Med Ball Throws For Baseball Performance
With fall upon else and the baseball post-season underway, most baseball players are now beginning their off-seasons. In order to gain an edge in the increasingly competitive environment of high school, collegiate, and professional baseball, a sound training program centered around strength training is essential. However, while important, strength training in isolation will have limited carryover to the field. Baseball players need to include things like sprinting, jumping, power work, and conditioning to ensure that they are improving all aspects of their game.
On top of a well rounded strength training regimen, baseball players (and golfers, softball players, and any rotational athletes for that matter) would be wise to utilize medicine ball throws in their training. Why? Simply put, medicine balls help bridge the gap between the weight room and the field. While increasing force production through strength training is pivotal, we need to complement that with movements that are similar in velocity to the sporting actions as well as in the same planes of motion.
The skills of throwing and hitting require movements in multiple planes of motion as well as the correct sequencing of multiple segments of the body. Medicine balls allow us to express the strength and power built in the weight room into movements that carryover to the sporting skill itself. We want to maximize how much energy and momentum we transfer to the ball.
Ok, so medicine balls are great, but which drills work best? Below is a list of drills that I have used in the past with players from the youth level all the way to the professional level.
Chest Pass
While not rotational in nature, chest passes nevertheless have a direct carryover to pitching due to the contribution of the pecs in the throwing motion. The Pectoralis muscles (“pecs”) play an important role in high velocity throwing as they (along with the Latissimus dorsi, or “lats'') are one of the main accelerators of the arm. In order for the pec to perform at a high level, it must maximize the elastic return it gets from the connective tissues.
Exercises such as bench press and push-up variations are excellent for increasing the force production of the pecs, and chest pass variations work well for increasing the rate of force development and elasticity of pecs as well.
Shotput
Shotput variations are fantastic drills to train rotational movement patterns as well as express the strength and power qualities built with weight room training. We can utilize them to improve the separation of the upper and lower segments during throwing and hitting. Hip and shoulder separation is extremely important for throwing and swinging. It is the delay between the upper and lower segments of the body, which allows the upper body to store elastic energy as a stretch is imposed on the muscles, tendons, and fascia. Simply put, this sequence of movements is what allows us to generate the rotational velocity required to throw hard and swing for power.
We can program these drills to bias certain movement qualities. Stationary variations allow us to train the movement from a deadstop, similar to throwing and hitting, while increasing the momentum of the drills will lead to greater rotational velocities.
Scoop Toss
Similar to shotput variations, scoop tosses also allow us to train rotational qualities.
We can follow the same progression as we did with shotput variations.
Overhead
As mentioned above, the lats are one of the main accelerators of the arm during the throwing motion. To perform their job well, they must be able to stabilize the shoulder and store elastic energy prior to releasing this energy. The length tension relationship of the lats must be able to support force production at very long muscle lengths. We can train this with different overhead medicine ball throw variations.
We can add a step to increase the momentum and subsequently the velocity of the throw:
Conclusion
Medicine ball training is a great way to supplement the hard work done in the weight room in order to maximize the transfer to on the field movements and skills. Utilizing all of the variations listed above will help you dominate the competition