How baseball influenced Purdy’s throwing motion evolution originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
Brock Purdy has established himself as a football star, but the 49ers quarterback continues his NFL asencion in large part due to a baseball influence.
Purdy sought the assistance of CORTX Sports Performance prior to being drafted No. 262 overall by San Francisco in 2022. It is there where Purdy crossed paths with Chris Hess, a respected member of the motion capture space, who had a revolutionary idea to improve quarterback play with principles from another sport.
Hess detailed his groundbreaking discovery that has aided Purdy’s rise into NFL stardom during an exclusive with ESPN’s Stephania Bell.
“In baseball, we expect a thrower to continue to evolve after they’re drafted,” Hess told Bell. “In golf, we talk about perfecting a swing over the life of your golf career. Why is it different in football?” In Gormely, Hess found a like-minded specialist with a medical background who could merge the data and visual feedback with his biomechanical findings.
“We’re trying to identify: [Is] this inefficiency physical, something we’re able to address through work on the soft tissues? Is this structurally how they’re built, or is it just a pattern that’s been trained over and over?”
Gormely is focused on integrating the analytics that have revolutionized baseball into quarterback development, with a focus on not becoming stagnant with on-field habits that stunt long-term growth.
“What you’re trying to do is explain to them, hey, better movement, more efficient movement, makes things easier,” Gormely told Bell. “Understanding how we want you to generate power and torque allows you to then access those different arm positions, arm patterns, hip positions more easily in the game and hopefully makes you a more dynamic athlete.”
After suffering a significant elbow injury in the 2022 NFL playoffs, Purdy made his way back to CORTX, where he has seen positive strides in his own game from the work with Gormely and Co.
“They’ve got me into different positions and movements that have helped me within my hips and my shoulder capsule to be able to make throws around defenders and the different windows and the different arm slots on the move,” Purdy told Bell. “There’s a bunch of plays on the run that I’ve made where my arm slot has been like a middle infielder, where it’s like, ‘OK, that’s all the training we’ve done with these guys.'”
Purdy’s body of work speaks for itself, as the 49ers quarterback immediately put together an MVP-caliber campaign during the 2023 season after returning to work with Gormely.
The 24-year-old’s ability to improvise and extend plays on the run is invaluable, and paired with the ability to maximize different arm slots, could have Purdy on a trajectory to an even greater ceiling.
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