This baseball training workout was designed for players ranging from the professional ranks all the way down to the littleleague.
It’s a workout designed systematically to make your players faster, quicker, and more active on the baseball field–all the factors that are necessary to be an outstanding baseball player. This workout will help your players develop speed, quickness, lateral movement, agility, and any other skill pertinent to becoming a better baseball player.
Like any conditioning workout, we’ll always want to go through a thorough stretching program before we start.
Baseball Training: High Knee Walk
The first drill we’ll walk through is what we call a high knee walk, which puts a heavy focus on technique and form. When performing this workout, it’s important for your players to keep the following in mind:
- Pick out a focal point that you’ll run to with your eyes, and keep your head there. This will keep you from moving your head side to side, which will slow you down.
- Swing the arms at a 90-degree angle. The hand comes up next to the cheek, then the shoulder is swung, and the hand comes back behind the belt or the hip.
- The knees are going to come up almost at a 90-degree angle.
- The elbows are going to lock in at a 90-degree angle.
In a typical workout, do three to four sets of this high knee walk. Your players don’t need to go much more than 20 or 30 feet for any one rep.
Baseball Training: Quick Skip
Part two of this baseball training workout involves what’s called a quick skip. This is a drill that takes a little while to get used to and to get agile with. However, it really helps coordination, and it’s just another building block toward getting us to going at a full run.
With this workout, your players will put a skip into a normal run. They should work the arms the way that they would normally work them, and that is to lock at the shoulder, go to a 90-degree angle, bring it to the ear, and then bring it back behind the hip. During the process, your players will want to focus on getting in a nice, even, smooth skip and really putting some rhythm into it as well as some coordination.
Baseball Training: Running Form
After we’ve worked our quick skip, it’s time to let the players work through an actual running form. This is, again, a building block following the high knee walk and quick skip–this is where your players will put the whole package together.
- Here are a couple of key points that your players will want to remember:
- Make sure to get your knees up–really get kind of an exaggerated pump of the knees.
- Make sure that you’re, again, at a 90-degree angle at the shoulders, pumping the hands from the cheek to back behind the hip.
- Make sure you have a focal point.
- You want a little bit of a forward lean with your body, just to propel you forward.
- Make sure you land on the balls of the feet.
- Make sure your nose goes over your toes so you get a little backward lean, so that you’re really working on quick feet.
It’s worth spending time thinking about how we want to run. If the technique’s good, the chances of maximizing speed greatly increase.
This is a very basic Baseball Training Workout that can help to get your little league players ready to run at full-speed–and with great technique. Do you think your kids can learn a lot about proper form from these workouts?