Keep up the hard work this week. Keep challenging yourself to go a little hit harder or farther with your workouts each week. And remember to track your offseason training points. Here is a reminder about how it works – take a look and log your activities.
Let’s get to our workout for this week.
Hitting:
Quality hits off the tee
- 15 big stride hits – we did this at practice last week.
- start very far back in the batter’s box and feet close together
- take a big stride so that your front foot is even with the ball
- let your weight shift off of your back foot onto your front foot
- 15 regular swing – inside
- 15 regular swing – middle
- 15 regular swing – outside
Let’s take a deeper look at hitting this week. Here is Mookie Betts hitting a home run in 2019. The full slow motion video is here – take a look (its only 49 sec).
I’ll highlight 3 keys.
- His bat stays ‘attached’ to his shoulder for a long time and he drives his back shoulder to the ball. Work on this when doing your tee work. Focus on pushing your back shoulder to the ball, then letting your hands ‘finish’ your swing. You can see this in the picture below.
2. He makes contact in line with his front foot – we’ve been talking about hitting the ball between our front foot and middle of our body – keep positioning the tee to train yourself to hit this way.
3. Mookie’s front foot is driving forward. Just like when we are generating power on the mound by using our legs and driving, we can generate power similarly while batting. This week we did the ‘big stride’ drill during our tee work to help us train for this.
Throwing:
We’ll keep our throwing train the same as last week – these are key drill that we haven’t mastered yet.
Get a quick refresher on how to do the last drill – This video should start for you at the 6:30 mark – the drill is explained from 6:30 – 8:00. You are welcome to watch more of the video but do the drill Brent describes at least 10 times. Note – he makes it look really easy. It is NOT easy to do. It takes strength and coordination – stick with it, this will pay off.
Strength:
Finish your workout this week by continuing these key exercises.
- 25 push-ups – to strengthen your chest.
- 25 rows – to strengthen your back (using a door frame, here is a resource on how: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8NzhNe9Res)
- 25 jump squats – to strengthen your legs
- This is a harder variation than previous weeks – it will help build more power.
- Here is a quick explanation on how to do it. How to Do Jumping Squats | Back Workout – YouTube
- 25 sit-ups – to strengthen your core
Keep it up and we’ll see you on Saturday!
– Coach Kevin
Pressure Baseball 