Baseball Strength Training Exercises
In today’s blog post, we are talking about baseball strength training exercises you can include in your training and practice plan, that will help you reach your ultimate goal of explosive speed and power. I will be showing you some traditional strength training exercises, and then introducing several adaptations that are more speed-specific to give you more explosion for greater performance.
Bench press
Here we want to contrast from your heavy high-intensity bench to a medicine ball so that we get explosive movement after the muscle recruitment. Maximum muscle recruitment followed by explosive movement with the medicine ball. The contrast helps to teach the muscles how we want them to react during a competitive situation.
Squats
Here we want a nice deep, parallel squat followed by plyometric jumps. We get maximum muscle recruitment with the multi-joint exercise of squats.
Step out, go right into box jumps. This teaches the muscle tissue how we want it to react during competition. Explosive. We do an equal number of repetitions of box jumps to the number of repetitions we did during the lifting phase with the weight.
Power cleans
Here’s another one of our multi-joint exercises for maximum muscle recruitment. We’re going to use good technique keeping the hips down, pulling from the ground straight up. We’re going to contrast this with a medicine ball chest pass.
So we get total body recruitment from the power clean followed by total body recruitment and explosiveness with the medicine ball. Get the hands up and pop the ball back and forth. Again, this is equal number of repetitions from the power clean to the plyometric and explosive medicine ball throw.
Hanging snatch
Here we’re going to work from the hang position to an overhead explosive lift. We want to keep good technique. Keep that back flat, lock out the elbows. We’re going to follow this with explosive box jumps that are a repeat. We want to fire that muscle tissue as explosively as possible. This is great contrast for competition.
Military press
Here we want to work that upper power area, the shoulder and the chest area. We get real good lift with our military press. We’re going to contrast this with an explosive vertical medicine ball test. Here we want to respond to the ball and pop it immediately back up in the air as soon as it touches the hands. So we get quick explosive response from those muscle, teaching them how we want them to work.
Next step… check out our baseball training drills collection for more skill-building workouts you can do in the off-season!