Important Points:
- Learning how to prepare effectively for your baseball swing (boxer vs marathon runner)
- Quality vs Quantity
- Tiring yourself out by swinging 30-50 swings at a time will make your swing weak, sluggish, and slow
- 5-10 quality explosive baseball swings is more effective than 30-50 swings in a row
OR
Imagine:
You are a boxer preparing for a $10 million fight. You only have 1 month to train, how are you going to prepare?
One round in professional boxing is 3 minutes. That means 3 minutes of intense activity, rest, 3 minutes of intense activity, rest, etc… until either you knock out your opponent, you get knocked out, or time runs out.
You have limited time to prepare so you want to use your time wisely. How would you rather spend an hour of your precious time?
Preparation 1: 1 hour jog
Preparation 2: 1 hour of 2-5 minute intense boxing sets with 1-2 minute rests in between
The answer becomes obvious: Preparation 2 will most effectively translate to improving your skills as a boxer. Preparation 1 may make you a great soccer player or marathon runner, but not a good boxer.
How does this apply to baseball?
THE BASEBALL SWING IS ONE OF THE MOST EXPLOSIVE MOVEMENT IN SPORTS. It should be trained as such!!
High school hitters do this all the time (I know because I did it too!): Take a whole bucket of balls, and take 30-50 swings in the cage before switching partners. At what point in a baseball game to we ever take 30-50 consecutive swings?! The average number of pitches per at-bat in the MLB is only 4!
According to Dan John on page 45 of his book, Easy Strength:
“Excessive endurance training , aerobic or anaerobic, can make the athlete weak, sluggish and slow. Don’t fall into the common trap of turning every type of training into an endurance event…. There is much more to excellence than sloppy endurance, and freshness is essential for development of skill, speed, strength, and power”
“Greco-Roman specialist A. Kolysov has had great success with having wrestlers shorten their bouts in order to increase the tempo and the intensity while increasing their number.”
The words “weak, sluggish, and slow” are not what we want to associate with our “explosive” baseball swing. Taking 30-50 swings in a row trains our body for endurance resulting in a slow swing. Our body learns to reserve energy during our swing to save it for the next 25 swings we still have to complete.
We don’t want energy reserved after we take a swing. We want all the energy available to be transferred to the baseball through our bat. We want relaxed explosiveness. We must train for explosiveness.
How to improve:Change your practice approach so that you are taking 5-10 quality, highly focused, relaxed, explosive swings every round instead of taking 30-50 swings at a time. This will train your body to swing explosively instead of preparing for endurance. Train to be a boxer not a marathon runner.
Go Hit.
Go Hit 