FuzzyLumpkins said:
Careful tossing out glenohumeral, your likely to scare some people off. Might be better with 'big arm bone.'
Two main things is that stick out to me. First is that while the muscles that get injured not the superficial the ones that are deeper. I would think that more strength in the superficial muscles could prevent further injury. The second is that you said it was more difficulty but I would think that a highly conditioned professional athlete and a top end trainer could if it is possible.
I often think the strength of the larger superficial muscles put athletes at greater risk of developing future shoulder injury. The reason is the shoulder depends on a dynamic balance between the large moving muscles and the small stability muscles. The bigger the moving muscles, the more imbalance tends to occur because the ability of the stabilizers to hypertrophy is not as great - these are more endurance type muscles.
Yes, a good dedicated trainer and athlete can do remarkable things.
[qoute]
Finally to the pitcher analogy. I do not intend to discount the tremendous strain that an offensive linemen puts his shoulder through. What I am saying is that a professional pitcher coninously puts tremendous torque on his shoulder through the same 180 arc while moving the mass from back to front.
Medicine is not my bag but physics is and translating that amount of force to the ball requires alot of torque and although the motion is predictaable it is done with high frequency. Pedro Martinez has chronic shoulder problems and is able to throw 90+ 50 or so times every four or five days and maintain that performance for months on end.
He has injured the shoulder several times starting in 1998.
Is it that unreasonable to say that others could not maintain similar performance.[/QUOTE]
Pedro rarely pops 90 mph these days but I guess that happens to all of us with age and injury I suppose.
The reason I brought up the predictability of demand on the shoulder is that muscle compensation and training works well for a controlled motion. You know what the motion is and you can control the biomechanics of the movement.
When a motion is unpredictable, the static restraints such as joint capsules and ligaments have to withstand much more strain because the muscles could not anticipate and compensate. This puts them at much greater risk of being injured. The issue with the shoulder is how ineffective the static restraints can be especially when put in certain awkward positions.
The bottom line is that Rogers is playing better than the other candidates he should start and we should all be happy and hope he does well. At the same time, we have to recognize he does have a very high risk of re-injuring his shoulder at some point in time so we will need to have a viable contingency plan.
