(If you’d rather watch than read you can do so here:)

Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s training routine is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

Instead of relying on heavy weights and traditional strength work, he focuses on body control, balance, and awareness.

His approach, built around what he calls the “Five Bs”—Breath, Board, Bar, Bowl, and Bridge:

Offers a new perspective at how movement quality can rival raw strength when it comes to pitching performance.

Breath

He begins with breath, the foundation of every throw.

The breath controls everything.

The breath controls when you relax, when you brace.

And science has even shown that if you’re able to better control your breath, it leads to increases in performance.

Yoshino Yamamoto trains this through straw breathing.

Inhaling through our nose and exhaling through the mouth.

The slow exhale tells your central nervous system to calm down and relax.

We progressed this into a slow jog while using the straw breathing.

That… was hard as hell.

Board

The next B of Yoshino Yamamoto’s workout is board.

A huge emphasis was balance and learning where his center of mass is and full body awareness.

Walking back and forth on a very small board and really feeling where your center of mass is.

With our eyes closed it was actually quite tough.

Bar

The third B was bar.

To mobilize the ribs and pelvis.

If we’re better able to segment the pelvis and the rib cage, then that’s only going to help us in the pitching delivery.

Bowl

The fourth B is bowl.

To develop balance and full body awareness.

He wants to be able to move his body extremely efficiently rather than just brute force velocity.

Bridge

The fifth B is bridge.

Think of your spine like a bamboo stick.

The more we can bend it back, the more recoil there’s going to be.

80% of pitching velocity comes from the rotational aspects of throwing, but the other 20% is the linear aspect.

Why he doesn’t lift weights:

Yamamoto doesn’t lift any weights.

He wants to be able to move his body extremely well and he explains that muscles could get in the way of that.

Since the pitching delivery works the whole body…

He would rather train something that trains the whole body at once and learning how to fire the central nervous system.

He uses 2 other training methods:

Judo workouts: front rolls, barrel rolls, backward rolls with caution, handstands, one arm handstand. Control his body when it is in an off-balance position and when it is falling. Translate during the drift.

Javelin training.

That’s it for today!

If you want to learn about these in more depth the video goes into detail for each of these.