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Former Minor League Pitcher and Youth Throwing Specialist: This Is the After-Throwing Step Nobody Built Into My Routine When I Was Twelve — And What I Now Tell Every Baseball Family Before a Young Arm Learns It the Way Mine Did
A former minor league pitcher explains the gap he felt in his own routine for years without having a name for it — and why understanding it now is the only useful thing that came out of a shoulder that stopped working at twenty-three
I know what an arm feels like when the fourth bucket has been empty for too long.
I know it because I felt it for eight years and called it soreness and told myself it was what competitive pitching was supposed to feel like. I know it because I said "I'm fine" more times than I can count to more people than I can remember. I know it because I threw through it at twelve, at fourteen, at sixteen, at nineteen, and at twenty-two, and by twenty-three my shoulder had run out of ways to tell me what I had not been giving it.
I was drafted out of college. Played four years in the minors. Never made it past Double-A because the shoulder that had been braking every throw for a decade without an ordinary after-throwing recovery step had accumulated enough damage that the velocity that got me drafted was not coming back the same way.
I am not telling you this as a warning. The worst case already happened to me. I am telling you this because understanding what went wrong in my own routine is the only useful thing that came out of it — and because the families I now work with do not have to figure it out from the inside of a shoulder that already paid the price.
If you came here because you read a baseball mom's account of her son's Little League Shoulder shutdown and recognized your own routine in it, I want to give you the version of that conversation from inside the arm. From the person who felt the gap without having a name for it for longer than I should have.
What My Routine Looked Like and What I Know Now
When I was twelve, I had what my dad and I considered a serious arm-care routine.
I warmed up before I threw. I did not skip warmups. I iced after hard outings, most of the time. We had a resistance band routine that my pitching coach had given us, used before sessions. I knew about the importance of rest days. I knew my pitch counts.
Looking back at that routine with what I understand now, I can tell you exactly where it stopped. It stopped when the throwing was done. There was nothing in that routine for what came after.
I did not know that was a category that needed to exist. Nobody I threw for, trained with, or learned from had ever told me it did. The conversation in youth baseball in the early 2000s was about pitch counts, mechanics, and rest. Nobody was talking about what the shoulder needed after the ordinary practice evening when nothing was acutely wrong but the arm had done real braking work across every throw of the day.
So the fourth bucket stayed empty for twelve years of competitive pitching. I did not know it was supposed to have something in it. And the shoulder told me, eventually, in the only language a shoulder has when nothing else gets through.
The Signs I Brushed Off
I want to tell you what I ignored, because these are the signs the families I now work with describe watching their kids dismiss.
The specific tightness that settled in after long outings. Not pain. Not something that required a training room visit. Just a tightness in the posterior shoulder that I had learned to expect and learned to tell myself was normal because it went away after a day of rest.
The "I'm fine" I said to my dad on the car ride home after hard practices. I said it automatically, before he finished asking, because I had been saying it since I was ten and it had always been at least partially true and I did not want to be pulled from the rotation.
The hesitation before certain hard throws that I had learned to mask by adjusting my mechanics slightly. I did not tell anyone about that adjustment. I just made it, quietly, and the adjustment added a compensatory stress pattern somewhere else in the kinetic chain.
The pitch count that looked fine. Every time. Until it did not matter anymore.
When parents describe these things to me now, I do not tell them it is probably nothing. I tell them I know exactly what they are describing. I described the same things to my own parents for years while the fourth bucket stayed empty.
What I Had to Learn the Hard Way About Arm Recovery
It took a sports-medicine PT, a year after my last professional outing, to give me the clinical language for what I had felt in my arm since I was twelve.
"Every throw ends with a deceleration phase," she told me. "After the ball leaves the hand, the shoulder has to brake the arm. The rotator cuff, the posterior deltoid, the biceps — they are all contracting at high velocity to slow the arm down. That happens on every throw. Not just pitching. Every warmup throw, every long toss rep, every bullpen pitch, every throw across the diamond."
I had felt that. For twelve years I had felt the accumulation of that demand without ever having a word for it or a step in my routine designed to address it.
The scorebook counts pitches. The shoulder counts everything.
Then she explained why the Biofreeze and the ice wraps I had used throughout my career were never reaching what the arm needed after a full throwing day.
"Counter-irritants activate cold receptors on the skin surface. The brain quiets the soreness signal temporarily while it processes the new cold sensation. The muscle tissue underneath is never addressed. The effect fades when the brain adjusts to the cold stimulus. Every throw has two sides — the fire side and the release side. Calcium drives the firing phase. Magnesium supports the relaxation phase. A counter-irritant works on the skin. Magnesium chloride works on the muscle relaxation side. These are completely different systems."
That is the clinical explanation for something I had felt for a decade without being able to name.
Now take your son's routine and sort every product, every step, into one of four categories.
Before throwing: J-Bands, dynamic warmups, arm circles, mobility work — everything that prepares the shoulder before it throws.
During throwing: Pitch counts, workload rules, inning limits, rest days — everything that manages the arm while it works.
Crisis response: Rest, ice, doctor visits, shutdowns, physical therapy — everything that responds when something has already gone wrong.
Ordinary after-throwing: The evening after a normal practice. After a lesson. After a bullpen. After a long toss session. Nothing acutely wrong. Nothing requiring medical attention. But the shoulder has been braking every throw all day.
Every family fills the first three buckets quickly. The fourth bucket is empty. It was empty in my routine for twelve years. It is empty in every routine I have ever reviewed since I started working with youth athletes.
Grading What Was In My Bag, From Inside the Arm
Here is what I know about each layer of the standard routine from having used all of them and felt what they did and did not do.
Pitch counts: important and worth tracking. Pitch counts did not track the warmup throws before my starts. Did not track the long toss sessions between outings. Did not track the bullpen work my pitching coaches ran me through during the week. By the time I finished a full pitching week, the pitch count chart had seen maybe half the throws my shoulder had actually made.
Resistance bands: the right tool for bucket one. They prepare the arm before throwing. I used them before every session I could. They did not help the shoulder recover after throwing because that was never their job. A kid who uses bands before every session has covered the preparation phase. The recovery phase does not exist in his routine if nothing is in the fourth bucket.
Ice: bucket three. Crisis response. Appropriate for acute inflammation when something is genuinely wrong. What I actually used it for was ordinary soreness at the end of hard outings because it was the only tool I had that felt like it was doing something. Most nights I did not use it long enough to matter. Some nights I skipped it entirely because I was seventeen and tired and it was a Tuesday. The fourth bucket was still empty either way.
Biofreeze and Icy Hot: I went through more tubes of these across my career than I can count. I know exactly what they feel like from the inside. The cold sensation arrives on the skin surface. The soreness signal quiets for a while. Then the brain adjusts to the cold and the signal comes back. The muscle that needed something was never reached. Not once. The product was working exactly as designed — on the surface — and I kept expecting it to reach something it was never built to reach.
Magnesium spray: I tried two different sprays during my last two seasons. The right mineral. Gone before the application finished. Contact time is the variable I did not understand. A spray that evaporates in sixty seconds is a gesture toward a routine, not a routine.
Everything I had was in bucket one, two, or three. The fourth bucket was empty for twelve years. I felt what that costs across a career. I would rather a parent reading this find the fourth bucket before their son does it the way I did.
What I Now Tell Every Youth Athlete Before the First Rep
I do not recommend a brand first. I tell every athlete I work with what the fourth-bucket step needs to be.
Magnesium chloride as the active mineral. A cream base, not a spray, because contact time is what determines whether the fourth bucket actually gets filled or just gets gestured at. Nothing with menthol in the formula, because the moment menthol is present the product becomes a counter-irritant and it belongs in a different category regardless of what else is on the label. And nothing with a strong smell, because a tired fifteen-year-old who objects to the smell on a hard practice night will find a reason to skip the step.
A parent of one of the pitchers in my current training program mentioned the one she had started keeping in his bag.
LeStrova Magnesium Relief Cream. Dead Sea magnesium chloride. 250mg per teaspoon. Cream, not spray. Built for sore, tight, overworked throwing-arm muscles after baseball. After the throwing day, not before it.
What I Want to Be Clear About Before Anything Else
I want to be more direct about this than almost any other topic I discuss with youth athletes, because I spent years using products that overpromised and I know what that costs.
LeStrova is not a treatment for Little League Shoulder, growth plate issues, rotator cuff strain, labrum tears, or any structural diagnosis. It would not have changed what happened to my shoulder across twelve years of competitive pitching, and it does not claim to. If a kid has sharp pain, worsening pain, popping, swelling, loss of motion, or pain that keeps coming back after rest, that is a physician evaluation — not a jar of cream. If a doctor says no throwing, that instruction stands. I spent too many years telling myself rest was enough and that I would know when something was serious. I did not always know. The doctor tells you. Listen to the doctor.
The three questions I hear from families before they actually try it:
"Will it mask pain and let him throw through something he should stop for?" No. Counter-irritants temporarily mask pain by distracting the brain from the soreness signal. I know what that feels like from the inside — the Biofreeze covering up something I should have paid closer attention to. Magnesium chloride does not work that way. It does not interrupt a pain signal. It supports the relaxation phase of muscle contraction after ordinary activity. If something is genuinely wrong, the signal stays intact. He will still feel it.
"Is it safe for a kid's skin every day?" Yes. Dead Sea magnesium chloride, lavender, calendula, shea butter, grape seed oil. No menthol, no synthetic burn. No strong smell. Safe for daily use and gentle enough that a kid will actually use it without negotiation at the end of a hard practice day.
"What makes a cream different from the magnesium spray we already tried?" Contact time. The spray I tried during my last two seasons was gone before it had any real time on the skin. The mineral needs to stay in contact long enough to function. That is the only meaningful difference and it is the variable that determines whether the fourth bucket gets filled or gets gestured at.
What I Have Seen Change in the Athletes I Work With
The first athlete in my current program I specifically walked through the bucket audit was a pitcher I had been working with for a season and a half. Strong arm. Clean mechanics. A family who tracked everything correctly. The same empty fourth bucket I had carried through twelve years of competitive pitching.
After the family added LeStrova to the post-throwing routine:
Day 1. Post-practice, post-shower, he applied it expecting the sting from previous rubs. Nothing. He told his dad it did not smell like medicine. That mattered to me because a product that does not start a fight gets used.
Day 5. Heavy bullpen day. He asked where the jar was before his dad brought it up.
Day 12. Tournament weekend. Two games Saturday, one Sunday. His dad texted me that the after-step happened Saturday night in the hotel room without an argument. Sunday morning he moved identically to how he had moved Saturday morning. That was the data point I needed.
Week 2. His dad stopped tracking whether he used it. He was tracking it himself.
Month 1. The jar was in his pitching bag, not at home.
Month 2. Pitch counts during. Bands before. Rest when something feels real. A doctor if pain becomes sharp, unusual, or persistent. LeStrova after every throwing day — practice, game, lesson, long toss, bullpen. Not a recovery plan for one rough stretch. A permanent routine for every ordinary throwing day he has ahead of him.
I did not have that at twelve. Or fourteen. Or twenty. The routine I have built for every athlete I work with now is the routine I would have needed then. I cannot use it for my own shoulder anymore. They can use it for theirs.
Do Not Just Take My Word For It
I Cannot Make You Build This Before Your Son Learns It the Way I Did
You have already been told to track the pitch count. You already have bands, ice, and a rub in the bag. You have built a real routine around a son who loves baseball and a season that matters.
You do not need a former pitcher telling you that routine was wrong. It was not wrong. It was missing one timing window, the same one every routine I have ever reviewed was missing, the same one my own routine was missing when I was your son's age.
I am the person at the end of the story that this angle is trying to help you avoid. Not because I want sympathy, but because the specific gap that ended my career at twenty-three is the same gap in the routine you just described to me. And the arm-care conversation that would have changed my outcome is available to you right now, before it is the kind of lesson that only gets learned one way.
The bucket audit takes thirty seconds. Most families come out of it looking at an empty fourth slot that nobody had told them to build. The baseball mom in the story found hers after a shutdown. You can find yours right now.
The routine you built is real. The investment you have made in this season and in the seasons ahead is real.
It is just missing the one step that every throwing day has been opening and closing without.
Two categories is all most baseball families have ever had. Long-term arm care, or waiting for the diagnosis. LeStrova is the third one. It is the one I did not have. Your son can.
You already built the warmup. Build the wind-down too.
From the other side of the shoulder,
Jake Thorne
Former Minor League Pitcher, Youth Throwing Athlete Specialist
P.S. — The 30-day guarantee means you risk nothing. Use it after real practices, games, long toss, bullpens, lessons, and tournament weekends. If it does not fill the fourth bucket your son's routine has been missing, send it back. And if you are wondering whether a former player's opinion on a cream carries any clinical weight — it does not, and I would not claim otherwise. What I can tell you is what the gap felt like from the inside of an arm that carried it for twelve years without knowing it had a name. The cream is not what I needed at twenty-three. It is what I needed at twelve. Your son is still at the age where it matters.
