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Ultimate
Baseball Training Guide Preview
I. Foreword Training to increase athletic performance is becoming more and more important in this highly demanding world that we live in today. Every fan that has watched a game of Professional Sports demands the players to reach their optimum potential every minute of every game. If you have ever been a competitive athlete, you would know that this is not truly possible. We are all human and sometimes let situations get the best of us. Over the past several years I have had the opportunity of training some truly great Professional and Amateur Athletes that have gone on to achieve some incredible performance gains and athletic successes. A few months ago I spent a few minutes speaking with New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez and asked him, “Why after all the success you’ve had both on and off the field do you continue to be the first one at the park everyday to hit, lift, and run?” His answer really surprised me. He responded, “I need to do this. If I spend all of these hours preparing for each game, I know I am ready, I have no doubt in my mind that I will play at my highest potential.” So, as everybody knows Alex Rodriguez is one of the greatest players to ever play baseball, made history with his blockbuster contract, but continues to work just like he did in the Minor Leagues. The point I am getting at here is the fact that if you take the time to prepare, you will always enter competition with a positive and confident mind set that will always bring you success on the field and off the field in the game of life. Everybody can be at this same level of preparedness if they understand the importance of training and preparation. “The failure to prepare is preparing to fail” This strength and conditioning manual is designed to not only help you get in the best playing shape of your career, but to educate you on what it takes to be a pro and unlock your potential. To succeed at this program and achieve your training goals, you must dedicate yourself to this program one-hundred percent. Just as you take the time to hit the batting cage on a daily basis, you must put the same focus here. Remember this: While you are out playing with friends, and playing games on the computer, there is some hungry young player training working to make it to the Major Leagues. Keep this in mind and it will keep you motivated and keep that fire burning within. Best of luck and enjoy the journey to success! -Coach Cavalea II. Introduction Regardless of your age, size, and strength, this program will help you to unlock some key characteristics that will make you not only and all-around better ballplayer, but a more talented, powerful athlete. Weight training and conditioning have been around for years and have always helped both athletes and non- athletes get stronger and put on more size. What some athletes eventually go on to realize is that with this newly acquired size, they might feel like they hit the ball further, but also have a limited range of motion which later makes them more prone to injury and decreased performance. Size is one trait that has always impressed people much like the homerun. Everybody is fascinated with one question when it comes to lifting, “How much do you bench?” In reality though, what does pushing several hundred pounds off your chest while you are lying down prove? Have sports suddenly changed to where we play them on our back? The point is this, each time we train, every exercise must have a purpose, or function to make us an all-around better athlete. Football Coaches will argue all day long that their guys must bench so they increase their upper body power and are able to drive guys off the line. Their thinking here is good, but don’t you think it would be more efficient to train standing up, and create a player that could increase his strength and power to the point where he could hit his opposition with such force, he disorients him, then moves on to continue blocking another opponent? Now that makes a little more sense. Every exercise you will see in this book will essentially have a function towards us becoming a better all- around athlete and reaching our training goals. Following each exercise you will see a bold word stating: Why? In order for us to truly give one- hundred percent of our effort toward something we do, we must understand why we are doing it, and how it is going to make us a better athlete. As you proceed through this book, approach it with an open-mind and understand that these methodologies have been proven both practically and scientifically to yield the greatest increase in performance to this day at both the youth and professional ranks. Each exercise you will come across in this book is designed to make you a more “Functional” athlete who demonstrates the ability to use the strength and power he/she develops. The old cliché Speed Kills is an absolute fact. A faster, more agile athlete will win every single time over their slower, less trained competition. So, in addition to overall strength and power gains, we must allow those gains to translate into speed development, which will occur due to better movement efficiency and mechanics, and the addition of increased strength and most importantly greater power output. This program will be broken up into several different phases, each lasting for a specified duration, accompanied by specified rep ranges, as well as exercises that correspond to each segment. The phases are as follows: 1. Foundations + Stability/Core Focus These phases can be looked at as a journey through your training year. Each phase will be followed by a recovery phase, which will work to recover the body from the rigors of the previous phase. If we fail to recover after workouts and between phases, we are setting ourselves up for a difficult next phase. Each phase has a particular emphasis and when you have completed each of the phases by the end of the year, you will have worked the entire training continuum from stability to strength to power. The following diagram illustrates this continuum.
This diagram illustrates a linking system between the first phase and the last. As you can see, Stability is our base, followed by Strength, which is the bridge to Power. If we lack stability, it is going to compromise our overall strength and power. If we lack strength, there is no way that we could take advantage of our true power potential. This is a great illustration of how one affects the other and why an integrated approach is crucial. We must always work to build our FOUNDATION first, which is like the ground floor of the house. The analogy I like to use is, would you start putting walls up in the house that doesn’t even have a foundation yet? If our foundation is weak, so will everything else that sits on top of it. Another angle to look at this phenomenon from would be to consider all our connective tissue, tendons and ligaments, which surround the joints, and our muscles which protect the joints as the nails that hold the house together. If we are short a few nails, or the nails are the wrong size, it doesn’t matter how good the wood we use is, the house is going to come crashing down. This is the same principle here. I again want to put a major emphasis on this STABILITY component. To many times athletes and coaches are obsessed with building walls and landscaping they forget about the foundation. Focus on stability, and when it is time to build strength, it will be that much easier and the results will be that much greater. Power could be looked at as what I like to call Fast Strength. When it comes to the development of power, we are working to move a load in the fastest amount of time possible over the shortest distance. So the last point on the performance triad diagram would be to look at it as a linking system. We must not skip steps, but then once we get to the next step or phase, we can’t forget what we worked on in the previous phase. An example would be, if we just left the stability phase and are moving toward the strength phase, we don’t want to lose the stability gains we just made. In order to prevent this, we always build stability into our strength program using tempos, single leg training, and propioceptive/ balance work. This ensures that we maintain all characteristics of the athleticism we are working to enhance. Lets breakdown the goals of each phase and what each phase is meant to do for us: Foundations + Stability/Core Focus: This phase was designed to create overall stability through the core as well as the upper and lower extremity. In addition it will teach athletes how to fire certain muscles and muscle groups in synergy. Also, this phase will focus on corrective exercise strategies as well as preventative exercises, also termed a pre-habilitation in some text. This is truly a preparation phase, but a phase that can not be skipped because it provides the foundation, hence the name, for all training protocols to follow. We will use a series of body weight movements combined with a constantly changing external environment, ex. Surfaces, which will work to challenge the central nervous system and body’s ability to communicate between muscles, joints, and the brain. Work Capacity/ Global Strength This phase is meant to build muscular endurance and baseline levels of strength. This is a basic strength phase that is a step above our foundational phase which incorporates primarily body weight movement. This phase will focus on bodyweight movement + resistance. Resistance will be in the form of weighted vests, dumbbells, barbells, resistance bands, etc. Again, we are working to create adaptation for the body, promoting the development of global muscle mass, prime movers, while at the same time focusing on the stability aspect for the secondary muscles, synergists, and connective tissue. This phase will strengthen the body in multiple planes and truly enhance joint stability/ protection. In this phase we will work in an upper/ lower body split, going from unilateral, single leg training, to bilateral training, double leg. Strength/ Low Level Power This phase will continue to develop strength, but will have an added focus of low level power. Power, increased rate of muscle contraction and fiber recruitment will be addressed here in its simplest form. It will be developed via body weight explosiveness. Examples include: low level plyometric hops, body weight explosion. We are not ready for high intensity power and explosiveness by this point because the body is still adapting to the new training stimuli that has been introduced in the previous two phases. This phase will incorporate a mix of both unilateral and bilateral training, but now transitioning from an upper/ lower body split to a push/pull split. Max Strength/ Power Complexing This phase will work to develop maximum strength, our abilities to move a maximum load through a full range of motion. In addition, we will be working on speeding up the contractile ability and recruitment rate of the muscle fiber by incorporating a power complexing component, which simple means after each strength exercise, we will follow it up with a power exercise. While working through a max strength exercise, the muscle fibers will contract a slower rate, but this will immediately be challenged by a power exercise which will again cause the muscle to fire at a rapid rate. This is a key phase that will begin that transition from strength to overall power, the true quality we are looking for in the development of overall performance enhancement and structural preparation. If our body is not prepared to recruit muscle and rapid rate, then have it contract at a rapid rate, we will be setting ourselves up for injury, often times and acute injury, but quite possibly an acute injury that becomes a chronic condition. This phase will incorporate many different modalities such as dumbbells, barbells, med balls, etc. Total Body Power In my opinion, this is the phase that is most responsible for increased performance where our stability and strength phases are the phases that yield the greatest effect in resistance to injury. The Total Body Power Phase will promote maximal recruitment of muscle fiber and max firing rate of this fiber in a triple extension format, replicating the type of muscle action that takes place while running and performing many “ sport” movements. We will not be working with max loads here because we are looking for speed of contraction. Always remember this: To be FAST, you must train FAST! This phase, only after completing the previous phases should give you an extra spring in your step, especially when combined with a movement based speed development program. Strength/ Power Complexing – In-Season This phase is the one that many coaches consider “the maintenance phase.” This is a hypocritical statement because if you ask coaches if they want their athletes to be strong or weak by the end of the season most will say they want them strong, yet, most don’t lift or train their athletes during the season. So, in turn, they are not maintaining, they are losing. Who said you can’t get stronger during the season? The key to this phase is to make adjustments as the season goes on. In the beginning of the season your training volume will be higher than the end, but the intensity of training will continue to go up through the season, but then taper off toward the final 6-10 weeks of the season to allow the body to recover. The in-season program will also contain full weeks for recovery which will allow the tissue to heal. The Strength/ Power Complexing phase will be very similar to that of the max strength/ complexing phase listed previously, but will be a mesh of max strength, strength, total body power, and power in general. This will also be combined as stated earlier with weeks similar to our foundations phase, and weeks that again will just provide recovery. The season is long so balance is the key. What you do in the weight room should only enhance on the field play, never negatively affect it. Once a negative playing outcome starts resulting from training, it is imperative to re-analyze the program because there may be to much volume, which lead to excessive fatigue and hindered play. Key Point: The #1 Goal in-seasons is to play the game, this is the only time training takes a secondary position in regards to volume. So now that we have an idea as to what each phase is composed of, we need to start looking at our yearly plan of action in regards to the length of each phase, rep ranges, and rest intervals for each phase. You will be provided with a Training Calendar that you should follow to take you through each phase and the complete training year. This calendar is your personal guide that will let you know where you should be during each phase of the year. Each person starts the season at a different time, ends the season at a different time, and the duration of the season also plays a major role in this planning process. If this dates on the calendar do not match up with your season, work backwards from the start of your season, and you will see that each phase lasts approximately 4-6 weeks in duration. If you work backwards, this will allow you to figure our YOUR starting date, and when each phase will start, transition, and change. This program is for YOU, so work to get your dates down as accurately as possible. This calendar will be based on a typical collegiate season, but again should be customized to meet the needs of your middle school, high school, or collegiate season. FOR MORE ON THE MANUAL, VISIT
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