From Broken to Bulletproof: The Pattern That Saved a Pitcher’s Career

A high school pitcher was told to rest, stretch, and wait it out—yet every week hurt more than the last. We took a different route: test how he moves under real conditions, then rebuild the pattern from the ground up. What we found was simple and powerful. His upper traps were calling the shots, his lat was stuck in neutral, and his pelvis and scapula were speaking different languages. Once we taught the shoulder blade to depress and the hips to hinge, pain gave way to clean mechanics and confident throws.

We walk you through the exact tests we used—the shoulder coordination test that exposes trap dominance, the squat screen that reveals pelvic control, and how serratus activation becomes the missing link for overhead athletes. You’ll hear why scapulohumeral rhythm matters for deceleration, how the lat connects shoulder and spine stability, and what changes when the body redistributes work from “always on” neck muscles to true stabilizers like lower traps and lats. The before-and-after details are striking: better thoracic extension, more space at end range, and a squat that preserves spinal curves while generating real force.

From there, we map the training plan that stuck: high-rep scapular depression with serratus, a catcher squat that grooves hip hinge and lordosis, and a steady ramp of throwing volume to 300 pain-free towel and ball throws a week. Along the way, we tackle the bigger lesson for players and parents—ask why every drill exists, demand a clear cause-and-effect, and measure what matters. If imaging is clean but movement is noisy, the fix is in the pattern. Subscribe for more case studies, share this with a pitcher who needs a roadmap back to the mound, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway so we can keep saving arms together.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Mission To Save Arms
• 0:24 Case Study Setup: Robert’s Injuries
• 2:43 The Limits Of Traditional Care
• 3:23 Why Functional Testing Matters
• 4:29 Shoulder Coordination Test Explained
• 6:25 Trap Dominance And Rhythm Breakdown
• 8:20 The Lat Link Between Shoulder And Back
• 10:26 Six-Month Transformation: What Changed
• 13:06 Serratus And Scapular Depression Focus
• 15:03 Squat Test: Pelvis And Spine Control
• 18:00 Identifying The Root Cause: The Lat
• 19:36 Programming The Fix And Results
• 21:28 Ask Why And Find The Right Provider
• 23:16 Guarantees, Goals, And How To Work With Us

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Hey everybody, it's Dr. Kevin McGovern, and it's another edition of the Velocity RX podcast. I would please have you like and subscribe the show. It helps us grow. It helps us get my word out. It helps me to get more followers so that I can save one million arms starting with yours. So another case study today. The title of that study is called From Broken to Bulletproof. The comeback story every pitcher needs to hear. So let's start about seven months ago. I got a call from a very upset mom who was at her wits' end, her son who loved baseball, who was looking to play in college at a at least a Division II level, if not a Division I level, but essentially was out injured. He's in the Texas area, and for to protect the innocent, we'll just call him Robert. So Robert had a series of injuries, and they're sort of related. One was a back injury, and the other was a shoulder injury. And hurt it pitching. I forget actually the exact mechanism of injury of why he hurt it, but you know, he's uh someone who came to me after going through a long line of providers, right? Starting with the medical model, we start with the primary care physician, and then we go to the orthopedic, and then by the time anyone does anything, it's six to eight weeks in the process. You know, maybe there's an MRI. No, there was an MRI in this case, not showing anything that was out of the ordinary. But the kid was the kid was in pain. He had therapy, and that was a failure because they didn't address the right movements. Not all physical therapy is the same, by all means, not every doctor is the same, not every auto mechanic is the same. So a lot of people think out there that you know every physical therapy has the same amount of training, the same amount of expertise, the same product, and that could not be further from the truth. So we got on a phone call. Uh Robert was telling me, you know, he loved baseball. This is what he wanted to do. He's very frustrated. Every thing that he has done went down the wrong, wrong path. Actually, many things made him worse. So I began to you know start asking questions. We had an MRI, I believe we had an EMG too, which measures nerve conduction velocity, you know, how fast the nerve is going, is going, uh, the impulse is going down the nerve. But the bottom line is we're off the field. We're we're not playing. So mom took a chance and signed up. You know, I really hit home the importance of functional movement testing. You know, when they went to physical therapy, there wasn't, you know, there was the basic range of motion and strength. What I mean by functional movement testing is squat, lunge, actual functional positions that the body will be in. You know, a lot of there's a lot of products out there, a lot of testing. You know, like for instance, there's some products out there that you're testing arm strength, lying down up against an immovable object like a wall. Well, that's not functional because never are we lying down on the baseball field resisting our arm against a wall. So it gives false or tainted data. You know, maybe those are the wrong words, because you know, I'm sure it's measuring the output, but it's not functional, right? As soon as you stand up, as soon as you tilt your pelvis, as soon as you're on one foot, everything else changes, right? It's we're a dynamic the body is a dynamic piece of machinery, and every change that you make, the pitch of the mound, that's the you know, where's the weight on your foot is on the medial side, the lateral side, all of those will change numbers moving up and down the kinetic chain. So I told mom, I'm like, look, this game test is going to show you exactly what is wrong, why it is wrong, and how we're gonna fix it. All right. So, you know, we started with my shoulder coordination test, and we'll see before and after photos here. So let's just rewind these. So the shoulder coordination test measures the scapular humeral rhythm of the body. You probably have heard me say that a million times. So, what is that? Well, we have our shoulder blade here, okay, and we have our arm here, all right. As we elevate this arm, okay, the shoulder blade needs to turn in and down, so this becomes a big circle. However, we've got these guys here, okay, called your upper trap. We got your middle trap, we got your lower trap, right? So the upper trap is a bully, it's on all day long holding our head up. So the body will use the most available tool, not necessarily the correct tool to do this movement. And in the video on the left, which is uh the injured video, you're going to see what I mean immediately when we get into as we begin to move, right? Let me clear out my drawing here, right? Let's hone us right into there, right here. Focus right there. What'd you say, right? Immediately upon moving, the upper trap fired, right? So now that is now that is moving opposite of how the body should move, right? We need lower trap activity to turn that shoulder blade down and in. So why is that important? Well, the body again can only accelerate as fast as it can decelerate. Well, your upper traps and your perispinal muscles of the neck are decelerators for your noggin, right? For your head. You get into a car, you get into a car accident, they're helping you decelerate. They are not decelerators for your shoulder and shoulder blades, all right. So you will see here as we begin up, we get up, right? So now we're in this upward position, tons of upper trap activity, and as he begins to go down, you're going to see now the shoulder blades become really non-symmetrical, right? I mean, look at how that as we come down, they become, you know, very non-symmetrical. All right. Now, that keyed me in that, of course, we have the poor scapula humor rhythm. So the so the shoulder is an amazing joint, it's got all of this movement, however, it's connected to nothing, right? It's swimming in our back, right? And the basics of kinesiology, the basics of the study of movement is what I call the meriground, the merry-go-round principle, meaning we have a stable post, right? Let's make that work. So we've got a stable post, all right, in the ground, and we have this merry-go-round that rotates around that stable post. Well, same thing with the body. We want to move the hip, the the femur. We've got a stable pelvis, and that femur moves around or about it. Okay. We want to rotate our spine, we've got our stable pelvis, and our spine rotates around or about that stable post. All right. We don't have very good stability in the shoulder because it's not connected to anything. So the basic movement of scapula humoral rhythm is vital. It's like air for breathing. Okay, if we don't have that correct, you are going to get hurt. It's just a matter of when, never if. Okay. So that has to be in place, moving correctly, before we exercise, and certainly before we throw anything overhead. Now, the next thing is so remember we had a shoulder issue and a back issue. So how are they related or how are they connected? Well, they are related and connected by a muscle that's right here, our lat. Okay, our lat has function to stabilize the pelvis and stabilize the shoulder blade. So now we have issue. Here's a moving body. We have issue with stabilizing the shoulder. So the lat is literally almost in a state of confusion. It doesn't know what to do, right? It doesn't know should I help here, should I help here? And now when we have two parts of the body that are injured at the same time, it's really in flux. Okay. So looking at this movement on the right, right? His initial scapular shoulder coordination test, you can see there's not much at all going on in that lat. It's not contracting to stabilize the pelvis, it's not contracting to stabilize the shoulder blade. It's literally doing next to nothing. Okay, it's just kind of there. All right. So let's just fast forward six months later just to look at the difference. Okay. So let's put them at equal parts here. So just looking at them, you could see a tremendous amount of muscle tone in here. Okay, but what I was drawn to is a nice smooth, right? It almost looks like his neck got extended, right? The upper trap is up in here. This this angle is different than this angle, okay. That just shows how the body now has redistributed its muscle function along this whole bot, along this whole spine here to get in middle, lower traps, and lats. Okay, so let's pan out and let's look at what we have initially, right? What do you see here? Right? You see muscle function coming here, right? Now, what do we see here initially is what? Right? Upper trap. We got two elevators going to the top, right? So in the post or at our six months, we have immediate lower trap involved. Look at the shoulder blades, depress, thoracic extension, right? Immediately, right? As he began the and he's able to hold it there as he comes all the way up, right? And then when he gets all the way up to the top, right, you're gonna see nice space in here. Now, on the before, when we get all the way to the top, right, you're gonna see less space, right? Much less space, right? So I'd argue that his traps are even more developed, however, they're known they know their role, as the rock would say of the WWE, right? They are on, but they are following suit with the scapular depressors, they are coming on and stabilizing last, not first. Okay, so that is a big, big difference in here, and you can you can it doesn't take much to see with the naked eye the difference in muscle tone left versus right. So, what did we do? Well, we did a boatload of scapular depression exercises, a boatload of scapular depression with serratus. You know, your serratus muscle is underneath your shoulder blade and wraps around. That's that extra. If you stick your arms out and you reach further, that's your serratus muscle. Very few shoulder programs from any PT on the planet is going to incorporate the serratus in a functional movement, okay? It's almost like a forgotten muscle, but it is vital to overhand throwing athletes. So now that's the shoulder blade. So what was going on in the back, right? And maybe we'll use his squat later, but he failed his squat test. Let's see if I can actually bring that up. We might be able to do that while we're on video. Maybe I can pause this. Yes. Okay. Okay, I'm back with the squat test. So that lat, remember, I talked about it being a two-joint muscle. So the lat is going to help really anterior tilt that pelvis. When I teach a squat, what I want to see is that we keep that lordotic curve. That is the inward curve of your lower back, and you also have one at your cervical spine. We do the I do that because the spine was built, you know, by God, like you know, for a purpose with three specific curves, and we have a tremendous amount, or the spine has a tremendous ability to bear weight, you know, through the head down, right? Compression force. So it you want to have those three curves as much as you can. Why do they invent the weight belt? Well, they invent the weight belt to help keep that lordotic curve, right? We want to keep that spine curved in. So as we begin to look at the squat, right? The first move we see is what? Bend your knees, right? I've got a I've got a video on my Instagram that's pinned there. You probably should go look at it. At Dr. What am I at at Dr. K McGovern PT? You will see I do a live demonstration with someone getting into the batter's box and bending their knees first as opposed to hinging their hips backwards. And you will see the hip hinge produces a tremendous amount of force. So we need to move proximal to distal from our spinal cord down to our extremity. When we don't do that, okay, that is when we get issues with movement, issues with stability, issues with muscle strength. So once I saw the squat test of knees going forward, okay, and right there, the rounding of the back, right? Okay, we couldn't get much lower than that. All right, I knew at that point that we have issue with this lat muscle, right? And the lat being a again, they call it a two-joint muscle, but it's not initially connected to a joint, but it has workability as a depressor of the shoulder blade, it has workability as a stabilizer of the pelvis. So with both of these movements, I now know that the lat is our issue that's not stabilizing the sacreiliac joint, that is disrupting the scapula humeral rhythm, okay, and that is why we have issue. That is the root cause of the issue. Now, that means that we'll be looking at strengthening our glutes, okay, hamstrings, pelvic floor, scapula depressors. Now, if you're not doing this testing and you send this kid out to go and play, he's going to get hurt, and that's why he was hurt. The root cause, when I said, you know, he's got a lat issue. Mom and son were like, Oh my god, that makes perfect sense. That that is the problem that I always knew. I remember the son saying, I always knew that I was doing these exercises that weren't getting to the problem. I began frustrated because I would do them and nothing would happen. The first time I did scapular depression followed by squats, I felt better that day. I felt better that one day after those exercises than I had for six months. So we focused on scapular depression and squatting, and I will show you the before and after. So I will show you the before and after here. Let's get to my screen here. So again, we focused on two movements. You've already seen the after of scapular depression, you've already seen the shoulder coordination test. Okay. And now one of the main exercises I do is I call it a catcher squat. This is the fundamental movement, fundamental squat. So many kids cannot squat correctly. Okay. If you're going to be a pitcher, a hitter, any athlete, you have to master the squat. But notice here the pronounced in lordosis. And I also want to see essentially chest, knees, and toes lined up over the top of one another. And you will see how this it's just we're literally lifting a millimeter off the ground as we do this, right? It's just literally kind of just rocking up and back, up and back, up and back. So these two exercises, we did ad nauseum for the better part of six months, maybe four months. I mean, we're still doing them. Now we're throwing 300 balls and towel drills a week. Pain free. We are hitting pain free. We are back to playing baseball, pain free. Okay. So doctors almost telling the kid, well, we can't really figure it out. Maybe you should just give up baseball, okay, to failing other therapy because the exercises didn't address the root cause to now being back on the baseball field. And, you know, I'm not here to to my own horn. I'm here to, I mean, listen, I was a back of the class sitter in in college, right? But I always challenge the why. Why? Why are you doing that? Why, why, why, why? And I'm always able to show the why. Well, we're doing this, why this way, and because, okay. So, parents, ask why. Okay, why is this happening? Why is this going on? Why are we doing this exercise? And if you're not getting a good answer to why, turn around and go and find another provider. There are many of us out there. I'd like you to come see me, but find another provider. So now this kid's mom is going to ask the why, and she knows the why. And more importantly, as an athlete, he knows the why. So he's not just doing exercise to like bang his head up against the wall. He's got a specific purpose, he knows why. And the results have been off the chart. And I cannot be happier for this kid who was literally miserable, all right, and is now back to playing and wants to go to college to play baseball, and he has the talent to do so. So thank you for listening. That's another case study. These are actual case studies that stuff that actually really happened. We're not making anything up here. So remember, like and subscribe. Visit velocityrx.org, K McGovern PT or Dr. Dr. K McGovern PT is my social media. You'll like and subscribe my YouTube channel, tons of videos there. Help me save 1 million arms. Contact me, and I will help your child. Okay. My programs are guaranteed. Okay. What I mean by that is we pick a goal. Now, if your goal is to be like, you know, Dr. Kevin, I want to go from 80 to 97 miles an hour, that's not a reasonable goal. But if you come in and say, hey, I want to go from 80 to 85 and be able to throw every third day, well, that's a very that's a very meetable goal. And if we don't get your goal after six months, the program lasts six months, I'll work with you for free until we do. So how many programs out there are guaranteed? Probably not many. So I stand behind my product. I've been doing this for 31 years. I can help your son. Okay, help me save one million arms. It starts with your kid. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in our next episode.