Fans have been enthralled by the home run spike in MLB since the second half of 2015. While many things are being debated, one area seems overlooked – improved training in MLB athletes.
The home run spike in MLB has accompanied a significant increase in the average velocity in pitches thrown. Over the last 15 years, the average velocity of pitches has climbed 3 MPH. The number of pitchers throwing 100+ in a season used to be one or two, and now every team seemingly has one or two pitchers on the MLB roster that can reach back for triple-digit velocity.
While many have theorized that perhaps a change in the ball or the bat has been responsible for the increase in home runs, many MLB players have begun to seek out the assistance of private hitting instructors and specific baseball trainers who are focusing more on smart training to improve baseball play, not just have a player look good in his uniform as many personal trainers that a player could hire at his local gym may provide.
A number of private instructors have really become quite well known through their work with hitter swing path and hitter approach at the plate, but a few places are working on the whole player, from training the body to training the mind to learning the mechanics of the game in such a way to both maximize performance of the game and minimize injury and/or damage from the game. One of the industry leaders in that realm is Driveline Baseball. Driveline’s research associate Michael O’Connell was gracious enough to field a number of questions and provide some excellent insight into exactly what Driveline is doing in their part of training a better baseball player. Because much of the question on training starts at a young age, many of the questions focus on training of high school and younger athletes in this interview.
We will be breaking these down in the following way:
Monday: Training specifically for baseball
Tuesday: Working with pitchers
Wednesday: Weight room work
Thursday: Tailoring a proper swing
Friday: What’s next?
With that, we’ll start with today’s focus on weight room work.
Weight Room Work
Benjamin Chase, Call to the Pen: How does the weight room, sprint work, agility work, plyometric work, and other indirect training with a pitcher differ from the same work with a non-pitcher (and if age of athlete matters)? (Writer’s note: while the question was about pitching, you’ll see that the discussion is in general on lifting and other training work.)
Michael O’Connell, Driveline Baseball: The weight room is a large part of our program. Our High Performance Trainers, Kyle Rogers, Sam Briend and Jack Scheideman, do a great job. They handle all the athlete screening and retesting plus they are excellent at balancing an athlete’s weight room workload with their throwing workload, something often overlooked. (We’ve talked about this concept, balancing an athlete’s training economy here.)
Everything we do in the weight room revolves around the screening. If they need to get stronger we can put them on a weight room specific and low volume (no high intent) throwing program. Getting stronger and producing more force is going to be beneficial not just for velocity development but also for fatigue resistance. We encourage athletes to lift stronger and if they meet our strength requirements then we encourage them to lift weight faster using velocity based training.
Our screening is done in two parts, a movement screen and a performance screen. The movement screen gives us an idea of an athlete’s movement quality while the performance screen gives us an idea of an athlete’s strength.
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(If you’d like to see more about what we do we discuss those further on our blog: movement screen & performance screen.)
We don’t do much specific sprint, agility, plyometric work. Most of that is covered with weight lifting: The stronger you are, the more force you can produce, the faster, quicker, etc. you should be.
Regardless of age we want athletes to cover the basic movement pattern squat, hinge, push, pull. So that really means that a youth athlete may goblet squat, a high school/college athlete will front/back squat, and a professional athlete will squat for speed using VBT.
There isn’t a huge difference between working with pitchers and hitters. Occasionally we’ll need to make some adjustments to pitcher’s programs based on throwing volume. So the only difference is pitchers usually need more adjustments.
Next: Mike Trout reaches milestone on his birthday
Thoughts:
These images of Bryce Harper went viral on Twitter a few years ago originally. As a power lifter, I scoffed at the amazement at the raw weight numbers as most college freshman running backs can clear a 500-pound deadlift.
However, the first link that Michael provided includes an important mention that this is still a “new” idea in the world of baseball. One has to remember that the Oakland Athletics became the first team to have a full-time strength coach in the 1990s. Every other major sport had a majority of its teams with full-time strength workers by that point, but baseball has always been that far behind.
Part of the increase in the home runs in the 1990s/early 2000s can be attributed to teams finally all getting a full-time strength coach. Many want to have it easy and point to just one reason, but better strength training is one of many reasons that we examined in January on Call to the Pen. That may be an article to re-hash on a yearly basis as players are denied with their numbers all assumed to be distorted for one reason. Like the current increase in home runs, there is always more than just one reason!
We’ll be back with more this week!