Depending
on your goals, you may be pursuing improvement in one or more areas of
your game. Maybe you're full of energy and have set some
big goals for the upcoming season, and you're looking for
guidance on how you should structure your training
Likely you're busy, with limited time. This
issue will provide some ideas about how to utilize your time
and make outstanding progress in three fundamental areas of training - Bat
Speed/Hitting Power, Pitching Velocity, and overall Strength &
Conditioning.
This is a suggested schedule if you have a 2
hour block of time everyday. In fact, I know it is possible to complete your workouts in 1 1/2
hours once you get your routine down, perhaps a little less than that. You do not have to put
endless hours into your pitching workouts to achieve the results your after.
Skill work is defined as activities and training that closely imitate
what you would actually do in a game, such as live arm or machine pitch
batting practice, hitting off of a tee, fielding practice, etc. Drill
work is defined as activities that are sport-specific but more
conditioning oriented. It may be that you won't be doing skill
work every day in the off-season, but you'll be doing some type
of strength/conditioning work most every day:
MONDAY - Baseball skill work (SW). Bat Speed Workout,
Dry Swings only (BS), Weight Lifting (WL), Flexibililty (F).
TUESDAY - SW. Baseball Pitching Workout (TV). You can do rotator
cuff (rc) strength work as part of your warm up, and the rc
flexibility work as your warm down from the throwing workout.
Power/Plyometrics (P) work, F.
WEDNESDAY - SW, BS, WL, F.
THURSDAY - TV + rc, P, F. Depending on priorities, drop skill
work for this day and do sprint/interval conditioning (SI).
FRIDAY - same as Wednesday.
SATURDAY - same as Thursday.
SUNDAY - Off/rest.
If your schedule allows an hour early in the
day (AM), and another hour later in the day (PM), then you can
do skill work early, and drill work later. If you have
several hours of rest between periods of activity, you can do
conditioning work before skill work, as you will have sufficient
recovery time before beginning skill work.
Depending on your training priorities, energy
level, amount of time and motivation, you can split weight lifting and
power days between upper body and lower body regimens.
Keep this important training principle in mind:
More is
usually NOT better.
Your body actually GROWS during your rest periods, or off days. A
minimum of 24 hours should pass between bouts of exercise for each body
part trained. This is why nutrition is so important. You want to
rebuild the structures you've just torn down and depleted with your
workout (muscles, tendons and other organs) with healthy materials -
protein (amino acids), complex carbohydrates, healthy fats, vitamins and
minerals.
As you might imagine, providing these materials
builds a much stronger, injury resistant body than what will result from
a diet high in sugary foods and drinks, fast food, and various synthetic
and highly refined junk foods and snacks.
(C) 2005, Baseball Fit
LLC. All Rights Reserved. Quotations with attribution permitted.
Cite source as Steve Zawrotny's BASEBALL FIT Hitting & Pitching
Academy - www.BaseballFit.com
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