We had the pleasure of training some of the members of the William Tennent High School Baseball team during the off-season. They spent 8 weeks with us, training for one hour each of those weeks.

   One hour per week isn’t an ideal training schedule, it’s much better than no training. It’s always better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

  Since Baseball is a power sport – bursts of all out activity followed by relatively long bouts of recovery, we focused the training towards increasing both upper and lower body power.  Players used compound barbell lifts and plyometrics to develop strength and power while learning movement mechanics to apply their new power appropriately on the base path and in the field.

    Before we started the off-season workouts, we assessed the players in a few different tests.  Tests were designed to accurately measure lower body power, upper body power, anaerobic capacity, change of direction skills, and shoulder injury risk.  At the conclusion of the 8 weeks, the players were retested in the same assessments to measure any change.

Average Changes –

Lower body power increased by 4.20%

Upper body power increased by 11.30%

Anaerobic capacity increased by 7.67%

Change of Direction skills had no statistical change with a mean of -0.49% and a median of 2.60%.

In short, the players averaged significant increases in anaerobic capacity,  both lower and upper body power without sacrificing their ability to change directions. A very favorably result from 8 hours of extremely hard work. Imagine the possibilities of a few more hours…

Thank you to the players who dedicated their time and effort in here. That hard work will pay off on field. Have a great season and we will see you next year.

Strength and Conditioning Staff at BucksFit