Free 6-Week Strength Training Program for Baseball Players
By Steffen Simmons and Daniel Comstock, High Performance
What are the Best Baseball Workouts?
Driveline High Performance staff members are regularly asked by well-meaning parents and athletes something along the lines of, “What is the best strength program for baseball players?”
While the question is valid, the unfortunate answer is: “It depends.” There is no best one-size-fits-all program.
When an athlete comes in for an assessment, we look at as many variables as possible. Athletes are then given an appropriate program based on a variety of factors, including age, training and injury history, athlete goals, and current physical qualities.
We decided to release this free six-week training block that fits a wide range of the needs previously listed.
Many of our programs are concurrent in nature. That means we train multiple qualities (hypertrophy, strength, and power) to some degree in every block.
This six-week program focuses on gaining strength. But an athlete should also gain size and improve power output over its course.
Due to the training economy demands of these baseball workouts, it will likely be best suited for a pitcher in some type of velocity or high intent phase, or a hitter who is coming off an accumulation or hypertrophy block. For pitching and hitting, this phase will likely come about a quarter of the way into the off-season. Power and preseason phases would follow before the competition season begins.
Does the program work?
With a sample size of 42, these are the average retest results of athletes that have completed this program:
- Net peak force increased by 9.15%
- Relative strength increased by 8.41%
- Countermovement jump height increased by 2.71%
- Squat jump height increased by 3.86%
- Reactive strength increased by 4.7%
- Squat jump peak power (highest correlated metric to motion capture velocity) increased by 2.81%
- Overall Athlete Score change of seven percentiles
While many other factors contribute to throwing harder or swinging the bat faster, training the physical qualities is certainly one piece of the puzzle. All of these metrics show at least moderate positive correlation with pitching velocity and bat speed.
We cannot guarantee improved velocity or bat speed, but we can say when athletes put work in the weight room, physical qualities improve.
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