The catcher step up is a great exercise to strengthen your lower body. This exercise primarily activates and develops your quadriceps, hamstring, and gluteal muscles and has an upper body component. This exercise is performed with a 4-6 inch step and can be progressed to an 8-12 inch step as shown in the figures below.…
How would you define a good hitter? What criteria does a player have to meet to be considered a good hitter? Can you quantify a good hitter by looking at his statistics? The “Good Hitter” label is an envious title in the game of baseball. If you are a player who can achieve this status…
In our last newsletter we discussed sacrifice bunt fundamentals (click here to read). This week I will give you a great drill that you can incorporate into your next practice. Bunting isn’t looked upon as an exciting part of our game, so when doing the drill make sure to make it a competition and involve…
The hamstring curl plus bridge is a great exercise for toning and strengthening your hamstrings, gluteals, as well as core muscles. The two exercises, the hamstring curl and the bridge, are done as a superset. A superset is when you perform two exercises in a row with minimal to no rest in between. For example,…
The common front lunge exercise can be made more dynamic and functional to help strengthen not only your lower body muscles but your upper body muscles as well. This new exercise called the front lunge row is a front lunge combined with an upper body row. This exercise targets your lower body muscles such as…
Some refer to it as “small ball” and incorporate sometimes into their gameplan. Others do away with it completely and would prefer to not take the bat out of the hitter’s hands. Regardless it seems more often than not that the art of the sacrifice bunt is becoming extinct in modern baseball. I work with…
When I was a player I prided myself on defense. I loved taking extra ground balls during and after practice at every level I played. It was never work for me. I was one of those guys who loved practice. As a matter of fact I used to have to bribe some of my college…
The Scarecrow exercise is a great addition to any upper body workout program. The overhead athlete participating in such sports as baseball, volleyball, and tennis will greatly benefit from adding this exercise to their shoulder routine. This exercise not only works your rotator cuff muscles, which helps shoulder stability, but your posterior and lateral deltoid…
Recently I have received quite a few phone calls from parents asking how long the basepaths are in their child’s respective leagues. I figured that more of you out there may have the same questions, so listed below are the infield dimensions for most of the fields you will be playing on this year. I…
The one arm dumbbell/ kettlebell crunch is a great variation for the typical abdominal crunch. This particular crunch not only targets your rectus abdominus and oblique muscles but also causes your transverse abdominus muscle to activate. The transverse abdominus muscle is one of your deeper abdominal muscles and is very important in core/trunk stability. This…