I learned the hard way that lifting weights won’t make you hit homeruns and this is personal to me.
When I was trying to play baseball at the next level, I did a lot of training stuff and I took a lot of advice on ways to improve. Their advice was that I should lift weights to get bigger, faster and stronger.
Until that point I really had not lifted a lot of weights, so I took their advice and started to spend a lot of time lifting weights. I remember working out 6 days a week for 1-2 hours a day. I did a lot of strength training, plyometric exercises, did a long toss program, sprints and took a lot of swings. I was bigger, faster, and stronger. And you know what? I stunk in the batter’s box.
I had a good year on defense because I was running down balls in the outfield and my arm was better because of the long toss program I had been doing. But on paper I didn’t have a good season. Basically my power was nonexistent the next year. The baseball skills I needed to be a great hitter didn’t translate into my training.
I thought, “I have to be missing something.” I knew there had to be a solution to this. That’s how I started doing a lot of research, and figuring, what happened? Where was I wrong?
“I have to be missing something.”
After doing research I did find that you do need strength training, but you have to convert that strength into power. The power is the fast-twitch muscles, which are explosive movements, so I would do a strength exercise, then I’d try to do an explosive movement to convert that strength into power. For example, the chest fly (a strength exercise) is performed followed by explosive medicine ball chest passes. This allows slow and fast twitch muscles to both be worked. Just lifting weights alone will make you stronger, but that strength will not translate into more bat speed.
So there’s kind of a three-step process to this whole thing.
To further convert the explosive power into bat speed, I was doing a sports-specific training of taking swings with slight weight overloads during batting practice. I found that training devices over 20% of the total bat weight can alter natural swing mechanics and decrease bat speed. All the weights I was finding were too heavy, so I created one that was just heavy enough to maximize the overload conditioning effect, yet light enough that it didn’t affect my natural swing mechanics.
