Are You Conditioning Your Baseball Players to Be Worse at Baseball?

Conditioning is one of those areas in sports where good intentions can create bad results.

Coaches want their players to be in shape. They want them to be able to perform late in games. They want them to be mentally and physically prepared for a long season.

All of that makes sense.

The problem is that the conditioning methods traditionally used in baseball and softball often have very little in common with the actual physical demands of baseball and softball.

And in some cases, the conditioning you’re using to make your players “better conditioned” may actually be making them worse at the things they need to do on the field.

To understand why, we need a basic understanding of the body’s energy systems.

Don’t Worry About the Big Words

The body has three primary energy systems:

• The phosphagen system

• The glycolytic system

• The oxidative system

You don’t need to memorize those names.

In fact, I rarely use them.

I prefer to think of the body’s energy systems as three gears.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s useful because coaches don’t need to become exercise physiologists. You just need enough understanding to make better decisions when preparing your athletes.

For our purposes, we’ll call them first gear, second gear and third gear.

And here’s the most important thing to understand:

Baseball is played almost entirely in first gear.

Yet a huge percentage of traditional baseball conditioning takes place in third gear.

That’s a problem.

First Gear: Where Baseball Lives

First gear is responsible for short, explosive efforts.

Generally, we’re talking about maximal or near-maximal efforts lasting somewhere around 10 seconds, give or take a couple of seconds depending on the activity and athlete.

Think about the things a baseball or softball player actually does:

Swing a bat.

Throw a baseball.

Sprint 30 yards.

Dive for a ball.

Steal a base.

Perform a plyometric movement.

Most traditional strength-training exercises also fall into this category.

These are short, explosive movements followed by periods of relatively low activity or complete rest.

Now think about an actual baseball game.

A hitter stands in the box.

Pitch.

Nothing.

Several seconds pass.

Another pitch.

Swing and miss.

Several more seconds pass.

Another pitch.

Foul ball.

More time passes.

Eventually he hits a double and sprints to second base.

That’s a significant explosive effort, but even that sprint probably lasts less than 10 seconds.

Then what happens?

He stands on second base and recovers.

Blip of energy. Recovery. Blip of energy. Recovery.

That’s baseball.

Pitching is even easier to visualize.

The pitcher delivers the ball.

Explosive effort.

Then he gets the ball back, receives the sign and prepares for the next pitch.

Explosive effort.

Recovery.

Explosive effort.

Recovery.

Then the inning ends and, hopefully, he sits in the dugout for a while as his teammates score some runs.

This pattern repeats for potentially two or three hours.

That’s the conditioning problem we actually need to solve.

What Does “In Shape” Mean?

This is where coaches can fall into what I call the “in shape” trap.

“We ran a mile today because I want to make sure we’re in shape.”

My question is:

In shape for what?

If you’re a baseball or softball coach, which team would you rather have?

A team full of players who can run a really fast mile?

Or a team full of players who can repeatedly produce highly explosive, powerful movements without losing their ability to produce those movements over the course of a two-hour game?

Obviously, we want the second one.

So why are we testing and training the first one?

Third Gear

Third gear is primarily the oxidative, or aerobic, energy system.

This is where we get into longer-duration activity.

Jogging.

Timed miles.

Long runs.

Sprints performed repeatedly without adequate recovery.

Long, high-intensity conditioning circuits.

Traditional “flush runs.”

These methods certainly make athletes tired.

But making someone tired and making someone better conditioned for their sport are not necessarily the same thing.

Cross-country runners need to be very good at third gear.

Marathon runners need an incredible third gear.

Triathletes need it.

Baseball players?

Not nearly as much.

The problem is that the human body is extremely good at adapting to whatever demands we repeatedly place on it.

Your body doesn’t know you’re preparing for baseball. It only knows what you’re asking it to do.

If you repeatedly ask it to perform long-duration, lower-output conditioning, it will adapt to become better at long-duration, lower-output conditioning.

That’s great if you’re training for a 5K.

It’s not necessarily great if you’re trying to throw 90 mph, run a fast 10-yard sprint or hit a baseball 100 mph.

You aren’t preparing for the game anymore.

You’re preparing for the conditioning.

The Body Adapts to What You Train

This is the concept coaches need to understand.

The body is constantly trying to become more efficient at handling the demands placed upon it.

If the overwhelming conditioning demand you place on an athlete is third-gear work, the body will adapt accordingly.

But baseball depends heavily on the athlete’s ability to produce extremely high outputs for very short periods of time.

Speed.

Power.

Strength.

Explosiveness.

Throwing velocity.

Bat speed.

Those qualities live primarily in first gear.

So when I say improper conditioning can literally make your athletes worse at baseball, that’s what I’m talking about.

You’re spending enormous amounts of training time asking the body to improve a physical quality that doesn’t closely resemble the demands of the sport.

There’s Another Problem: Fatigue

Improper conditioning can also create another issue.

Chronic fatigue.

And fatigue masks athleticism.

A fatigued athlete cannot display the same speed, power, coordination or explosiveness as a recovered athlete.

That’s obviously a problem.

But coaches sometimes see that decline in performance and respond by adding even more conditioning.

“They’re tired. They’re not in good enough shape.”

So we condition them harder.

Now they’re more fatigued.

Their performance declines further.

And we condition them again.

Eventually you’ve created a team that is very good at surviving conditioning sessions but rarely gets an opportunity to train or perform at its true athletic capacity.

There’s also a potentially more serious consequence.

Injury.

When teams seem to repeatedly get “bitten by the injury bug,” we tend to chalk it up to bad luck.

Sometimes it is.

But a chronically fatigued, over-conditioned team experiencing soft-tissue injuries throughout a season shouldn’t automatically be dismissed as coincidence.

Training load matters.

Recovery matters.

Fatigue matters.

So How Should Baseball Players Condition?

Here’s where this becomes practical.

Make the conditioning look more like the sport.

One simple example would be short sprints with adequate recovery.

Let’s say an athlete performs a 15-yard sprint that takes approximately three seconds.

Instead of immediately turning him around and making him sprint again, give him enough recovery to maintain a high-quality output on the next sprint.

Maybe we use approximately a 1:3 work-to-rest ratio.

Three seconds of work.

Roughly nine seconds of recovery.

Then sprint again.

Now look at the pattern:

High output. Recovery. High output. Recovery. High output. Recovery.

Sound familiar?

That’s much closer to baseball.

And don’t mistake the recovery period for making the workout easy.

When athletes aren’t accustomed to conditioning this energy system, properly performed first-gear conditioning can be extremely difficult.

The difference is that we’re asking them to repeatedly produce high outputs rather than teaching them to survive increasingly slow, fatigued ones.

Compare That to Traditional Conditioning

Now picture the energy demands of jogging a mile.

There aren’t explosive spikes followed by recovery.

It’s a relatively constant, moderate output.

The athlete isn’t repeatedly practicing the ability to generate high levels of force or speed.

He’s practicing the ability to maintain a lower output for a longer period of time.

Again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

It’s simply not baseball.

And that’s ultimately what this comes down to.

Train for the Game, Not the Conditioning

The goal of conditioning shouldn’t be to make athletes tired.

The goal should be to prepare athletes for the energy demands of their sport.

Those are two very different things.

For baseball and softball, we want athletes capable of repeatedly producing high levels of speed, power and explosiveness over a long period of time without those qualities significantly deteriorating.

That’s baseball conditioning.

Not proving that they can survive a mile.

Not seeing who can finish the most brutal workout.

Not making them tired simply because tired athletes look like they’re working hard.

Every training decision should eventually come back to one question:

What are we preparing them to do?

If the answer is play baseball, then the training should reflect baseball.

Because the body doesn’t technically know what sport or activity you will play tomorrow.

It only knows what you prepared it for yesterday.

⸻

One Last Thought

Whenever I have a microphone-In this case the “microphone” being a blog- in front of me or an opportunity to reach people, I don’t want to waste it.

So I’ll leave you with this:

There is absolutely nothing in your past that Jesus Christ wouldn’t love to forgive you for.

Nothing you’ve done is too bad. We all have baggage. Christ has already paid for it.

All you have to do is ask Him for forgiveness.

That’s worth remembering regardless of what happens on a baseball field.