Prevent Catcher Knee Injuries

I recently received an email from Mark Dagenais, the owner of SoftballPerformance.com. In the email, Mark talks about preventing knee injuries for catchers.

Mark provides some great tips for catchers to follow. In the email, he says:

Yes, catchers have a greater risk of developing knee issues just because catching puts more stress on the knees than any other position.

What can you do to prevent this?

1) Use the Knee Savers. These are support padding that you attach to your shin pads and that gives you good support when squatting down. It takes away close to 85% of the stress when resting before you get into your catching position.

Some people think it makes your catcher lazy. To me, you can't play with knee safey. However, I don't buy the lazyness thing. A good coach will know how to properly train their catcher and if the catcher is hard-working, this is a non-issue.

Now, it is not mandatory to wear them but it can really help to prevent a lot of the stress placed on the knees.

2) Do Hindu Squats - old, silly-looking, martial art exercise that many personal trainers would tell you "It's bad for the knees" exercise because the heels are coming off the ground but guess what.. every catcher has their heels coming off the ground.

It is actually a great muscular endurance exercise for catchers. I would do 50-100/day several days a week.

After that, your catcher will have the best conditioned legs of any catcher in your league.

Check this exercise:

3) I would get also get them to do single-leg squats for strength and stability. They are killers but boy do they work.

Check it out:

4) Make sure you teach proper catching techniques; especially the basic catching position. You want to make sure that their weight is well-distributed. Teach them good fundamentals and you will take a lot of the stress away.

From experience, most softball players with knee problems are not catchers but former/current gymnasts, basketball or soccer players.

Make your catchers injury-proof.

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