Pitchers and baseball players in general have an interesting sport to prepare for. Team sports like soccer, lacrosse (if you consider it a real sport), hockey, basketball all require a good amount of stamina, as they require nearly constant motion.  The needs in those sports is somewhere in between anaerobic and aerobic.  Baseball and football are different from the others, and similar to each other as both are played in short, high-intensity bursts followed by rest intervals between plays.  

Interesting thing is, though, that pitchers have historically been part-time distance runners, doing tremendous amounts of sustained running between outings.  The validation for this practice was that pitchers needed strong and enduring legs to go deep into games.  

While it’s true that during a 7-inning outing a pitcher will be pitching over the better portion of two hours, he isn’t doing it in one sustained effort.  

Rather, any pitching performance is broken down into half-inning intervals of pitching and rest, which is further broken down into shorter intervals between each batter, and then even shorter intervals between each pitch.

Training is supposed to make the athlete better prepared for game situations.  If we want a pitcher to best prepare himself for his act of pitching, then it doesn’t make sense to perform sustained cardio work between starts.  Rather, pitchers should be condition like they play: by working in intervals.

Furthermore, sustained running and cardio are done anywhere from 60-85% of one’s max heart rate.  Do pitchers throw at 60-85% effort?  I think not.  Try 98-100%, every single time.  Pitching is explosive, powerful and anaerobic.

Conditioning in bursts at high effort levels also builds and converts muscle fibers into fast twitch, which are responsible for powerful movements.  Fast twitch muscles fatigue quickly, but would have plenty of time to recover between pitches. Distance runners have a predominance of slow-twitch muscle fibers, which produce less power but are more resistant to fatigue over long periods of time. Pitchers who throw hard likely do so because they have a high percentage of strong fast twitch fibers in their arms and throughout their bodies.  Training should be done to keep these fibers intact and not convert them into slow twitch.

So what should pitchers be doing, if they are to be well prepared for game situations?  High-intensity, repeated short-duration sprints.  If your body is going to go all out 110 times over 7 innings, then train to do that, don’t train to run a marathon.

Pitchers are as powerful and explosive as any athlete around.  Ever seen a distance runner?  Not powerful, not explosive.  Ever seen a sprinter?  Big difference.

High Speed: the commonality between sprinters and pitchers.

I’m still for varied training, and I’m not claiming that we should run 100 1/4 second sprints each day between outings.  Varying the distances and rest intervals is key to keeping your body from plateauing and preventing diminishing returns. But whether it’s 10 yard or 60 yard sprints, it should be high-intensity, and done with enough repetitions to allow 10-25 minutes of quality conditioning, depending on how many days of conditioning are to be had between outings.

If one is considering whether or not his conditioning program is appropriate, maybe it best boils down to one question: Does this program mirror the demands of my sport?  For a pitcher that means summoning the explosive, anaerobic leg strength to throw pitch #125 just as hard as pitch #1.  For a position player, it means being able to leg out a triple with one out in the 9th inning.  Does distance running get the job done in either of those cases?  I don’t think so.