Barbell RDL With Kansas City Royals P Tim Collins

Kansas City Royals P Tim Collins performs a Barbell RDL during his off-season baseball training with coaching by Eric Cressey, president and co-founder of Cressey Performance.

Tim Collins demonstrates his offseason pitchers workout by performing deadlift variations. It creates stability and strength in the back and glute muscles.

TRANSCRIPT

Eric Cressey: It's a great posterior chain exercise. We use a lot of dead lift variations with our guys for a lot of reasons. For a postural standpoint it's a great way to get some good scapular stability, to get some good thoracic spinal stability, get them more upright, to teach a good hip hinge so that they're not just cranking on their low back. Instead they're learning to use their hamstrings, their glutes, and their posterior chain. You get grip benefits. Your rotator cuff fires without you even knowing it. So there are a ton of benefits to that and for Tim knowing how much he uses his posterior chain when he throws, it's really important for us to get him strong there in the off-season so he can sustain it throughout the year. I always emphasize keeping the chin tucked instead of being out there and looking out we want to make sure guys are moving through the hips. I always cue guys to initiate the movement though the hips and stay on the heels. So we either have guys go barefoot or in Tim's case he's wearing the Minimus, which is a great shoe for being able to do that stuff while you're training and not have to slip them off and go barefoot and throw them back on. It's a really versatile show and it allows us to keep our weight back. It's great for posterior chain exercise whether it's a dead lift or whether it's a hip thrust like Steve was doing, whatever it may be. It could be four reps if you're going pretty heavy on a given day or up to eight. You don't want to go for high reps because it's a pretty technically advanced exercise and guys will break down later on in form.