Helping Young Athletes Pursue Their Dreams Is What We Do!
Parents are constantly telling me that their son lifts weights at school. They are always convinced that will help their son to improve as a baseball player. The truth of the matter is this. Many high school athletes are working out without the benefit of a certified weight lifting or fitness trainer. We talk to baseball players all the time who tell us how much they can bench or how much they military press. It appears as though many high school age athletes are often left to their own devices to figure out what exercises they should be doing. They figure that the simple solution is to do what the football players are doing. That said, they jump on the bench or step up to the curl machine and go to town. We are here to tell you that there is a better way. Georgia Personal Training produces better baseball players through proper speed, strength and agility training.
Lets remove the mystery here. There is a right set of exercises a baseball player needs to perform and a wrong set of exercises they should avoid. The athlete themselves should not be forced to try and figure which is correct. They need help from someone who has been there and performed at the higher levels of the game. They need a trainer who understands precisely which muscle groups provide value for a baseball player. Matt Lein, owner of Georgia Personal Training is exactly who they need to talk to.
Matt has worked with the best fitness trainers in the Atlanta area. He started with Baseball Performance Center when he was only 13 years old. He learned about the importance of core body strength, quick twitch muscle, lower body strength, speed and agility. The exercises that he did at BPC were all designed to enhance those attributes. He stuck with the training all the way through High School. Matt worked out 3 times a week in the Fall and Winter. He generally worked out 2 times a week during Spring and 1 to 2 times per week during the Summer season. That work paid off for him. He was an extremely successful player, earned a college scholarship and was eventually voted onto the Collegiate All-American team.
Matt will tell you that the difference maker for him was the following. First, he worked with fitness trainers who knew how to mold a baseball player. Second, he was dedicated to the workout routines and choose working out over other distractions that young players sometimes are influenced by. Third, instead of just showing up and going through the motions, he approached workouts just like he did baseball games. He attacked the workouts with energy and vigor. He tried to get better each and every day. He did!
While baseball and football players fundamentally utilize similar muscle groups when playing their sports, they truly need a different type of muscle in order to be successful. Football players need incredibly strong lower bodies. That helps them to drive opponents off the line of scrimmage. A Baseball player also benefits from strong legs, but, needs to primarily work on developing quick twitch muscle needed for quick starts and stops. They need base stealing ability that can only come from working to develop the quick twitch muscle fibers. Football players are looking to develop powerful leg drive. They need to push people around, using lower body power. We train both at Georgia Personal Training. The difference is, the exercises we have the athletes do and equipment used in the training sessions is often quite different.
A baseball player doesn’t really benefit from doing flat bench presses. Why you ask? Well, it’s because a baseball player isn’t trying to push something using their chest muscles or back. They are in fact swinging a bat. Swinging a bat is an activity that benefits from less bulk and more muscles that are longer and lean. The trainers at GPT work to develop a players ability to effectively generate bat speed, not to push a bus up a hill. While both football players and baseball players can and do benefit from a strong core body, the baseball player relies specifically on their core for lateral movement, endurance, balance, bat speed and power.
Matt was a small player growing up. When he reached high school, he was just over 5 feet, 8 inches tall. He had the core body to drive the baseball into the gaps. He did not have the body size though to hit home runs. By the time Matt reached his Sophomore year, he had grown a couple more inches. His weight had climbed to approximately 165 pounds. With all the baseball speed, strength and agility work he had done to that point, he began to start driving balls out of the various high school fields they were playing on. By the time he reached his senior year, Matt was belting home runs from both the right and left side of the plate. That trend continued on into college. In his freshman year at Wofford, Matt was able to lead the nation in batting average for third baseman. He also set a school record for most hits in a season. If you ask him, Matt will tell you he attributes much of his collegiate success to the foundation he built in his strength, speed and agility workouts at BPC.
If you have a son playing at East Cobb or playing for one of the local area Cobb, Fulton or South Fulton county high schools, we highly recommend that you bring them to Georgia Personal Training to meet with Matt. He will provide a free consultation and a free baseball strength assessment for you and your son. Matt has worked with some of the most elite athletes in the area. He has helped a number make it to the collegiate level. While Matt would never promise you that your son will get a scholarship, he can absolutely develop your son into an elite athlete, who is much better equipped to compete as a ballplayer. Evan Moore is a great example of that. Evan started working with Matt when he was only 13. Evan is now a starting infielder for the Alpharetta High School Raiders. Evan is strong, fast and filled with incredible potential. There is no doubt that some lucky college coach out there is going to wind up signing this up and coming superstar.
If you bring your son over the Georgia Personal Training, you will quickly find out that Matt works on more than just speed, strength and agility. He also spends time listening to the challenges his players are up against, then helping them to find ways to mentally cope with those challenges. Matt knows that the competition level his athletes are going to face is steadily going to increase. The higher they go, the more pressure and competition they will face. It really helps players to have someone like Matt working with them. They can talk about things that parents and players just cannot relate to. Matt has been there and knows exactly what you son is going to have to deal with. He focuses on building better athletes, while also working hard to build better young men.
