When young ball players learn how to throw correctly, the most crucial aspect is understanding how the player’s body moves efficiently and with proper movement patterns. The ultimate goal is to apply correct rotational forces to baseball efficiently; these rotational forces need platforms or foundations to rotate around. The first of these platforms is the hips into the ground, and the second platform is the scapula, which the throwing arm rotates around.

Ensuring the hips are stable and have proper external and internal rotation and hip mobility is crucial. The first step in this process is to ensure the young athlete can hinge his hips. This can be seen in simply bending over and picking up a box correctly. Hinge-type exercises, such as squats, split squats, deadlifts, single-leg deadlifts, and kettlebell swings, are key in this process.

Once we've established that the individual can hinge his hips correctly, we move up the kinetic chain to spinal stability and correct spinal movements. Since these aspects of the spine have been worked on in the hinge exercises, it is also important to incorporate isometric-type movements, which involve contracting a muscle without changing its length, for the spinal erectors, lower trapezius, and serratus anterior muscles. These exercises include plank variations, wall sits, and static holds with resistance bands.

As we progress up the kinetic chain, we now focus on scapular stability and proper scapular rhythm, which refers to the coordinated movement of the shoulder blades. The key here is correct retraction and depression of the scapula in all pulling-type movements. It is very easy for the upper trapezius to become dominant in many of these pulling movements, so it must be stressed never to allow the shoulders to move in the direction of the ears (elevation).

After achieving the above results in creating proper hip mobility, spinal stability, and scapular stability, we can now progress into specific external and internal rotation exercises involving rotating a joint or limb. Examples of these exercises include shoulder external and internal rotations with light dumbbells and a quality arm care program. Far too many times, I witnessed young ballplayers jumping ahead in this development process and needing to create the proper foundations for the body to rotate around. As stated before, we must acquire the ability to anti-rotate ( stable platforms ) before we learn how to rotate. If we solely base it on chronological age, we should focus on something other than Resistance-type exercises in the rotational plane for any ball player younger than 14.