Early Off-Season Priorities for Baseball Players

We’ve almost completed the first month of off-season workouts with our baseball players. With that, I wanted to address what we’ve been working on and where we’re going from here.

Early off-season priorities are focused on restoring lost joint range of motion, improving movement quality, developing maximal strength, and avoiding a lot of what athletes were doing in-season. The frequency, intensity, and high volume of sprinting, changing direction, and aggressive medicine ball throws is minimized significantly early on due to this being done nearly every day during season.

While we want to work on developing numerous physical qualities such as mobility, speed, agility, power, RFD, strength, etc., the main focus is maximal strength development. I like to think of strength as the foundation in the performance pyramid. The bigger base of strength we can develop, the potential for growth in other physical qualities is greater. Developing greater levels of strength gives athletes the potential to be faster, more powerful and explosive.

Everything we do in the weight room is very general. What athletes do in skill work development and on the playing field is specific to their sport. In the weight room, we’re getting stronger in numbers in the main compound movement patterns (squats, deadlifts, bench presses, rows, chin-ups, lunge variations) to set them up for future success in other phases down the road. We want to convert the strength that’s been developed into power and replicate specific movement patterns and speeds athletes will encounter on the playing field.