Recently, Motus conducted and published a study that purports to debunk my observations about the Tommy John Twist.

The problem is the study is a classic example of a Straw Man.

Motus purports to study my ideas, but does so using a milestone I long ago stopped using.

As I told Motus a year ago.

The Motus "Study" of the Tommy John Twist

Let me go into some detail about the problem with the Motus "study" of the Tommy John Twist.

One problem is their use/reliance upon (Stride) Foot Contact as the milestone.

(S)FC is a convention that USED to make sense b/c it correlated (pretty well) with the start of Rotation.

As in hitting, and for reasons I suspect that have to do with the sequencing of muscle firing when walking/running, SFC correlates pretty/quite well with the start of rotation.

Or, it used to.

The problem is ideas like Driveline's Positive Disconnection changed everything.

While the most efficient athletes used to -- and most hitters still do -- employ a Middle-Up pattern, I'm seeing more and more pitchers who are less Middle-Up if not largely Top-Down.

What Douoguih called Early Torso Rotation.

The proliferation of Top-Down cues and movement patterns makes what the feet are doing -- and (Stride) Foot Contact -- increasingly irrelevant. When judging Timing, I abandoned looking at the feet. Which is why my pitcher predictions have gotten MUCH more accurate.

https://twitter.com/thepainguy/status/1022571129364471808

Ultimately, what matters is LOAD on the arm. Because LOAD > Stress. And while LOAD used to correlate pretty well with what the feet are doing, that's less and less true. I tried to tell the Motus folks this starting a year ago when I sensed they were studying my claims.

In sum, to say you're duplicating my work and using (Stride) Foot Contact as a/the key milestone is absurd.

Laughable.

I still talk about (S)FC when talking to parents because it still TENDS TO be relevant for kids, but I DO NOT use (S)FC when evaluating pros.

Because it doesn't work.

I started to realize that (Stride) Foot Contact had stopped working something like five years ago.

Which is when I moved on from it.

Now, I focus on more direct measurements of the start of Rotation and thus LOAD.

Motus knows this, because I told them, but they don't care. Which is why their latest "study" is the very definition of a Straw Man.