OFF-SEASON: Skills Before Drills

No doubt you're well underway with your off-season strength and conditioning work. Depending on your goals, you may be pursuing improvement in one or more areas of your game. Perhaps you're full of energy and have set some really big goals for the upcoming season, and you're looking for some guidance as to how you should structure your training

Likely you're busy, with limited time. This issue will provide some ideas as to how you can best utilize your time to make excellent progress in three key areas of training - Bat Speed/Hitting Power, Throwing Velocity, and overall Strength & Conditioning.

This is a suggested schedule if you have a 2 hour block of time each day. In fact, I think it is very possible that when you get your routine down, you can complete your workouts in 1 1/2 hours, perhaps a little less than that.  You do not have to put endless hours into your workouts to achieve really good results.

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 probably be doing some type of strength/conditioning work most every day:

MONDAY - Baseball/Softball skill work (SW). Bat Speed Workout, Dry Swings only (BS), Weight Lifting (WL), Flexibililty (F).

TUESDAY - SW. Throwing Velocity 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 perhaps another hour later in the day (PM), then you can do skill work early, and drill work later, or vice/versa. 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. 

Until next time,

Train Hard, Train Smart!

Steve Zawrotny, MS, CSCS

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(C) 2005. All Rights Reserved. Quotations with attribution 
permitted. Cite source as Steve Zawrotny's BASEBALL FIT 
Hitting & Pitching Academy - www.BaseballFit.com

The information contained in this newsletter is the opinion 
of the author based on his personal observations and years 
of experience. Neither Steve Zawrotny or BaseballFit 
assume any liability whatsoever for the use of or inability to 
use any or all of the information contained in this newsletter.