Improvements in training the final frontier in MLB performance

Baseball-specific training

Benjamin Chase, Call to the Pen: Within the game, the increase in training and its effect on player strength is obvious. However, many athletes are not training specific to baseball. What specific gains do you see physically from athletes shifting to baseball-focused training?

Michael O’Connell, Driveline Baseball: For baseball specific work in the weight room it depends on age. In the weight room the basic lifts will work for athletes of any age, especially youth athletes.Youth athletes should be able to cover basic strength exercises (squat, deadlift, bench or push-ups). Most high school and college athletes also usually just need to focus on getting stronger in the main lifts as well.

A lot of specialization doesn’t come until later in the process such as an older, more-developed college athlete or a professional athlete. Most of the specialization will come on the throwing side. You can consider throwing plyo balls, wrist weights and bands as specialization but they are more about getting proper warm-up and cool down routines & building workloads. Further specialization usually only comes later in pro athletes, throwing weighted balls off a mound, doing specific command work or pitch design work.

What we do throwing wise is going to depend on what an athlete’s strengths are. Pitchers who don’t throw hard will obviously be more focused on velocity development. Athletes who do throw hard will be more focused on command and pitch design work.

In the weight room it is doesn’t have to do with baseball specific training per se. It’s really about having a good screening process and then coming up with smart programming from there. We can take an athlete who does really well in the weight room (squat, deadlift, etc.) but test poorly in rotational strength and write him a program to better develop his rotational strength. Or if they test well in the weight room then we can give them more of a focus on high-intent throwing.

It really comes down to having a good screening process and retesting athletes to see how they are developing and then making changes from that new information. If you can do this then you should be able to see your athletes throw harder.