Growing Pain Injuries For Baseball Pitchers

In this video, Scott Haase discusses some of the most common growing pain injuries that youth players deal with in middle and high school. They include Osgood Schlatter Disease, Severs Disease and any other growing pain aches in the back or other areas.

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Full Transcript (will update):

If you want to talk about annoying players that are going through a growth spurt and have just soreness in their body and their joints just hurt, it's terrible. My wife has gone through, I've worked with so many players that have gone through it. So there are some common growth, growing pain injuries, there are a few of them, one being as good slaughters. That's what my wife went through. And a lot of players are the ones severs disease with your ankle and your heel area. And then just some other general ones, I want to talk a little bit about what they are, what so you can start to recognize them and pinpoint them. But then also, more importantly, what you should be doing in advance. And then definitely what you can do afterwards.

Osgood Schlatter Disease

So Osgood Schlatters tends to be knee pain. So in the front of the knee right here tends to be painful. So this tender here, but it could be the whole knee joint, whole knee could be bothering you. If it's achy all the time, during exercise, after exercise, before exercise, while sleeping any of those things for long periods of time. That tends to be a type of growing pain that players are going to get that is just not fun. It can I've had athletes that have dealt with it for four years, my wife was the same thing multiple years, a lot of guys, that and girls that go through growing pains and get Osgood Schlatters Disease, just deal with it for years. And oftentimes, the doctors say, it's not going to hurt you long term, it's not gonna do long term damage, you're just gonna have to push through the pain and there's nothing you can do to fix it. That's here. Fortunately, though, there's good news and bad news. Bad news is it actually can do damage, especially for pitchers.

So if you if it hurts to use your legs, and you don't use them as well guess what the rest of your body has to compensate for that and do extra work. So not have to rotate extra hard and use more upper body extra heart. And that could cause long term damage and injuries. It could long term damage, my mechanics and my movement and my ability to reach my full potential because you dealt with knee pain for so long. So how do you avoid it? First of all, you got to move. And I don't just mean go to practice and do what you're supposed to do, like I've talked about, in addition to so guys that are doing any type of weight training, whether it's lightweight, body weight, heavyweight, whatever it is always with a trained and certified professional. But guys doing that or doing speed classes or plyometric classes, or anything like that is going to help you out tremendously if your muscles aren't strong enough to start, and then you go through a growth spurt and they're stretching. I'm sorry, there's not much you could can do now, as opposed to what you could have been doing in advance. Now if you're already in it.

Luckily, there is something you can do. There's definitely icing which can help maintain the pain or maintain a little less pain, some kind of numbness, there's always that option. But there's actually some exercises you can start to do that yes, will be a little bit painful. But you can push through the pain. As a personal trainer, I've worked with adults that have had knee injuries, I've worked with youth that have had these in physical therapists to try and like work in, in conjunction to be able to give them a plan.

So things you can do is start to strengthen the muscles right here. You can actually, if I haven't done this already, while you're watching this, I plan to be including this in some of my programs on how to pinpoint Osgood Schlatters Disease, specifically, because there's exercises you can do to get yourself through range of motion with your knee and develop strength.

So it's leaning against a wall and doing toe raises, you'll start to squeeze this muscle right here and strengthen that muscle, which helps you when you land you think about right there that muscles is engaging, a pitcher is going to land and that muscle is going to engage when you run and you stop those muscles engaged. But if those muscles are weak, that doesn't help out your Oscar's fodders or your knee pain. So right there, then also we can target with some calf muscle exercises. And your calf muscles actually work in a couple different ways. You've got a couple different sets of muscles, you have the big ones that stick out to the side, typically and then one underneath. So by working those out both in an extended position, and then a bent position, we can actually target the calf muscles.

So now we've got the front and the back, we've got the entire part of the lower half below the knee that's getting stretched out and getting exercise and getting stronger. And we can do that all with no pain or little pain because you're just in 24/7 pain. It's not necessarily that we might be getting rid of it, but we're trying to mitigate or lessen the stress and pain in your knees. And then there are some exercises you can do with your quads where you can both stretch them and put them through a good range of motion where you're maybe bracing yourself and taking the stress off but just getting your knee to move through a further range of motion than you're used to. Because if you've ever seen someone that has maybe an elbow injury, and they're just in a sling like this for months, just to get them to straighten out their elbow. requires physical therapy.

So they're actually being pushed into an extended an extended position to get that extension, and that full range of motion back. So we need to get the full range of motion back into your knees, the same thing and then develop the strength as well. Once you've got that, and then like I said, they're stretching too, there's also some stretching for the hamstring. So you can get that stretched out and strengthen it. So now you've stretched and strengthened all around your knee, and we can help lessen the pain, increase the strength and help get you out of that Osgood Schlatters, a little bit earlier.

Sever's Disease

The other one is severs disease. And that is in your ankle. Again, growing pain type of injuries. Not really an injury, just something that kind of happens over time, I guess it would be an injury, but they call it severs disease, it's going to be in your heel, same types of things. They would call minimally invasive exercises, basically things that aren't taxing in your body don't hurt too much going through ranges of motion can help that. But I want you to be aware of if you've got heel pain, that can be an issue. And it can affect some other things. But again, if we can strengthen all of this area, and get that ankle moving through a full range of motion, that can help.

General Growing Pains

And then the other one is just general growing pains. So guys have that in their back in their limbs all over their body. Sometimes they have it in the knees and their ankles, they could have it in their upper body, their shoulders, there's a lot of different places. So again, the biggest thing is, number one, be aware that that could be an issue, if you're about going through puberty, if you're in puberty, or if maybe you've kind of hit your growth spurt a year or two ago, but you're still dealing with it, that can be the issue. What you have to do is either get strong to fight that it would never come get strong while you're in it or once you've been in it, you're going to have to get stronger and that means going through range of ranges of motion, trying to lessen the pain as much as possible by adding support to get through ranges of motion. And then adding strength through the range of motion you have and that you continue to get as well.