Off Season Baseball Programming

Jun 22, 2022

I thought I'd share what we are doing with our baseball guys this off season. There seems to be a lot of interest in programming and, with our baseball guys starting to come back after the season I figured this would be a good place to start.

Here's a few quick things:

1- We never olympic lift with our baseball guys. I just feel like the potential risk with hands and wrists is too high. We do Olympic lift most of our other athletes.

2- We don't barbell bench press. Although I'm not anti-bench press most of our baseball players prefer dumbbells to bars.

3- We also don't do chinups with the majority. Again I love chinups and, if I have players who have a favorable history with chinups I'll let them continue. However, I do not program them. I prefer a combination of ring rows and pulldowns for baseball players.

PS- baseball players are notoriously bad at upper pulls, both vertical and horizontal. Heavy horizontal ( ring rows) allows a lower percentage of bodyweight to hang off the shoulder joint.

      

Couple of explanations

Vertical Jump is 3 max efforts on the Just Jump mat.

Overhead Squat is actually the FMS test. We've added the FMS tests to week1 phase 1 so we dont lose a training day

Sled March has become a phase 1 strength exercise for us

Slideboard Leg Curl starts with 5 reps as these generally need work. We start slow with fewer reps.

Pitchers Chop is done opposite of our conventional chop. I may eventually switch all our athletes to these. ( video to follow)