Is throwing a football good or bad for your arm, if you play baseball? Can it help or hurt your throwin motion

Answer 1

Is throwing a football good for your arm? Well it's not bad. Perhaps you should define "good". Will it help you throw a baseball harder? No. Will it decrease injury? No.

Now, if you spend more of your time throwing a football than throwing a baseball, your improvement with throwing a baseball (accuracy, speed) will be very slow, and could actually regress (I'll talk more about this in a minute).

Throwing a football is not the same as throwing a baseball. The forces at the shoulder and the speed of shoulder rotation throwing a football are not nearly as fast as when throwing a baseball. The mechanics are totally different, and throwing a baseball would not help with throwing a football the same way that throwing a football would not help in throwing a baseball.

According to the Principle of Specificity, they are two completely different activities, and cannot help you improve in throwing a baseball.

It could hurt your throwing motion through the negative transfer.
From 36.5 of The Science and Art of Baseball Pitching (I know its basis is on pitching, but it holds true for many other things): "The principle of specificity implies that specific training will only achieve desirable training effects if they transfer directly to a competitive performance. Non-specific activities - and activities do not have to vary much to become non-specific - have the potential to interfere with good technique and the competent use of fitness components if they exceed the requirement for maintaining general fitness. Training activities that do not replicate the physiological and neuromuscular components of a sport have the potential to detract from performance through 'negative transfer' (Bompa, 1986)."
To make sure this doesn't happen, focus your time on what you're expected to do in a game. If you play both baseball and football, and it's football season, focus on football mainly, but it'd be nice if you could still do baseball activities.
If it's baseball season and you play football, focus mainly on baseball, but don't be afraid to throw a football around once in awhile, just know it won't improve anything baseball-wise, and as long as you don't do it much more than you do baseball-wise, it won't detract from anything.

Are you a pitcher? Infielder? Outfielder?

Answer 2

It probably won't hurt your arm any more than throwing a baseball would, but it definitely won't help your form for throwing a baseball...the motions are totally different. The football has side spin and the baseball "should" have backspin.

Answer 3

I would think maybe blocking a player or tackling a player with the ball would/could lead to a pitcher having issues with their motion. If a qb is a pitcher I would think that they're throwing motiions would be similiar in each of the respective sports.

Answer 4

Tom House (yep, same guy who caught Aaron's 715th) was pitching coach for the Rangers in the late 80s/early 90s, when Nolan Ryan was on the team. Part of his regimen was having the pitchers lob a football around, as a way of toning the arm muscles. It didn't seem to hurt any, but it didn't obviously help either, as witness the pitching success of those Rangers teams.

Pic of a contemporary baseball card of Ryan: http://www.jockbio.com/Bios/Beckett/Beckett%20Images/Beckett.Bio.01.gif

Answer 5

I have not scientific evidence...but several Red Sox players were throwing a football in the outfield prior to a World Series game this year...

Answer 6

It helps. It's the best recommended thing to do in winter, unless you go to an indoor complex or something. Doing that every day loosens it up.