• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

PlayBallKid Baseball Players Recruiting Portal

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Create Account
    • Athlete Registration
    • Coach Registration
  • Pitching Velocity Leaderboard
    • Spin Masters
    • Exit Velo Leaderboard
    • Speed Leaderboard
    • Browse Player Profiles
  • Podcast
  • Blog

Training

Train Hard, Recover Hard

posted on January 6, 2021

It never fails, every college or pro player I speak to says they regret not getting into the weight room earlier in their career. I started training at age 11 at True Grind Systems in Austin, TX. At these young ages it isn’t about lifting heavy weights, it is about learning the habits, movement patterns and intent of moving athletically. I am finally seeing more kids aged 9-12 training all over the country on social media, and I am excited about their future. There are plenty of good sports performance facilities that work with kids around the country now.

Managing Your Training Workload

Over the last few months, I have moved to a 4x a week program in the gym. I do skills camp at 180 Performance Center 2x a week, where I work on a structured hitting, fielding and pitching program. On top of that, I long toss, throw Clean Fuego and a football a few times a week. I’ll throw at least one bullpen a week, where I am focused on my mechanics or on a specific thing I want to work on that week. I’ll get in the batting cage and play wiffle ball a couple of times a week, too. I’ll also ride the bike (indoors or outdoors) once or twice a week. I am not blessed to be the best athlete with great natural movements, with speed or with explosiveness. Like many people out there, I wasn’t born a thoroughbred. I am more like a junkyard dog. I’m not that kid who woke up one morning and could throw 90 at 13 or run a 6.7 60 yard dash. I’ve got to work hard for every gain. You can work hard, too and I hope you have already started. But one key lesson I want to share with you is if you are going to work hard, then you better work hard to recover, too.

whoop strain recovery sleepThe key here for me is the Whoop strap. Whoop allows me to monitor all my activity, strain and sleep. I will use it to track all my training and it will provide me a daily strain score. At the end of the day, it will tell me when I need to go to sleep in order to perform my best, or well enough, the next day. This is really invaluable during the school year and of course before games. When I wake up it, will show me my recovery score and how much my body and central nervous system are prepared for my daily workload.

As I mentioned, getting good quality sleep is really important to your recovery. There are a number of routines I go through before bed that help me with my sleep score.

The Importance of Hydration

My go-to-bed routine starts with my rehydrating and getting in some electrolytes. I drink a glass of Jigsaw Health’s Pickleball Cocktail. Making sure you are well hydrated throughout the day will also aid in your recovery. Dry muscles and fascia are more likely to get injured.

A couple of hours before I go to sleep, I will use blue light blocking glasses if I am looking at any screens. Many studies suggest that blue light in the evening disrupts your brain’s natural sleep-wake cycles.

Active Recovery With Marc Pro

Now I can deal with any tired and sore muscles. I’ll get on the Marc Pro for active recovery. I tend to use it on my pitching arm after throwing days, after an upper body workout day and when I need to throw the next day. This week I’ve used it on my legs as well, since my new workout program emphasizes more squats while my last program was more focused on deadlifting. How much time I spend on it will be based on how much damage/stress my body has gone through. To learn more about the Marc Pro, make sure to listen to this week’s podcast cast with Gary Reinl, Director of Sports Performance for Marc Pro. While I have the Marc Pro on (usually 30 minutes) I’ll get in a comfortable position and watch some YouTube or TV.

Maximize with Mobility

Before laying down in my bed, I’ll spend some time focusing on my hip mobility with several hip flows. I will get on the Rotex floor model in order to work on my ankle (I plan on writing more about this in the future) and hip mobility as well. If I notice any muscles that are really tight, I will use a percussion massage gun or a Yoga Tune Up ball to roll out tight muscles and feet.

I’ll spend about 10 minutes doing my J-Band routine to stretch and strengthen my shoulders and arms. As I get into bed, I’ll spend some time with focused breathing to relax myself and bring my heart rate down.

This is my typical routine 6 days a week. On Sundays, during the off-season, I’ll just use it to recover, play some other sports, like basketball, and rest up. When I look at all this written down, most days, between the gym and skill work, I am putting in 2:30-4 hours of work and about an hour of active recovery, in total. Add all of that to making sure I eat well all day, hydrate consistently and get my 8-10 hours of sleep, and you can see why I say it is important to work hard, but work at recovery harder, as well.

This week I asked on Twitter how long people spend on active recovery and the results of the poll are quite interesting:

Baseball players, how much time do you spend on your active recovery daily?
(@TheMarcPro, mobility, other movement, massage)

Trying to put together an article this week.

— Play Ball Kid (@PlayBallKidInc) January 5, 2021

How long do you spend on recovery?

PS: If you are looking for a Marc Pro code you can you can “Play Ball”.

Filed Under: Pitching, Recovery, Training, Training Equipment Tagged With: hydration, marc pro, mobility, recovery, routines, training

Time to Talk Training Timing in Hitting

posted on November 29, 2020

A thinking man’s pitcher, Warren Spahn would describe his approach on the mound as “Hitting is timing. Pitching is upsetting timing.” While interviewing former big league pitcher Lary Sorensen, an executive from F5 Sports who make the PitchLogic smart baseball, he shared that Hall of Famer Eddie Matthew’s said “he could time a jet airplane going through the strike zone if it was straight enough and he saw it often enough.”

The best hitters are masters of timing.

For all the arguments of the swing up or swing down club, they both require you to time the impact of the bat’s barrel to the baseball to produce a favorable outcome. There are those that will argue a ball on the ground is better than a ball in the air. There are those that will argue that you swing down to hit under the ball to create backspin. They can all be right because ultimately it’s still all about timing. Isn’t that why we can sometimes see the ugliest swings still produce extraordinary outcomes?

Timing is impacted by the bats path and how long the barrel is in the trajectory path of the ball. The longer you can keep your barrel in the zone the more time it seems “you buy yourself.” If you are steep up or down in the zone, the barrel is not in the zone long and you will have a smaller timing window. If you ask a hitter would you rather have more of a window of time to barrel a baseball or less, I don’t think any hitters would say less.

So it seems we can possibly set up a mechanical advantage to timing a baseball. Create mechanics that keeps the barrel in the zone a long time like Ted Williams said in his book “The Science of Hitting.” Although, Ted Williams doesn’t talk much about timing in his book. Maybe he just assumed it wasn’t something that needed to be taught or talked about. What he did say clearly is to look for a good ball to hit. In fact, that is nothing new because it was Rogers Hornsby, who told Williams that the single most important thing for a hitter was to get a good ball to hit.

Two Times Timing

Seems to be two parts to being “on time”: one to recognize that you are getting a good ball to hit and two the mechanical time to have your bat meet the baseball on the sweet spot of your barrel. These seem to be the most important elements that transfer to a game. We’ve all seen plenty of bad swings (poor mechanics, poor movement patterns, etc.) that were timed properly or the batter adjusted his timing to get a hit.

Perry Husband who teaches effectively velocity talks about “The same speed pitch located in different parts of the zone has different reaction times for hitters.  This ‘not-so-simple’ concept is the beginning of understanding timing.”

Can timing be taught or is it something that you are just born with?

In my 10+ years of being on ball fields I have heard coaches talk about loading “early” or you are “late” to the pitch. Of course, I’ve heard the expression “slow the game down.” Plenty of people use timing words but are they actually teaching it? I’ve seen plenty of kids who gather and load up late and can’t catch up to fastballs that are faster than they are used to and kids who struggle when they see pitchers who throw much slower than they are used to in practice. But I have rarely heard anyone train based on timing up pitchers with their delivery, rhythm, arm action and pitch type. With the exception of limited amounts of Live ABs. How many pitches a week should you see at game speed to train your timing?

  • The mechanics of your swing has a time.
  • The pitcher’s movements and pitch has a time.
  • A hitters job is to learn how to sync the two together.

We spend tons of time swinging off a tee. Does that help with training either timing component? How does front toss or flips help? BP or hitting off the machine has some timing component but does that prepare you for game-like timing? This can help you time up your body movements. They have their place and value, but timing a pitch is what needs to transfer.

Matt Nokes says “Timing isn’t isn’t a random skill set you inherit, the swing has a timeline, the pitch has a timeline, and you gotta match your swing time with the pitch time.  That’s how you do it soft toss, but soft toss is only from 12 feet away.  So what do you do when you multiply the 12 feet by 5 and now the pitchers throwing from a mound 60 feet away.  The variables you were managing automatically in soft toss, from 60 feet those same variables suddenly become unmanageable unless you know what the variables are.  You can’t cope with a situation like a pitchers delivery when you don’t know what’s important to pay attention to and what you need to filter out…

When you understand your mechanics in a way that makes timing the top priority, the best hitters find a way to rehearse with a flow, making sure all their movements are natural and powerful, short and quick…this puts you in position to automate your mechanics and focus on the number 1 most important ingredient to hitting…and that’s timing.”

In my recent podcast interview with Chris O’Dowd, former big league catcher and CEO of baseball virtual reality training company WinReality he shared this story of Steven Souza Jr, and how he had gone through a number of swing changes over the last year and a half, two years.

“But the feedback that he was getting, in our quick recognition challenge was so consistent that he was making his decisions about six to eight feet too late. That he may never have needed to make a swing change if he moved his decision-making up, that it could have put him in a position to where he was getting better information about where he could improve as a hitter. And so he’s, he’s been doing different drills where he goes quick recognition training WinReality. High velocity, fastball machine and going back and forth, just to move up his decision-making four to six feet out, yeah. Without WinReality, you really, there’s no way to quantify where was I’m making a decision. Spatially what does it feel like to make a decision earlier?”

This is what inspired me to ask you “what percent of a hitter’s training is spent on the most important game skill, timing?”

How are you training hitters to be “on time?”

Filed Under: Hitting, Training Tagged With: batting practice, effective velocity, hitters, hitting, timing, training timing

Primary Sidebar

Login

Lost your password?

Sponsors

Related Products

Categories

  • Hitting
  • Mental Game
  • Pitching
  • Podcast
  • Recovery
  • Training
  • Training Equipment
  • Tutorials

Copyright Play Ball Kid Media © 2021 · We Value Your Privacy. Recover Password