As the off-season is just on the horizon, it is important for players to identify their strengths, weaknesses, and goals for the off-season. When I was a player, I couldn't wait for the off-season. Like many players, I loved lifting weights, spending hours in the cage, and halfway through the summer I would always start thinking about how awesome the off-season was going to be.
As a coach, it is much easier to see why I did that as a player. I was noticing areas of my game that needed improving, that I felt I needed more time to work on than I had at the moment. We start focusing on our deficiencies and want to think about the cure so we put it just over the horizon, in the magical "off-season". Too often, however, we spend too much time "recovering" from the season, a few weeks is more than enough to start getting the body ready for training.
Taking a few weeks to recharge is normal, after all, diving headfirst into lifting can be more detrimental than taking too much time off, but as a high school or college player, your body is still made to move. Things like swimming, pickup basketball, biking or hiking, can all be good ways to get your body moving before you jump right into training.
The important thing is once you are ready to train, remember that you're training to be an athlete. I am not bashing on the weight room warriors here, I was one who lived in the weight room, but I also know there were things I should have spent more time on outside of the weight room like sprinting, speed work and mobility work. Getting to your personal physiological max velocity for sprinting is something athletes all need to strive to do. I've yet to meet a coach who says, "Yeah, he's a great player, but he's too fast."
Coaches will tell you, the first thing they'll look at when checking out players is speed. There is a baseline speed necessary for 95% of players looking to play at the next level. The 5% is for pitchers and mutants who hit the ball 500 feet. Even those who don't meet the baseline speed will still need to be explosive, so training your body to move fast is always going to be a necessity.
So why don't we? What keeps athletes from training for explosiveness & speed?
It's humbling. We all think we're faster than we are, especially when we're training on a daily basis.
It can be uncomfortable. Moving our bodies at max effort when we're tired or low on energy doesn't always feel good.
It takes time. Building speed and explosiveness usually means small gains over time, you don't see more plates on the bar, or the ground going by faster, and it usually doesn't feel like we're moving that much faster on a daily basis.
It doesn't have the instant gratification factor. Moving more weight feels cool. It looks cool. People notice it in the weight room. The only problem? There's no weights on the field. Moving faster is going to make you throw harder, swing faster and move faster on the field, and that's the number 1 goal.
Now that we know why it's not the sexiest part of training, here's the bad news. You need to be in condition to train for speed. If I can only run 2-3 short sprints before I start to get winded, even if I take breaks, I can only get so much faster each workout. We need to build up our system to handle a decent amount of volume so that we can get more out of each session.
The Key: Start slow. Good strength and conditioning coaches will attest to this, it is better to leave the first workout going, "I could've done more today," than to be crawling out the door. Save that for later in the off-season. You want to build over the course of your training. A good program will be at least 8-12 weeks long, have a build up, an increase in intensity and then a transition into the pre-season to get you ready to play. Ideally 15-16 weeks gives you time going into baseball season to hit the ground running, while allowing for periods of recovery.
So while it would be great to come into the weight room and do chest, bicep/tricep circuits, some calf raises and dip out. Those workouts won't make you a better athlete, besides, if you're training the right way and taking care of your diet, you should be seeing noticeable changes in your physique along the way.
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