The Effects of Personalized Mobility Work on High-School Baseball Players

FMS training or functional movement training is effectively a movement based approach to athletic training. This newly popularized training philosophy is mainly focused on prioritizing movement quality, range of motion, and kinesthetic awareness when approaching the optimization of an athlete’s physiology for sports performance. This is not to say that strength development takes a back seat when this philosophy is applied, rather it suggests that mobility training should be major point of emphasis along with strength/power development in any athletic training program. FMS training has gained a great deal of attention in recent years in regards to its effectiveness in preventing sport-related injuries. This should be no surprise considering the importance of adequate range of motion and subsequent joint health when it comes to sport-specific actions that require rapid or aggressive movements. While FMS has began to creep into many main stream sport performance organizations, the research on the realistic application of this training philosophy to real world athletes is lacking.

Suzuki et al. 2021 was the first to measure the effectiveness of this training philosophy on high school baseball players. Specifically, this study aimed to clarify the effect of movement-focused training or FMS on physical function and baseball-specific performance in high school athletes between the ages of 15 and 17. Baseball-specific performance was quantified by a selection of movements targeted through the concept of “specificity”. A group of movements where selected that mimic the physiological demands of baseball players and the quality at which these movements were performed was observed and quantified.

Their general findings suggest that participation in a FMS training program (detailed more in the paper attached) has a significant positive effect on the movement quality for the deep squat, hurdle step, inline lunge, active straight leg raise, and trunk stability push up. Another interesting finding was that after this mobility programming was removed from these athletes, their FMS scores began to drop in value suggesting that mobility-related movement quality improvements need to remain as a constant factor in athletic programming to maintain physiological benefits.

If you are interested in seeing more details about how this study was conducted, please visit the link below.

Suzuki et al. Medicine (2021): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33832142/