner18,268 views • 4 months ago
The Biggest Mistake of College Pitchers The biggest mistake I see is guys doing random stuff and putting in the work, thinking that’s enough. They’ll say, yeah man, I’m putting in the work, I lift five times a week, I throw five times a week, I do mobility every day. Then I ask them, what’s the goal in the weight room? They say, just lift heavy. I ask, what’s the goal with your throwing program? What’s going on with your mechanics? What are you attacking? They’ll say they kind of just long toss every day and that’s it. So do you really feel like that’s the most efficient path to get where you want to go? If there’s no intention behind what you’re doing, then you’re just doing something to do something. This is most common with college guys in programs where the lifting plan isn’t great and the coaches don’t really help them. They get stronger, but they never throw harder. It’s because they’re not working on what they actually need to work on. If you’re already super strong in college, then let’s focus on force production, power, and your mechanics. You need to transfer the strength you built into the mound. I created a full guide on this, so if you want it, comment guide below and I’ll send it over.
Josh Gessner13,563 views • 3 months ago
The simplest way I think about the lower body: The simplest way I think about my lower body mechanics goes like this. I’m in leg lift and shifting my weight a little bit. This is called the drift. As I shift my weight, all I need to do is let gravity pull me into the throw. That's what accelerates me down the mound. But I can't just continue to sink down. There is a stabilization that happens with the back leg. After this stabilization, I fire everything into rotation. My knee, hip, and foot all fire into rotation. This creates the separation between the pelvis, which yanks my spine into the throw. All of this happens subconsciously. You need to be able to do that subconsciously. You can't think about these things on the mound. If you start to think about them, which happen in milliseconds, it's too slow, and the result just isn't going to be as good.
Josh Gessner10,801 views • 3 months ago
Training to get drafted Day 3: One of the biggest things I’ve been working on lately is my pelvis rotation. I’ve talked about this in the past—how my pelvis wasn’t fully clearing and fully firing. For a long time, I thought the issue was that I just needed to rotate harder. What I started to realize, was that the real problem wasn’t my pelvis at all—it was my foot. Because my foot wasn’t firing, my hip wouldn’t fire correctly, and my knee would try to take over. My cue used to be, “Alright, slam the knee down to rotate the pelvis.” But what was actually happening was my foot would get stuck. It wouldn’t clear. It wouldn’t fire. When I started looking back at video from times when I threw harder, the difference became obvious. My entire foot had cleared and fired. That’s why one of the biggest things I’m working on right now is getting my foot through and fully rotated—firing the foot. Because if I’m able to fire my foot, and you actually feel this, you physically can’t keep your pelvis closed when your foot is in that position. Everything opens. One of my favorite cues for this is “get to my shoelaces.” This is something I got from Albertus, my partner. During the drive phase, all I’m thinking about is getting to my shoelaces. If I can get my foot into that position— I know my pelvis will clear. And if my pelvis clears, I’m going to create elite pelvis rotation. That’s one of my mechanical focuses right now. I’m posting every day until I get drafted. I’ll see you tomorrow.
Josh Gessner12,208 views • 5 months ago