Wednesday, September 22, 2010

What to Focus on when Training for Baseball

So far these past 2 weeks for Trinity Baseball the workouts have been getting tougher and more intense as we near the start of fall ball. Fall ball consists of 4 weeks of practicing Thursday, Friday, Sunday and Monday, with Saturday as an off day. We practice from 2-7 p.m. However, even though we are starting to practice the workouts don't stop or get easier.

(Photo taken by Shari Robertson)
© All rights reserved 
When playing baseball what parts of your body are the most important and should be in great shape? Your legs and core. Hitting a ball farther, getting to a ground ball deep in the hole, or throwing 95 miles per hour off the mound all comes from your legs and core muscles. It's the torque, or exploding of the hips/obliques/abdominals that produces the power. With this in mind, our team workouts consist of starting with a warmup, then a heavy leg lift. These are most commonly back squat, deadlift, and hang clean. (Sometimes we incorporate more complex lifts but those aren't important now). We then go into what we call a W.O.D. or a "workout of the day". The W.O.D. includes a combination of back, legs, chest, and abdominal exercises. The point of these workouts is to build muscle strength along with muscle endurance to get you through a game or season, so the workout is done as quickly as possible and is timed. An example workout we would have on a given day would look like this:

Core Lift:
Back Squat: 3x5

WOD:
3 rounds of:
20 Box Jumps (24 in. box)
20 Push-Ups
20 Air Squats
**No rest in between rounds**


This would be our workout for the day, with some days having running afterwards. It may look like nothing, but try it and don't cheat yourself. It helped our team win a conference championship last year. I linked a few videos onto this post to sample a few other leg and core workouts we do. The guy in the video is our strength and conditioning/hitting coach Nick Vera.
"Landmines"





"Kettle Bell/Dumb Bell Complex"




"You gotta be a man to play baseball for a living, but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you, too." - Roy Campanella

No comments:

Post a Comment