In-Season Programming for the Professional Baseball Athlete (Part I)

My role as a strength coach is to help my athlete or client achieve goals. I find it’s important to re-evaluate and ask myself if I’m implementing the exercises and programs with those goals in mind.  For this post I will focus on athletes, specifically professional baseball players.

Professional baseball players all have the same goal in mind: to make it to the big leagues. My job is to help get them there as quickly as possible. I prescribe, coach, motivate, and communicate my strength and conditioning sessions while keeping that goal in mind. Every exercise I have the player do has a reason behind it, whether it be to get them stronger, aid their performance, or increase their resilience to injury.

Keeping in mind the baseball season is long, very long, like everyday for 7.5 months (even longer for MLB), you also have to take into consideration other factors. These include but aren’t limited to burnout, lack of recovery, travel schedule, game time schedules, month of season, rain outs, and temperature. I always try to put myself into the player’s shoes; this helps you build relationships faster and helps you recognize the appropriate time to increase or decrease the workout intensity.

When planning workouts for baseball players, I break them up into two groups: pitchers and position players. In general, both workouts are very similar exercise wise. The main difference comes from the volume (overall work prescribed) and additional emphasis on arm care (shoulder specific strengthening exercises) for pitchers.

(Part 1 of 3)