Baseball Strength and Conditioning: Foundations of Strength

By Brice Crider, High Performance

The Driveline Foundations of Strength course was created to provide coaches with a baseline education in strength and conditioning, specifically catered to training baseball players.

This course was designed for high school or college coaches that are without access to a strength staff, strength coaches with limited experience working with baseball players, and skill/sport coaches looking to gain a more fundamental understanding of developing athletic performance.

In the amateur levels of baseball, improving the strength and conditioning side is often one of, or the lowest hanging fruit to improving the program as a whole by both enhancing performance and mitigating injury. Specifically, at the high school, junior college, Division III, and NAIA levels, where many teams lack access to a strength coach, gaining basic knowledge on the fundamentals and application of exercise science can help a coach make big strides in improving the general physical qualities of their team.

Foundations of Strength: A Six Part Course

The course is split into six parts. The first is an introduction to basic strength and conditioning concepts and principles. This introduction covers everything from the Driveline High Performance Staff’s fundamental methods and beliefs, to basic anatomy and physiology, to the basics of applied exercise science. This section provides the fundamental base on which the actual programming and coaching will be built.

Next, we cover high-performance assessments, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and athlete range of motion in key joints. We discuss the importance of tracking athlete performance over time, what we use as KPIs in gym, and low-tech KPI’s that coaches can implement into their training without access to extensive and expensive facilities and resources. Lastly, we discuss the joint range of motions and other general factors coaches should be aware of when monitoring athletes over time.

Following assessments and KPI’s, we get into some specific fundamentals of programming. This includes how coaches can use Bondarchuk’s pyramid in making programming decisions, exercise progressions and regressions, exercise pairing examples, and programming in a group setting.

Programming baseball players is up next, as we detail building out training blocks and designing training periodization plans, specifically when looking to program an athlete for a full calendar year. This section gives you a fundamental understanding of how to create a training plan designed around your athlete’s specific needs.

Learn to work around environmental constraints and systematically progress that plan through the year. Learning the rules of how to program an athlete through the off-season, pre-season, and in-season is invaluable for both strength and skill coaches alike. 

Coaching in the Weight Room

Lastly, this course will give you insight into the art of coaching in the weight room. Working from designing a warm-up, through interacting with athletes, and even into cueing specific exercises, it details valid assessment processes, exercise selections, and training accommodations for coaches on any budget with a variety of resource and facility constraints accounted for.

The exercise videos cover the dos and don’ts of our most popular programmed exercises. Beyond the how-to videos, also included are quizzes with visuals showcasing the most common mistakes we see, helping coaches understand how to correctly identify and cue athletes in the weight room. The course also comes with a full exercise library and a sample program progressing through accumulation, strength, and power block.

The FOS certification is all online and can be found with our other certifications here, and pairs well with the Foundations of Pitching course to provide a broad understanding of developing baseball players in throwing and strength training.