Posts Tagged weightlifting
In-Season Training: A Difficult Task
Strength and conditioning is tough enough in the offseason, but once you have to focus on practices, bullpens, batting cage time, skill development, and playing games, training for strength and speed becomes nearly impossible! I’m a huge supporter of youth athletes picking up multiple sports in their early years of high school – by all means, join the soccer team, lacrosse team, football team, and baseball team (of course). However, this diversity comes at a price: You can get good at all the sports and increase your overall fitness as a result, but you’ll rarely be great at any of them. Why? There’s no offseason to take your focus off performance and place it on training to increase general strength and conditioning.
Kettlebell Swings: Great conditioning work for any season
As you progress through high school, it’s worth analyzing what sports you really like and the ones you have some talent in. If you’ve got a shot to play college or pro baseball, you should seriously consider dropping the other sports so you can have a clearly defined workout program in the off-season to focus on your SPARQ Baseball metrics, overall bat speed, fastball velocity, fat loss, or just getting stronger and fitter.
When you have a clearly defined off-season and in-season timeline, I recommend focusing the bulk of your off-season work with high volume and high intensity weight training that’s hard to recover from. This type of training is inappropriate for in-season training but yields great benefits if you can set aside enough time to recover from the effects of the exercises. As you approach the competitive season, you should deload and switch your focus to skill work like taking grounders/fly balls, throwing long toss and bullpens, changing your pitching mechanics so you can throw harder and with less effort, examining your swing for flaws, and putting that increased strength and fitness to good use!
During the season, strength training will become very hard. If you’re in high school, you have 20 games with the school, plus playoffs, plus five practices a week, plus weekend practices or workouts with your select/travel team. Yikes! It becomes impossible to squat or deadlift heavy and recover from the effects of the training in enough time for the next game. Finding one day per week that you can lift heavy to maintain strength is your best bet, if possible. Focusing on high intensity but low volume workouts (heavy triples in the squat and deadlift, for example) will help you maintain the strength levels you built up in the off-season without seriously impacting your recovery system in a negative manner.
Improving your sprint times and medball throws are goals you can focus on during the season, as these activities dovetail nicely with conditioning that’s done in-season with your team already and won’t tax you too much. Kettlebell swings are a great way to develop rapid hip extension power, provides a nice conditioning stimulus, and are easy to find time for!
P90x for Baseball?
In an excellent (and controversial) post about Crossfit for baseball athletes, Eric Cressey talked about why Crossfit’s Workout of the Day is a poor way to train for baseball for many reasons. One such reason was:
3) I have huge concerns about poor exercise technique in conditions of fatigue in anyone, but these situations concern me even more in a population like baseball players that has a remarkably high injury rate as-is. The fact that 57% of pitchers suffer some sort of shoulder injury during each season says something. Just think of what that rate is when you factor in problems in other areas, too! The primary goal should not be entertainment or variety (or “muscle confusion,” for all the morons in pro baseball who call P90X their “hardcore” off-season program). Rather, the goals should be a) keeping guys on the field and b) safe performance enhancement strategies (in that order).
Not only is this an excellent point, but the bolded section (emphasis mine) deserves an in-depth look as well.
P90x is a popular training system sold on infomercials and targets the young adult population from ages 18-30, who unsurprisingly have a lot of dispensable income and are predisposed to watching a lot of television. P90x’s secret?
The secret behind the P90X system is an advanced training technique called Muscle Confusion™, which accelerates the results process by constantly introducing new moves and routines so your body never plateaus, and you never get bored!
Let’s just get this out of the way: This statement is stupid.
Problem One: Constantly introducing new moves and routines on a daily basis ensures that you are unable to accurately track your progress throughout the program.
For those unaware of what P90x looks like, here’s a sample infomercial with their exercises:
You’ll notice a lot of light DB and bodyweight exercises done in rapid succession with a clock timing you.
Problem Two: P90x incorporates little – if any – heavy resistance training to build strength. Contrary to popular belief, strength is not some nebulous word that you throw around and occasionally combine with the word “core.” Strength is binary – it is the answer to the question “Did I move this heavy object that weighs X pounds?” You cannot build strength effectively without the ability to appropriately load an exercise that works your body’s musculature with compound movements. This typically ends up involving barbells and exercises like the squat, deadlift, bench press, press, and rows.
I happen to have a copy of the training schedule (given to me by a friend who failed to complete the program), and while I won’t reproduce it in its entirety, suffice to say that you are “training” six days a week with a single rest day that involves some light yoga and/or stretching.
Problem Three: Any exercise program that has you training hard for six days in a row will eventually lead to overtraining, a phenomenon I discussed in an earlier blog post.
Let’s get to baseball-specific problems with P90x, shall we?
P90x works your body in segments – isolating body parts over given days. Day 1 might be a “Chest and Back” workout while Day 5 is a “Shoulders and Arms” workout. The problem with this approach is that baseball (and every other sport out there, really) is not an isolation-based sport. Training your body to work via isolated movements will have little – if any – carryover to athletic competition. Strength, conditioning, and overall fitness is best built through compound movements that are capable of moving heavy weight through multi-joint activities – just like you would in any sport!
Problem Four: Isolation-based training – which P90x is – has little carryover to athletic competition.
While P90x can lead to building instabilities and promote dysfunction through isolated movements, I’m not terribly worried about the injury factor that it can absolutely lead to in baseball players (particularly pitchers). Why? Because P90x uses movements that necessitate low resistances, and so not much is getting done.
I can already see your responses: “But Kyle,” you say, “my completely sedentary and untrained friend did P90x Lean and got in much better shape over 90 days! Take that!”
There’s an easy response to this – and one that I hope everyone who reads my blog understands and memorizes. They are the three tenets of exercise science, and they are:
1. Everything works.
2. Some things work better than others.
3. Nothing works forever.
P90x for completely untrained individuals fall directly under the first bullet point. Training 3-4 times a week while focusing on squats, deadlifts, chin-ups, rows, explosive movements, and a focus on mobility fall directly under the second bullet point. And Olympic athletes who are trying to increase their Clean and Jerk from 212 kg to 214 kg in the matter of four years fall under the third bullet point.
If you take a completely sedentary individual and have them run 2 miles a day, every other day, their one-rep max (1RM) squat will go up. Does this mean running is the best way to increase your squat? No. It means that for individuals who don’t train and who have bodies completely unadapted to stress that anything will work.
While I’m not a fan of cookie-cutter workouts for baseball athletes, if you absolutely must get a program from someone – and you’re an untrained novice – do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe and Lon Kilgore. It’s a must-own for anyone who takes strength training seriously anyway, so you might as well pick it up and follow the program. If you’re a baseball pitcher, I’d advise against overhead pressing and possibly switching the low-bar back squat for front squats or the high-bar back squat, but those are modifications you can make after you read the book and start to understand the basics of exercise science.
Friends don’t let friends do P90x. Just say no, kids.
Link: Should Pitchers Bench Press?
Another excellent article by Eric Cressey is available here: Should Pitchers Bench Press?
The NFL Combine Bench Press - Oh wait, this is a baseball site...
Most of my clients are interested in throwing hard, hitting a ball farther, and developing as a baseball player. However, most of my clients are also high school or college players who have egos and dreams of being able to bench a 225 lb. bar 24 times like Brady Quinn did in 2008. A bad comparison? Not really – consider that Brady Quinn is a quarterback who hasn’t exactly had a lot of success in Cleveland (and yes, his surrounding team isn’t helping much), and at the end of the day, he is throwing a ball for a living. Sound like a position in baseball to you?
At any rate, I understand the desire to have a big straight-bar bench press. It’s the lift that gets the most attention in the gym by men and women alike, and it’s typically the first question anyone asks you when you say that you work out four times a week. (Incidentally, I ask how much they squat – or if I’m being funny, deadlift - and always get a stammering answer.) It builds big pecs and arms and all those other beach muscles that we’re big fans of. However, all of this musculature has very little (if any) carryover to throwing (or hitting!) a baseball hard. Sorry, guys. Here’s what Eric said in his article:
With dumbbell benching, we recognize that we get better range-of-motion, freer movement of the humerus (instead of being locked into internal rotation), and increased core activation – particularly if we’re doing alternating DB presses or 1-arm db presses. There is even a bit more scapular movement in these variations (even if we don’t actually coach it).
With a barbell bench press, you don’t really get any of these benefits – and it’s somewhat inferior from a range-of-motion standpoint. While it may allow you to jack up the weight and potentially put on muscle mass a bit more easily, the truth is that muscle mass here – particularly if it leads to restrictions in shoulder and scapular movement – won’t carry over to throwing the way the muscle mass in the lower half and upper back will. I’ve seen a ton of guys with loads of external rotation and horizontal abduction range-of-motion throw the crap out of the baseball, but can’t say that I’ve ever seen any correlation – in the research or my anecdotal experience – between a good bench press and throwing velocity.
This is exactly why my pitchers use the dumbbell neutral-grip bench press movement as their primary upper body pressing movement in addition to push-ups that are balanced out by chin-ups and pull-ups (vertical pulling is very helpful for pitchers).
So, to all you pitchers out there: While the squat and the deadlift aren’t as sexy as the bench press, they’re simply more useful for sport-specific and general strength purposes. Unfortunately, my guys still love to straight-bar bench press, so we do it once a week. In return, they promise to do a dumbbell neutral-grip bench press day on their other upper body day as well, and bang out a lot of chin-ups and pull-ups along the way. Some of them bench more than I do (which isn’t saying much). But I’ve still got them all in the squat and deadlift. For now.
Proper Warmups For Weight Training
Our baseball athletes undergo a rigorous offseason workout schedule that incorporates a ton of heavy weight lifting – mostly done with barbells, but we use dumbbells for single-arm exercises (rows) and pressing (bench press with the neutral grip and the occasional push press) as well. Most of the athletes that I get come into the gym ready to go wearing shorts and a cotton t-shirt and ask “What’s first, coach?” Assuming that they’ve already passed their initial assessment that all my clients undergo, we talk to them about proper warmup procedures and ask them what they typically do to get ready for lifting some serious weight.
The responses are varied and interesting. Most include basic static stretching, maybe a little bit of running or elliptical trainer work, a few minutes on the Airdyne, and in some exceptional cases, yoga poses and actual dynamic range of motion work. However, no one has come to me and discussed soft tissue quality and/or foam rolling as part of their warmup techniques!
Soft tissue quality is extremely important when maintaining and gaining flexibility/mobility and plays a huge role in “prehab” and rehab operations equally. This topic is worth studying and dedicating a few posts to later on, but for now I’ll just talk about proper warmups that we use at Driveline Baseball to get ready to move heavy weight (which are similar to the warmups we do before batting practice or throwing a bullpen).
First: Foam Rolling / Self-Myofascial Release (SMR)
To me, foam rolling is a no-brainer. Eric Cressey and Mike Robertson wrote a groundbreaking article titled “Feel Better for 10 Bucks” on T-Nation that changed the way I trained athletes (and myself). Here’s a quick excerpt from said article:
It’s also fairly well accepted that muscles need to not only be strong, but pliable as well. Regardless of whether you’re a bodybuilder, strength athlete, or ordinary weekend warrior, it’s important to have strength and optimal function through a full range of motion. While stretching will improve the length of the muscle, SMR and massage work to adjust the tone of the muscle.
I’m going to plagiarize Eric Cressey again and show you a video that he taped that discusses the foam rolling progressions he has his athletes go through. They are very similar and nearly identical to the foam rolling patterns our athletes go through:
Second: Dynamic Stretching / Mobility Work
For many athletes – and especially baseball players - this involves pounding away at hip mobility. Stronglifts.com has a great article on this topic along with companion videos. Basic stuff like simple leg swings can make a huge difference over the long run:
We also work on ankle mobility and stabilization (a topic I wrote about last month), as this is huge in any squatting pattern. You’ll also find that soccer players and baseball athletes (both pitchers and hitters) will have deficits between their “plant” leg and their free leg. Don’t just work on one ankle – work them both to bring them up equally!
There’s also a bit of static stretching involved prior to our lifts – I know, I know. Static stretching before lifting or power-based movements has gotten a bad reputation. However, like many controversial topics, it has been vastly overblown. Static stretching of the hip flexors prior to squatting or jumping has been shown to improve performance and working the agonist/antagonist relationships (hanging from the chin-up bar prior to bench press, for example) tends to help a lot as well.
One of our favorite static stretches - the "Ichiro" stretch
Third: Band Work
We use resistance bands quite a bit between sets and prior to lifting to get the blood flowing throughout the body and to increase mobility in important areas. We’ll often do some facepulls and general scapular mobility work, X-band walks and other glute activation work, and simple internal/external ROM work for the shoulder.
I hope that this article helps you to think about warming up for weight training – and sports in general – a little differently, and perhaps more seriously. You can pick up resistance bands or mobility/flexibility products from our respective Products pages. Give them a shot – I bet you’ll notice a big difference next time you’re in the gym!
Compound Movements: Use Them!
In your strength training regimen – be it off-season or in-season – you should be prioritizing compound movements. This means full-body exercises that utilize a lot of muscle mass in your prime movers. Good examples include the squat, deadlift, clean, snatch, bench press, press, pull-ups, chin-ups, rows, and many others.
I would like to make it clear that these compound movements should absolutely not be done with machines. By using machines instead of free weights (barbells, dumbbells, plates, kettlebells, etc), you are giving your stabilizer muscles nothing to do; the machine controls the plane of movement rather than your bones, ligaments, tendons, and muscles. Additionally, you get less central nervous system (CNS) response from this type of work. Even worse: These machine-based “exercises” barely transfer over to athletic competition.
Useless.
Staying away from machines is a good first step. However, there are plenty of “bros” in the gym who are doing equally silly things with dumbbells or barbells in order to pump up their “beach” muscles. Exercises like curls, leg extensions, lateral raises, and tricep kickbacks have no place in an athlete’s training program (with few exceptions for intermediate-to-advanced lifters). They simply do not stimulate enough muscle to gain appreciable strength, and the muscles they do work are worked in isolation, rather than an integrated movement.
Does this look like an isolated movement?
Baseball does not use isolated movements in competition. In fact, very few sports do. Effective athletes learn to use their entire body efficiently to produce the most force possible to throw the ball harder, to hit a ball farther, to hit an opposing lineman harder, to jump higher for a rebound, and so forth. Isolating muscle groups has very little carryover to athletic competition – as such, these exercises should be used sparingly or omitted entirely.
Though I said I wouldn’t give out programs or workouts for free, I’ll show you what the offseason training for one of my clients (a HS Varsity infielder) has been over the past few weeks to show you that I practice what I preach:
- Monday: Back squat (3×5), DB Neutral-Grip Bench Press (3×5), Deadlift (1×5), Chin-Ups (3 sets to failure)
- Tuesday: Batting cage session
- Wednesday: DE Box squat (8×3), DB Push Press (3×5), Power Clean (5×3), Push-Ups (3 sets to failure), Light medball work
- Thursday: Volume medball work, Batting cage session
- Friday: Back squat (3×5), DB Neutral-Grip Bench Press (3×5), DB One-Arm Rows (2×10), One-Arm Suitcase Deadlift (2×5), Pull-Ups (3 sets to failure)
- Saturday: Skills day – grounders, flyballs, drills, etc. Agility/sprint training.
- Sunday: Light medball work and light long toss
On Wednesdays we’ll occasionally substitute the snatch for the clean depending on his progression, and we occasionally do full cleans with a jerk or substitute thrusters for more power output. The above program should be seen as a template that is flexible, but the overall message should not be lost – train for strength and power. It’s also worth noting that we do a comprehensive dynamic warmup with foam rolling (self-myofascial release) and mobility exercises before every workout, and some static stretching after it.
As we get closer to tryouts and the season, he’ll cut out Wednesday’s lifting session in favor of more sprint-based training, skills training, and a long run (2+ miles). I’m not a big fan of distance running for baseball players, but long-range cardio fitness has carryover to athletic competition, and his coach does like to make his players run long distances at practice, so he should be prepared for it – however dumb it may be.
A few pictures of the facility…
Here’s a few pictures of our strength and conditioning facility in North Seattle. Don’t mind the mess, we’re here to get work done. We never claimed that the facility was clean with TVs and treadmills. You come here to get strong and in-shape for the baseball season – nothing else!
Our Power Cage
More after the cut!
Misconceptions About Training Youth
Quick link this time: Here’s a great paper by Lon Kilgore, Ph.D. about the misconceptions many people hold about training youth athletes (PDF).
Should you wear a weight belt?
You’ve seen them in the weight room at your local globogym – big hulking dudes that look like bodybuilders with big belts in the back and small straps in the front. It might look something like this:
Typical belt seen at your local globogym.
The guys wearing these sweet belts are doing tricep pressdowns on the cable machine using the rope attachment, they’re doing curls with the 60 lb. EZ-curl bars, and they’re bouncing their bench press reps off their chest.
Let’s get one thing straight: These belts suck and so do the lifters who use them.
The reason that you use a belt is to give the abs something to push against – therefore making them work harder in the squat, deadlift, press, and bench press. The belt pictured above is small in the front, giving your abs basically nothing to push against! These belts are designed to “support the back,” which completely misses the mark on why you would use a belt in the first place. Gary Gibson on the Starting Strength message board put it very well:
The belt allows one to squat more weight NOT because it provides rebound…and not because the belt itself increases the necessary intra-abdominal pressure. The belt gives the abs something to push against so that the ABS THEMSELVES can provide more pressure. The belt just allows the abs to generate more tension by providing external resistance…just like a freaking weighted barbell on your back allows you to generate more tension than just flexing your lower body muscles really hard without the barbell as you stand up.
A journal article was printed regarding belts and their effect in both the conventional and the sumo stance deadlift. The results were:
Results: … Compared with the no-belt condition, the belt condition produced significantly greater rectus abdominis activity and significantly less external oblique activity.
Yep, as Gary said, the belt helps the abs work harder and it decreases the strain on the obliques – both good things!
Now, a proper belt will be 3-4 inches tall and 10mm thick all the way around – no taper. Most lifters should use a 4″ belt unless they have a short torso and less than normal room between the top of their ribcage and the iliac crest, in which case a 3″ belt is probably best. 13mm thick belts are for super strongmen and powerlifters and take forever to break in and use, so they’re probably not something that is applicable for the average athlete.
I personally own the following APT belt:
This belt rules.
It’s a single-prong model, which is a lot easier to get on and off, and it was reasonably priced at $50 plus S&H from their website. I even had to return my first one because I mismeasured my belt size (it goes around your belly button, not your waist) and the exchange process was simple and easy.
You might want to get a belt tightener tool so you can wear the belt extremely tightly around the midsection. They look something like this:
However, these seemingly-simple tools cost about $40-50 from various stores online! It’s pretty expensive for a piece of metal. I will say that they are extremely useful, though – it’s very difficult to get the desired tightness around the midsection by yourself, and unless you have really strong friends, once you use this tool, you won’t go back (I feel this way myself).
So if your squat is stalling and you’re at the end of your novice program, it might be time to invest in a nice belt. I use an APT belt, but there are a lot of good companies – many of my friends use Inzer with great success. Just be sure to get a single-pronged (or lever) belt that’s 10mm thick and 4″ tall unless you have a short torso.
Free Weight Squats > Smith Machine Squats
This is something the strength training community has known for awhile, but free weight squats are vastly better for performance training than smith machine squats. Additionally, since the Smith machine restricts your range of motion in one or more planes of movement (depending on the machine and exercise in question), it is inherently injurious as it leaves out the development of stabilizing muscles.
Don't use this. Also, this guy has terrible squat form.
Here is a study recently published that backs this up:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19855308
Electromyographic activity was significantly higher by 34%, 26%, and 49% in the gastrocnemius, biceps femoris, and vastus medialis, respectively, during the free weight squat compared to the Smith machine squat (p < 0.05). There were no significant differences between free weight and Smith machine squat for any of the other muscles; however, the EMG averaged over all muscles during the free weight squat was 43% higher when compared to the Smith machine squat (p < 0.05). The free weight squat may be more beneficial than the Smith machine squat for individuals who are looking to strengthen plantar flexors, knee flexors, and knee extensors.
…
The free weight squat may be superior to the Smith machine squat for training the major muscle groups of the legs and possibly would result in greater strength development and hypertrophy of these muscle groups with long-term training.
So get off those stupid machines and learn to train with free weights!
“Rate of Force Development?”
People often ask me what “Rate of Force Development” (ROFD or sometimes RFD) means in terms of exercise science. Well, the boring and classic definition is:
A measure of the rate at which a force is developed. Rate of force development is measured in newtons per second or newton-metres per second.
Boring, right?
Here at Driveline Baseball, we emphasize ROFD training for our baseball athletes due to the high carryover it has into pitching velocity, bat speed, and overall strength gains. Here’s a brief excerpt of what EliteFTS had to say about it:
Rate of force development (ROFD) is probably the most important and under-recognized area of applied science pertaining to strength training and athletics. ROFD essentially refers to the speed at which force can be produced. Aside from those sports requiring very precise movements (such as gymnastics and ballet), I can’t think of a single example in athletics or lifting that wouldn’t benefit from a faster ROFD. A faster ROFD results in quicker, more explosive movements and gets the bar moving sooner.
Let’s take a look at an example. Let’s say two people (lifter A and lifter B) are attempting a 500-lb deadlift. Both are capable of producing 500 lbs of force, but lifter A has a significantly faster ROFD. It may take lifter A two seconds to produce enough force to get the bar moving off the floor and four seconds to lock it out at the top. Lifter B, with an inferior ROFD, takes four seconds to get the bar moving off the floor and six seconds to get it to his knees. He reaches failure before locking out at the top.
Louie Simmons (the creator of “Westside” training) emphasized “dynamic effort” training in all three of the traditional powerlifts – the squat, bench press, and deadlift. He advocated training not only for maximum strength (typically using 2-4 sets across of 4-6 reps at near-maximal weights), but also for power (ROFD) by increasing the sets, decreasing the reps, and increasing the speed at which the workout is done. For example, I currently have a 5-rep maximum (5RM) back squat of around 360 pounds. In a typical “volume” workout, I’ll do 3 sets of 5 reps at 360 pounds for a total of 15 reps in about 20-30 minutes depending on rest periods. An alternative to that volume workout could be 10 sets of 3 reps at 225 pounds – squatting to an 11″ box (below parallel) and exploding upwards after my butt makes contact to the box! Rest periods are kept to a minimum – perhaps 60 to 90 seconds between each set. This helps to develop power and ROFD which then carries over to heavy maximum strength lifting.
A box squat - a bit high, but you get the point.
Hopefully this short blog post helps you to understand what Rate of Force Development is and how it can help you on the baseball diamond and in the weight room. And last, but not least, here’s an outstanding example of power and ROFD in my favorite weightlifter (Pyrros Dimas, Greece) in the 1996 Olympics where he won a gold medal:
Widgets
