With cold weather and accumulating snow fresh under way, not many people are thinking about playing baseball and softball. After all, we still have many long, blustery, cold months ahead of us before athletes can head out onto green fields and play America's pastime. Yet now is the perfect time to begin honing in on your batting and pitching skills in preparation for those long, hot days of spring and summer fun.
Athletes can use the coming months to fine tune the mechanics of their swing, improve their throwing mechanics and strengthen their body in order to not only withstand the rigors of sport but also improve performance. Proper training mechanics focusing on body control and awareness develop key body spatial awareness cues that are highly transferable to sport.
Aside from the usual strengthening exercises to prevent shoulder injuries for throwing sports or more explosive movements designed to improve power in pitching and hitting, there are many things that athletes can do to assure proper body alignment. This becomes very evident when looking at the mechanics of a batter's swing. In order to transfer lower body power into a hard solid contact on the ball, the hips must time/align with the trail shoulder of the batter. Thus effectively squaring the batter to the ball and delivering the most force possible using the entire body at the same time.
When it comes to throwing, often people tend to focus on arm strength. However, a great deal of power is generated from the lower body and abs. Only focusing on developing a stronger arm, neglects total body development and places too much emphasis on the end of the chain. True throwing speed/strength comes from the lower body. Creating great drive off the back leg and having perfect alignment with the lead shoulder and elbow while the abdominals apply downward force allow stress to be relieved from the thrower's arm.
Strengthening each individual body part essential to throwing or batting only transfers to increased performance if the individual also learns how to use their body completely, tying all components of strength and power together. The lower body and the hips hold a great deal of possible kinetic energy, but it must transfer through the body up the chain to the upper body in order to be useful.
Olympic lifts, partial or whole, are great coordinated dynamic movements that require the body to function as one unit as well. After all, these are the most explosive things an athlete can perform within a weight room. However, there must be more direct transfer to sport that the athlete can see and realize within their training. Some of the most applicable and transferable exercises for these types of sporting movements are medicine ball exercises. Many rotational medicine ball exercises can be designed to begin to get these results after strength has been increased.
At NTS Athletic Development, we can not only strengthen the body to improve performance, decrease the risk of injury, but we can also work with athletes to improve body control and key timing alignments for sport. Through assessing an athlete's mechanics of throwing and hitting, greater success can be seen this spring and summer.
Kevin Ebel is owner/director of performance for NTS Athletic Development in Stevens Point. Contact him at 715-252-9926 or go to www.nts-ad.com.