Stop Icing Your Arm, Pitchers
Stop Icing Your Arm, Pitchers
No really. At least consider it.
After a long two weeks of travel highlighted by the baseball trip of a lifetime in Cooperstown, I’m officially nestled back into Good Game headquarters (aka my office/workout room/extra guest room). Excited to get back in the rhythm of our Wednesday & Friday publish schedule. There is endless dissecting and empathizing and calling a spade a spade to be had in this youth sports behemoth. If you have any youth sports buddies that you think would enjoy receiving Good Game, here’s an easy way to pass us along. ⤵️⤵️⤵️⤵️⤵️⤵️
Cooperstown was a magical experience, one I plan to write about in full detail in the next week or so. Surprisingly, my biggest takeaway had nothing to do with the game action or anything that happened on the ground really.
Pin trading is a massive part of the Cooperstown experience - I imagine the same can be said about other large scale (but low pressure) youth sports events where teams from around the country and the world coalesce. There are standard pins. And rare pins. Blackout pins, too. My kid, with an assist from his younger bro, worked hard to get as many pins from the 56 teams as possible but fell a few short. So like a lot of parents I headed to the robust Cooperstown All-Star Village Facebook page to engage in some post-Cooperstown pin trading. But the page is so much more than that and easy to get sucked into. The eager prep questions from those yet to come are endless. What to pack, parking, restaurants recs with no shortage of alumni parents excited to answer. It’s precisely the pay it forward aspect I believe is desperately needed in youth sports, and hope we can implement here.
In any event, I was scrolling through the mountain of posts the other day and came across an interesting question about whether Cooperstown has stations for pitchers to ice their arms after games. Reading through the comments, I saw a lot of “Nos” at first until someone asked, “Why would you ice a pitcher’s arm?”
‘What a stupid thing to say. Of course you ice a pitcher’s arm after a game, you reckless parent you,’ I thought. But then I read more comments and dug into a recent enough piece in the American Baseball Coaches Association that not only debunked the idea of ice being helpful, it explained the dangers.
Written by Lindsay Berra (Yogi’s granddaughter), the piece cites scientific research that proves icing delays the healing process as it increases swelling and can damage healthy tissue.
Berra’s piece includes a deeper explanation from Randy Sullivan, CSCS, DPT and founder of the Florida Baseball Ranch, “Soreness is caused by micro tears in the muscles, tendons and ligaments that happen when you throw,” Sullivan says. “To repair micro trauma, the body sends cells to the area via blood flow. Ice inhibits blood flow.”
There’s a productive way to increase blood flow and rid the body of fluid accumulation after pitching: Movement. Perhaps a quick 2-minute jog after a pitching performance. Two-time Cy Young winner Corey Kluber does light-resistance training targeting his rotator cuff muscles.
Note that this methodology applies to general soreness and inflammation, not actual injuries.
So why have we blindly and subconsciously reached for a bag of ice for our pitchers for several generations now? Blame Sandy Koufax.
A picture of Koufax’s left arm submerged in a bucket of icy water in an issue of Sports Illustrated set the standard. If Sandy freakin’ Koufax is doing it, it must be the way.
According to Berra, though, there has never been a peer-reviewed, published piece that unequivocally proves the benefits of icing. So yes, we keep icing because it’s tradition.
That’s not to say the Berra piece should be taken as gospel, though as the mom of two pitchers I found it quite compelling. Here’s a paper from a Catholic University professor published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research that further makes the case against cooling in eccentric-exercise muscle damage. [Eccentric-exercise is rooted in explosive movements with body control like skiing, a running back cutting, and yes, a pitcher pitching.]
But it’s clearly a topic worth debating on many levels. No ice vs. a few minutes of icing before you work out the micro tears? Pain vs. soreness?
Obviously you should all do your own research and talk to your doctors and orthopedists. But definitely some food for thought for those of us accustomed to grabbing that bag of ice every time our kids pitch.