Pitching lessons help pitchers of all ages improve and learn important fundamentals to take them throughout their careers. One thing our program focuses on is functional strength specifically for pitchers. You might be wondering why this is. Read on to learn why we prioritize functional strength for pitchers of all skill levels.
Why Our Pitching Lessons Include Information About Functional Strength
Pitchers who attend our clinics, receive coaching, or join our VIP membership program often notice that we teach a lot of exercises and strategies for increasing and refining functional strength. It’s one of the pillars of our methodology because it can improve a player’s performance and also help with injury prevention. With good functional strength, a pitcher’s muscles are fine-tuned for the motions needed for high performance pitching. Improving functional strength can help with a variety of things, including increased pitching velocity, better control, as well as arm health.
What is Functional Strength and Why is it Important?
We’d argue that functional strength is essential for anyone. However, it’s particularly helpful for athletes, which is why we teach it in our pitching lessons. Functional strength is basically having muscles that are strong during practical movements. For instance, if you look up functional strength online many sources will recommend squats for the average person to train functional strength for things like sitting down and getting up from a chair. For pitchers, functional strength also focuses on pitching-specific movements.
Functional strength training looks different for everyone and often changes based on any changes your body goes through, like increases in height and weight. However, we frequently train body weight movements that exercise muscles through the whole body to help increase functional strength for pitchers.
Functional strength is often very different from exercises you might do to “get ripped.” Many exercises where you focus on one muscle group aim to increase absolute strength, which means that you can move more weight with that particular muscle. However, functional strength is training your body how to increase strength during movements you use during competition or during daily life. Our pitching coaches can also help you assess functional strength to understand where you are and how you can get better.
Important Things to Know About Youth Pitching Functional Strength
As a parent, you might be wondering how functional strength applies to youth pitching athletes. The good news is that young players can improve their functional strength safely with the right protocols and workouts. Just keep in mind most kids need to stay away from lifting heavy weights.
Lifting heavy weights before puberty usually isn’t beneficial, because a young player’s body doesn’t have the testosterone or estrogen needed to really build strength with these methods. Instead, we typically recommend focusing on bodyweight exercises and only using implements that are the same weight that they’ll use during competition, like a regulation baseball.
Pitching Lessons from National Pitching – A Tom House Sports Organization
Pitchers of all ages benefit from our comprehensive program at National Pitching. Our training methodology comes from Dr. Tom House, the father of modern pitching mechanics. We focus on evidence-based baseball training to help pitchers improve and develop key skills to use on and off the field. Get started today by finding a pitching coach near you or joining our online V.I.P. membership for exclusive access to our virtual training library.
