Softball Conditioning - Tips for Building Speed, Strength, Power, Endurance, and Flexibility

Stay away from leg raises or a floor-based crunches or sit-ups (or close variations of them) as they only focus on training one abdominal muscle (the “six-pack” muscle) and this muscle doesn’t help in transferring power or generating rotational power. Any other core exercise is likely to benefit you, especially is the meet the two criteria mentioned above.

Focus on whole-body exercises that use lots of muscles and joints in coordinated action and use your muscles the way they’re designed to work instead of those that are force muscles to work in isolation. Here are a few of the best strength training exercises that you can choose: squat, lunge, deadlift, bent-over row, BB and DB presses, dips, military press, pull-ups, etc.

Stay away from machines. Machine training is not sport-specific at all. It doesn’t train the muscles the way they are used on the field. In other words, machine training doesn’t prepare your body to perform on the field. Instead, focus on bodyweight, free weight and stability ball exercises. However, there are a few exceptions: the lat-pull down, the seated row and any cable exercises that involves more many muscles are good machine exercises.

Stay away from leg presses. People love the leg press because they can load it up with insane amount of weights and they feel strong and powerful. Many people think that it’s a good machine because it involves most of your lower body muscles. However, it “isolates” the lower body and doesn’t involve any muscles from the trunk or the upper body. You will be much better with squats, deadlifts, lunges, etc.

Don’t abuse the bench press. The bench press is a good upper body strength builder. However, abuse and overuse of this exercise to produce a lot of shoulder injuries. If your shoulder is not healthy, your performance will greatly suffer. Do it mostly to build strength whenever your do sets of 1 to 8 repetitions.

Don’t think that the Smith-machine replaces real squats. The Machine is a “standing” leg press. It’s no substitute for real squats and it’s certainly not better than the leg press. Even if it looks a lot like a squat, it doesn’t force your body to stabilize because the machine does it for you. Stay away from it.

The weight or resistance has to be heavy enough to make strength gains. If it is too light, you will not make gains. Progressive overload is one of the basic principles of strength training. Make sure that you also keep increasing the resistance as you get stronger.

The goal of each workout is to get better. Try to set new records every workout. While it will not happen every time, it will force you to push yourself and work hard.

To build strength and power, you must train hard but less frequently, with plenty of recovery time between workouts. More is NOT better. Intense workouts with quality recovery are the key to building strength and power.

Control the speed of your lifting. To build strength, you must lift slowly. A general rule of thumb is to lift the weight in 1 to 2 seconds and lower it in 2 to 4 seconds. The only time where you want to lift quickly is when you are training power (explosive strength).

Vary your program every 4-6 weeks. The more conditioned you are, the faster your body adapt to any training program. After that, it reaches a plateau. Elite athletes usually change their program every 3-4 weeks to make sure to keep making gains. You can change the exercises, the number of sets and reps, the rest period, the speed of lifting, the order of the exercises, the training frequency, etc.

There is no magic system of exercises, sets, and reps. Everything works but nothing works forever. You have to change what you do frequently.

Build your body using a logical order. Use the following progression: 1) develop stability and muscular endurance using 2-3 sets of 12-20 repetitions, 2) develop general strength using 2-3 sets of 8-12 repetitions, 3) develop maximum strength using 3-4 sets of 4-8 repetitions, and build power by lifting explosively using Olympic lifts, medicine balls exercises or plyometrics. The number of sets and repetitions will vary depending on the type of training you will be doing.

Use Olympic lifting to build power. Most of the world’s best softball players use some form of Olympic lifting in their training. Olympic lifting is the use of cleans, snatches, and all of their variations to build power. Olympic lifts are very technical so before you start using Olympic lifts, seek guidance from a qualified strength and conditioning coach.

You’ll get better results by working your butt off on a bad program than you will loafing through a good program. There is no shortcut for hard work in the weight room.