Elite Seattle Baseball Training and Coaching – Driveline Baseball

UPDATE: Be sure to get the free Weighted Baseball Velocity Development Book on our site!

At Driveline Baseball, we use a lot of training implements for our pitchers. Most won’t surprise you – we use free weight training with barbells and dumbbells, medicine balls of varying weights for rotational exercises, a chin-up bar for pull-up variations, sled push/pull interval training for energy system development, resistance bands of varying tensions to improve stability/mobility and to provide accommodating resistance for more advanced lifters, and lots of other techniques like high-speed video to analyze someone’s mechanics for flaws.

However, a controversial training aid that we use are weighted baseballs.

Weighted Baseball Set: 4-12 oz

Research backs up the use of under/overloading in various forms, and it’s no surprise that it works for baseball pitchers as well. Dr. Coop Derenne is the foremost expert in this field and has published a number of research papers that indicate that weighted baseball training creates a significant increase in velocity for those training with underweighted and overweighted baseballs. His most popular paper is Effects of Under and Overweighted Implement Training on Pitching Velocity, which concludes that training with either underweighted (4 oz) or overweighted (6 oz) baseballs improved pitching velocity when compared to simply throwing normal baseballs.

How do you implement weighted baseballs in your Pitching Program?

Like most coaches who train their pitchers with weighted implements, we don’t get too aggressive with them until they’ve gone through our initial evaluation to determine shoulder/hip imbalances and they’ve received a reasonable amount of pitching instruction from us with regards to mechanics. Additionally, our guys aren’t typically throwing weighted baseballs in-season and only throw them when they have a solid throwing program under their belt – no getting into the weighted ball throwing when they’re cold and throwing 80-85% of their max velocity off a mound!

After we’ve qualified a pitcher to use these implements, we design a program around their age, skill level, bodyweight (very important for recovery purposes), fastball release velocity, and mechanics. We are generally more aggressive with guys who are older and have more refined mechanics – especially if they’ve gone through multiple high-speed video analyses in our Pitching Program. (Athletes who have had their pitching mechanics biomechanically analyzed in our lab can see a lot of improvement with a more specific plan, and we recommend it to all pitchers over the age of 16 who are seriously considering college or pro baseball.)

A typical program for an 18-year old high school senior about to enter college baseball will be throwing batting practice once or twice per week and one short bullpen once per week. On his bullpen days and possibly on one of his batting practice/light throwing days, we’ll have him throw weighted baseballs using a truncated motion that focuses primarily on shoulder rotation. The mechanics in our “Shoulder Rotation” 3 lb. medicine ball drill is similar:

Obviously the 3 lb. medicine ball drill focuses mostly on the out-front portion of the pitch while the 4-12 oz. baseballs will more accurately reflect an actual pitch.

We isolate the shoulders by having the athlete get to foot contact and starting the drill with their hips open. They keep their upper body closed with their arms equal and opposite, then focus on driving the trunk forward while simultaneously rotating the shoulders as fast as possible to create velocity. (Side note: We use this drill to correct one of the biggest flaws in amateur baseball pitchers – the front shoulder opening too soon. A long-time HS pitcher just fixed that mechanical flaw today while throwing his bullpens and immediately added 5 mph to his fastball!)

What’s the typical throwing progression with the weighted baseballs?

When throwing with a full mechanic off flat ground or the truncated motion to focus on shoulder rotation we’ll go as light as 3 oz and as heavy as 7 oz, which runs counter to what most people recommend. Many sources will tell you to stick to +/- 20% of the original implement’s weight (5 oz), but these recommendations are based off of Soviet shot-put research and not baseball-specific research. We do not throw weighted baseballs off a mound, as arm-related stress increases when throwing off a mound and when using weighted baseballs – combining this much torque is not something we play around with lightly!

A typical weighted ball progression for the aforementioned 18-year old high school senior might look like this:

Weeks One and Two – 39 pitches, 2 sessions per week

• Six throws with standard baseball (5 oz)
• Six throws with underweight baseball (3 oz)
• Six throws with underweight baseball (4 oz)
• Three throws with standard baseball (5 oz)
• Six throws with overweight baseball (6 oz)
• Six throws with overweight baseball (7 oz)
• Six throws with standard baseball (5 oz)

Weeks Three and Four – 52 pitches, 2 sessions per week

• Six throws with standard baseball (5 oz)
• Nine throws with underweight baseball (3 oz)
• Nine throws with underweight baseball (4 oz)
• Four throws with standard baseball (5 oz)
• Nine throws with overweight baseball (6 oz)
• Nine throws with overweight baseball (7 oz)
• Six throws with standard baseball (5 oz)

Depending on how the athlete is progressing, we’ll switch it up going forward – generally we add more repetitions, but it can depend on how his progress in the weight room is coming along or where he is at in the off-season. This training is all on top of the free weight training, anaerobic energy development, medicine ball throwing, and throwing-related out-front drills with 2 lb. iron balls and 3 lb. medicine balls – a topic for another blog post.

The Final Scoop

Weighted baseball training can be beneficial for a lot of baseball pitchers out there. However, I would caution against blindly running to them as a tool to gain velocity. In my opinion, pitchers should build up a reasonable amount of strength in the gym and ensure their shoulders are adequately stable before getting into a training program that is necessarily going to increase torque and maximum external rotation (MER) in the athlete’s delivery. Find a pitching coach who can assess your shoulders and safely on-ramp you into an aggressive training program.

Pick up a set of weighted baseballs on Amazon – ships to your home free!