Think this guy has a decent fastball? I doubt it.

Many coaches subscribe to the notion that “good” workouts end with their pitchers exhausted and on the verge of vomiting. Again, this is pure, unadulterated crap. The only thing these types of workouts are good for is breaking down the muscles in a pitcher’s legs and making them weaker. Good trainers and coaches will prescribe exercises that challenge the athlete but never make them ill.

Another thing to watch out for as a pitcher is overtraining, which is “a physical, behavioral and emotional condition that occurs when the volume and intensity of an individual’s exercise exceeds their recovery capacity.” Essentially, your body is unable to recover fully in between bouts of exercise. This means you will plateau in your fitness gains and eventually will lose strength.

I saw the effects of overtraining firsthand last season among the pitchers on my team. As a team, we usually only got one day off every two weeks. In addition to practice and games, we would also meet as a team 2-3 times a week to lift weights. And of course, there was the pitchers’ conditioning. This conditioning took place after literally every practice and game, and consisted of nothing but long-distance running (poles, loop around campus, etc.) As the season progressed, our pitchers were getting more and more run-down and were suffering on the mound as a result. Towards the end of the season, velocities were decreasing and ERAs were soaring. Of course, to the coaches this meant that the pitchers needed to be punished by doing the very thing that had led to their problems: more running. With ignorant training philosophies such as this, we were doomed to fail in postseason play.

If your coaches require pitchers to do ungodly amounts of running, you should try to get them to do some reading about the harm that it can cause. You don’t want to piss your coach off though, so be polite and discreet about it and you may be able to get him to change his mind about the effectiveness of sustained aerobic exercise.

For more information, Dan has already written about how to effectively train as a pitcher here: A Few Words About Pitchers’ Conditioning

I hadn’t done much of it recently, but felt motivated to get back into it.  And having experienced good things with it in the past, I made some time after a workout.

Bad move.  Well, good for the body, but bad for my pain receptors.  Man, that stuff is super painful in some areas.  My calves, lateral quads and IT band (outside of each thigh) hurt so bad.  Me and my buddy Andrew laughed at each other as we made various whimpers and cries of pain as we foam rolled following our workout.  

I felt great after it was over, and most of the pain is just due to the fact that I haven’t done any foam rolling in a while.  Once you do it consistently for maybe a week, you loosen up and the pain becomes a pleasant massaging sensation.  So, if you can suck it up for about a week, foam rolling will really increase your soft tissue quality and your flexibility.  On the other hand, they are spawned from the devil himself.  Tough call.

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.