Swingtraining.net has joined with Perfect Competition sports performance facility in order to provide comprehensive strength, speed, and hitting specific workout programs in the Southeast Florida area. Perfect Competition already has a well established reputation for their MLB Performance Enhancement program, and now Swingtraining.net will add the most specific hitting training available.
A couple of years ago, I made a post about resistance training for bat speed that outlined a weight lifting program that has been demonstrated through research to improve strength for high school baseball players. It’s basic multi-joint movements and progressive overload principle provide exellent results.
Something I think that was overlooked there was that the original NSCA article by Dr. David Szymanski also includes a simple protocol for increasing bat speed using overload/underload weighted implement training:
Bob Alejo is the strength and conditioning coach of the Oakland Athletics. This video from the strength power hour is from the 2007 NSCA sport-specific conference and he gives some baseball training tips, drills and exercises that address these areas of hitting:
You can check out more on Bob Alejo at his website.
I am trying to use my larger muscles more when I swing and I thought perhaps you had some type of specific drill with a medicine ball or some weight that would help develop my rotational strength.
Check out this post I made on Resistance Training for Batspeed. The article in there covers a lot of basics about general, special and specific training for bat speed. Each of the protocols referenced there were used successfully with high school and college athletes.
More from the Texas Rangers…..their Major League strength and conditioning coach, Jose Vazquez, has a series of instructional videos on baseball strength and conditioning, which include strength exercises, core stability, medicine ball work, and also stretching.
What follows below is information I first wrote in January 2006. I’m reposting it because I want to have the info on the ‘new’ version of the site (rather than just the old link) and also because it’s pretty good stuff.
There’s a video clip to show the progression, and the text details a number of things:
Here is a tidy little article summarizing info related to over/under training for baseball – click here
Roger M. Enoka best sums it up in his textbook “Neuromechanical Basis of Kinesiology”
“Training adaptations are specific to the cells and their structural and functional elements that are overload.
Here is another study that I was a part of at La Tech – this one was done to see if adding weight to the forearms while training (taking swings) would help improve bat speed and batted ball velocity.
I spent last weekend taking in Perfect Game’s WWBA event right here in Jupiter. From everything I heard, this is/was the premier high school tournament in the country that brings the best players from all over to one spot. That’s pretty easy to believe if you’ve been to one of these things and you see the hundreds of scouts and college coaches. The Roger Dean Stadium complex in Jupiter is home to the St. Louis Cardinals and Florida Marlins, with 6 minor league fields on each side, and when the event is in full swing there is action on all of the fields. You can check out profiles on some of the players here.
I’ve also been playing some catch up as far as reading up on different internet resources and a number of different books that I’ve ordered. Here are a couple of nice links that you should find useful:
SB Coaches College is a site created by three well known coaches in the S&C industry and it has tons of articles and other information. For example, here is a quick piece on a college softball dynamic warm-up program.
The S&C staff at the College of Holy Cross has assembled a video library of exercises that they use in their program. Here are a couple that I like/use – 1-leg straight-leg deadlift (hip dominant hamstring) and cable lift rotation (although I’d make a point for the spine angle to stay vertical or slightly back as in the swing)…
First, a long overdue congratulations to the Louisiana Tech Softball team, who won their first ever WAC conference championship back in May. What a great group of hard-workers who pulled off multiple wins against ranked opponents to bring home the title.
Along with another assistant, I got involved in directing the team’s strength and conditioning program for the 2007-2008 season. What we were very fortunate to be able to do was measure/test all kinds of physical and performance variables at the beginning and end our training.
I made a previous post about presenting a conference poster about our intial findings regarding the relationship of the players’ physiological characteristics to the performance characteristics. So after all this time, here is the actual poster that I presented:
Big surprise, the girls who were bigger and stronger hit the ball harder! It was nice to find some relationship between the variables, but the correlations are not great, with the highest r-squared value being .25
I’ve been meaning to do this (start some quick reviews) for a while and I thought this would be a good way to start….
A few years ago, I was directed to an article entitled: The Holy Grail in Speed Training by author Barry Ross.
I found the article very interesting, contacted Mr. Ross and got going on the workout. I was “retired” at the time and figured I’d give it a shot…..what I found (my personal experience) was quite interesting. Within a couple of months, my deadlift improved from the mid-200’s to near 420 pounds while my body weight stayed the same. For sprint work, I did 10 yard starts from a base-stealing position using an electronic timer. Over that winter, I decreased my 10 yard time by .2 seconds. And on the first 40 that I had timed, which was the first sprint I had run over 10 yards, my time was over .2 seconds faster than I had ever run. Pretty cool.
It didn’t take long for Barry Ross, who is a seasoned track & field and strength coach, to open his own site and release his book: Underground Secrets to Faster Running
The book outlines the concept of mass specific force, and sites some nice research studies to back up the claims. The workout is incredibly easy from an equipment, execution and planning standpoint, but not so easy in terms of the load/intensity used! Basically you have to lift heavy! With all the talk of fast and slow twitch muscle fibers, this method gets right to the point of muscle fiber recruitment and training for strength. It is a fast, simple read that goes through mass specific force, physiology, exercise selection and workout design in a logical fashion. Theory and application.
In addition to the lifting and running, I was hitting and throwing with a pair of minor league players and I noticed that my bat speed and throwing velocity were improving above what I had achieved in college. Also pretty cool. Although not excatly common-place, strength training for the posterior chain and specific swing/throw training appeared to be a great combination.
Check out Barry’s web site for more information — Bearpowered.com
From: Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology Jul2007 Supplement, Vol. 29, pS92
In baseball hitting, a powerful bat swing needs to be produced by utilizing ground reaction force (GRF) and it should also be temporally coordinated relative to the flight of a pitch. Therefore, organizing a hitting movement to meet these task requirements is a key for a successful hitting performance. This leads to a presumption that a front-foot stepping motion adopted for utilizing GRF to produce power for a bat-swing motion should be temporally coordinated with respect to an oncoming pitch. The present study investigated the temporal organization of hitting movements by focusing on the timing of the stepping motion relative to the flight of pitches. Six participants hit pitches projected by a pitching machine with following task conditions: 1) hitting pitches traveling at a consistent speed and 2) hitting pitches traveling at fast/slow speeds, which were randomly delivered. The second condition was aimed at eliciting movement modulation to the difference in the pitches’ speeds. Ground reaction forces exerted by left and right feet during hitting movements was recorded by two force plates to measure the timing of the front-foot take-off and landing in the stepping motion. Hitting motions were also recorded by a high-speed camera for interpreting the change of GRF profile relative to the hitting movement. The comparison between the GRF profiles in the two task conditions revealed that the timing of the stepping motion and shifting weight forward for initiating the bat swing was modulated relative to the pitch’s speed. Temporal relation between successive motion phases was compensatory such that the early timing of landing the front foot relative to an oncoming pitch was followed by the late initiation of shifting weight onto the landed front foot, and vice versa. The timing variability in the successive motion phases progressively reduced up to the ball-bat contact. These results demonstrated the coordinative structure of the hitting movement for timing the bat swing relative to the pitch’s flight.
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