In the high school baseball world, the fall is a great time to focus on measurables and improving skills. After long playing seasons in the spring and summer, an overwhelming majority of players would significantly benefit from a break. For our athletes who are not playing a fall sport, we focus on three specific areas for growth in the fall: explosion/speed, arm strength, and bat speed.
We choose these three because over the years it has become apparent that speed kills, you can’t hide a weak arm, and swinging the bat with authority gives you the best chance for sustained success at the plate. We do have individual goals we work on with specific players, but working on “the big three” elements has yielded the best results for our programs over the last 18+ years.
Explosion/Speed
On a weekly basis, we hit a jumping/plyometric day, a sprint and agility day, and a lift dedicated to lower body power. The goal here is to get as much “bang for our buck” while we are actively working on baseball fundamentals and position-specific work.
In order to establish a baseline and measure growth, we test our guys in standing broad jump, a 5-10-5 shuttle, a 30-yard dash, a steal time with a 12-foot lead, and the 60-yard dash.
We also add a variety of pogo jumps (with and without bands), successive broad jumps, skater jumps, box jumps, depth jumps, bounds, Yuri bands, and med ball sprints.
For our strength portion, we balance quad strength and stability with exercises for hamstring strength and power. Our emphasis is on full range of motion and keeping weight off the spine, so we use a reverse lunge with a barbell, hack squat machine for speed, Nordic curls, Bulgarian split squats, and trap bar dead lift to improve ground force.
With our baserunning, we prioritize leads and training our starts with an open front foot and a powerful crossover to gain ground with the back leg as the first moving part of our break.
Arm Strength
For arm strength, we do a variety of warmup exercises to get blood flowing and warm up the arm. We long toss Monday and Friday in a normal fall week, with a focus on distance and minimal arm effort.
We throw bullpens on Wednesdays using the Pitch Logic ball so we can track measurables like movement, velocity, and spin efficiency.
Our post-throwing routine includes “IYTWs” as well as PVC/body blade motions for time. Wrist rollers, sand buckets, and rice buckets are also used to ensure our arm gets worked uniformly.
Our guys get feedback from long toss distance, improved metrics in the bullpen, and through feel.
Bat Speed
We focus on bat speed through med ball work, forearm gauntlets, and over/underload swings. We use Blast sensors to ensure we are on plane, our time to contact is as quick as we