Georgia Personal Training – Baseball Performance
Strength Training For Baseball Players
Baseball Strength Training Is Unique From Other Sports
Strength training for baseball is not just a matter of lifting heavy weights. Many of the most popular and effective exercises for building size are not beneficial and can even be detrimental to a baseball player. Baseball is a game of fast twitch, explosive movements. It’s also a game of precise technique and fluid motion. When training athletes to perform better at baseball, we must strive to achieve a proper balance between explosive, powerful movements and the speed and fluidity in which they perform them. Strength training has been an essential part of the game for many years now. Young players know they have to do it, but unfortunately none of them know how to do it right. Most players are emphasizing the wrong muscle groups, utilizing incorrect training modalities, training with minimal intensity and improper technique, and most importantly, not training in a manner specific to their individual needs. On top of that, there are very few trainers or facilities in the area that truly understand how to train a baseball player. The end result is wasted time, energy, and money, yielding minimal to zero on field results.
When it comes to strength training for baseball, the goal should be to help a player generate the maximum amount of force possible. Force translates into power at the plate, velocity on the mound, more range on defense, and faster sprint times. Force = Mass X Velocity. This means that both the amount of weight we can move, and how fast we can move it, are equally important in everything we do. If you train by moving big weights around in a slow manner, you will actually decrease your ability to create force, which will translate into less speed and power. The primary example would be a traditional power lifting program. These types of programs revolve around squats, dead lifts, and bench press, typically performing one rep max lifts. Watch a video of a competitive power lifter performing a one rep max squat. Pay attention to the speed at which the movement is performed. The concentric portion of the lift usually takes 2-3 seconds to complete because of the huge amount of weight. It’s too heavy for them to drive it up in a few tenths of a second. The reason this is a problem for a baseball player is because the human body becomes conditioned to whatever type of training it is regularly exposed to. If your training consists solely of slow, flat footed, super heavy lifts, you may increase your squat max but you will do so at the expense of speed and acceleration. You might add mass, but you will also slow down. The end result will be less force. If your training consists of lightning fast, explosive power movements, you will get both faster and stronger, resulting in maximum force production. At Georgia Personal Training, we ensure that our strength training workouts have explosive fast twitch elements to every exercise. Every repetition is done with a purpose, and that purpose is to explode through the movement with the same violent force you would when striking a baseball. The end result is more power at the plate, more speed on the bases, and higher velocity on the mound than you ever thought possible.
If a player needs to put on size, we don’t resort to body building or football workouts. We don’t try to build a massive chest or huge biceps. Instead we build explosive lean muscle in targeted areas of the body. In doing so, we achieve the desired growth and strength gains without restricting or altering the player’s mechanics on the field. Many athletes spend far too much time training the front side of their bodies. These are the muscles they can see in the mirror, and it gives an athlete confidence and gratification to see these gains. Unfortunately, this type of over training on exercises like squat and bench can cause muscle imbalances that are detrimental to an athlete’s performance. The fact is it’s the muscles we can’t see that are most essential to our performance on the diamond. Muscles like the glutes, hamstrings, erectors, obliques, lats and scapular stabilizers. These muscle groups are the real driving factors to our baseball mechanics, but unfortunately they are the muscle groups most often neglected. That is why at Georgia Personal Training, we focus a great deal of time training these areas which we refer to as the “posterior chain”.
Every workout will contain a 5-10 min shoulder routine designed specifically to strengthen and protect the interior structure of the throwing shoulder. This routine should eventually be utilized daily by all players. Regardless of whether you are a position player or pitcher, arm strength and durability are absolutely essential to a successful and lengthy career. The pillar of every workout is intense core training focusing on abdominal and lower back strength, and most importantly rotational strength and explosiveness. In most sports, core training simply means doing weighted crunches and building up massive abdominals. In baseball terms, core training should be centralized around rotational movements as this is what will translate into baseball power. Core strength is essential to the body’s ability to avoid injury during the constant wear and tear of year round baseball.
We also put a tremendous emphasis on developing power and explosiveness in the legs. You core and legs are the basic tools that every player needs in order to accomplish the movements required of a baseball player on the field. Most high school weightlifting workouts seem to focus on how much weight a player can squat or bench. That approach doesn’t produce a better baseball player. We put the emphasis on increasing the force you can create through your core and legs. GPT leg workouts are notoriously difficult. They consist of intense plyometrics, stability work, progressive resistance lifts, olympic lifts, and as many single-leg ground based movements as possible. Baseball is played upright on your feet, so your training should be done the same way.