Baseball Players: How to Dominate Your Off-Season

As a baseball physical therapist, I often get asked by my athletes what to do with their off-season. I work with many middle school and high school athletes who are looking to play college baseball. In order to make it to college baseball, you need to come into the spring season ready to look good and avoid injuries. After all, you only have a few years to actually get noticed by college coaches. If you are in 6th grade, you only have 7 off-seasons before high school baseball ends. You probably aren’t going to get recruited going into your senior year, so your time to get noticed is even shorter. Because of this, you need to have a plan for your off-season and not waste time.

Assess YOUR Needs

Social media has changed a lot about baseball workouts. It has opened up a bunch of ideas, but it has taken away one key concept: personalization. It is easy to see exercises or workouts posted on social media and try to copy it because a college or MLB athlete is using it. However, everyone is different and what works for that player almost certainly won’t work for you. The higher you are in skill level, the more individualized your program needs to be. Most 10 year olds can get away with basic exercises, but 16 year olds need more specialized training.

The question you need to ask yourself is: how are those high level athletes selecting their workouts? The answer is simple: they are undergoing individual assessments to determine their specific deficiencies and needs. They are not guessing. Once you reach the college level or higher, you don’t have the time or ability to assume which workouts will make you better. That is the component you need to copy as a middle school or high school athlete: individualize your training and you will be way ahead of your competition.

When looking for an assessment, you need to find the right person. Different assessments have become very popular in the baseball world, but not all are created equal. If you are trying to determine how your body moves, you need to find someone who understands the human body. I often see coaches performing assessments, which is better than nothing, but they do not have an anatomical background. I would rather find someone (such as a physical therapist) who gained the anatomical and biomechanical knowledge and then applied it to baseball. Too often, I see pitching and hitting coaches watching a couple of Instagram videos or taking a course and thinking that they understand how the body moves.

Recover From the Season

Ok, so you got an individual assessment. Now you need to choose the order in which to program your off-season. In Northern Virginia, most teams shut down in late October and the high school season begins at the end of February. This gives you approximately 4 months. The first thing you need to consider is how much recovery your body needs. If you played 8 months straight at a continuously high level, you may need a little more relative rest. That may entail a couple of weeks with decreased exercise intensity to let your body heal. 

I commonly see athletes who went deep in their high school playoffs and never got a real break between spring and summer in this bucket. Their body never really got a break earlier on in the year and it needs one now. Another common issue is the switch to a larger field at 13 years old. All of a sudden, there is much more wear and tear from throwing and running longer distances. These athletes are great examples of those that might need to take a relative rest.

The key to the previous paragraph is the idea of relative rest. Do not take weeks off from doing anything. You will end up slowing your healing by not stimulating your body in any way. Lighter activity such as isometrics, walking, or other cross-training can be beneficial. Recovery modalities such as a Marc Pro or compression therapy can also help speed recovery. Finally, manual therapy can make a big difference in speeding recovery and getting a jump start on regaining mobility. Ideally, you know how mobile you were before the season and you are able to regain that mobility rapidly with targeted manual therapy and exercise. Do not lose your off-season by simply waiting for things to get better. Attack recovery the same way you would weights or any other training.

Lift Heavy and Attack Mobility

In my opinion, this is the most important part of your off-season and the one that is most often missed or undervalued. Once you have achieved adequate recovery, you need to get strong and mobile, quickly. I will discuss some in-season training thoughts later on, but the off-season is hands down the best time to get stronger. Your body is not devoting as much energy to skill development and game play, so you can lift heavy and see rapid gains.

At some point, I will discuss the strength-speed continuum in more depth, but for now we can cover the basics. The heavier a weight you are lifting, the slower you will lift it. In my opinion, we need to train baseball players to be more generalized athletes, particularly in the off-season. This can help ward of the issues raised by specialization and decrease injury risk. Baseball is a sport that exists mostly in the high speed, low weight side of the curve. For that reason, I think it is important to train at higher weights with slower speeds, especially early in the off-season. This creates rapid muscle growth and gives your tendons and ligaments a break from rapid speeds.

Another important aspect to train this time of year is mobility. Good mobility training creates stress on tissues, therefore you want to be aggressive when you have less time on the baseball diamond to allow your body to recover. Stretching muscles and other tissues creates damage that needs time to heal. You want to create that damage in November rather than April when you have to pitch the next day. Find your strength and mobility limitations and get after them early with great intensity.

Transition to Faster Movements

As the off-season progresses, you will need to start focusing more on baseball-specific training. Generally, older athletes make this transition sooner than younger athletes. This is because they create more force with throwing, swinging, etc. and need more time to ramp up. At 12 years old, you can swing hard with less time to warm-up. Therefore, younger athletes can spend more time chasing strength and mobility.

As the season approaches, you should start working your way down the strength-speed curve by utilizing less weight and focusing on faster movements. This can take the form of medicine balls and transitioning to weighted bats or balls until you are back to swinging or throwing. Each athlete has their own timeframe that they need to ramp up, and you should have that deadline in mind at the start of the off-season. If you know that you want 4 weeks to ramp up your throwing before March, you need to begin throwing in the beginning of February. However, if you want 8 weeks of focused throwing, you need to start in the beginning of January. Your heavier lifting and mobility work should be adjusted based on your throwing and skill-specific timeframe.

Should You Throw During the Off-Season?

This is the million dollar question: Should you throw during the off-season, or are you better off shutting down? I will usually ask a few questions of clients: How does your arm feel? How stressful was your season? What are your goals for the off-season? Are you still growing?

If your arm feels terrible or you had a stressful season (changed field size, threw way more pitches, saw a huge jump in velo), then you might need to shut down. Once again, make sure that you are utilizing relative rest and still performing some exercise along with manual therapy and other recovery modalities.

You need to go into the off-season with your own plan of what you need to address. You can have the best assessment in the world, but if you feel that improving your curveball is the primary goal of the off-season, then you probably need to spend less time working on strength and mobility. Conversely, if you want to get stronger, then you may take a longer break from throwing to focus on strength training.

Your body’s growth is important to consider. Younger athletes who are still growing often suffer different injuries from adults. Growth plate injuries are more common than ulnar collateral ligament tears in young athletes (read more about Little League Shoulder or Little League Elbow). While throwing mechanics and other training can decrease growth plate injury risk, it is not as effective for younger athletes. Younger athletes need to take more time off because their body is growing more rapidly and simply cannot handle the repetitive force of throwing throughout the off-season.

One important thing to remember is that the best mobility exercise for throwing is, in fact, throwing. If you take months off from throwing a baseball, then your body is going to take time to get back into the positions necessary for throwing. Some light throwing can prevent the complete loss of throwing mobility, but this is a factor to consider, especially if you are aggressively pursuing strength training.

Keep Re-Assessing and Training Throughout the Season

It is important to have an overall plan going into your off-season. It is also important to be flexible and adjust as needed. It is a good idea to re-assess your body every few weeks to determine your progress. This can take the form of mobility testing, power testing, or simply maxing out on lifts to determine your strength. If you are not reaching your goals, take a step back and figure out why. Do not just plow ahead through the whole off-season without stopping to check how you are doing.

The purpose of this post is to highlight off-season training, but I would be remiss to not mention in-season training. If you work hard all off-season and never train during the season, then you wasted your time. In the future, I will discuss in-season training in detail, but the important thing to remember is that you need to at least maintain what you gained in the off-season. I honestly see most athletes undertraining during the season because of their fear that their performance on the field will decrease from lifting weights. Younger athletes in particular bounce back from lifting much quicker than most people realize. They can actually continue making gains during the season, but that is a topic for another time.

In summary, you need to realize that you only have a few off-seasons to attack your goals of strength, mobility, power, or whatever else you are chasing. Get an individualized assessment and a personal plan to address your needs. Be aggressive and keep checking to make sure that you are heading in the right direction. Come the start of the season, you will be glad that you put in this work. If you are in the Sterling, Virginia area, reach out for an assessment and we will make a plan to help you dominate the off-season and see the results come springtime. Email me at danny@eclipsewellnessnova.com and we will make a personalized plan to optimize your off-season.