December 5, 2011
A guide for staying in playing shape during winter
Boston College coach Mike Gambino (right) says players can't wait until the preseason to get into shape. (photo: Boston College Athletics)
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New England is a beautiful place in the fall and winter — a popular destination for watching the leaves burst into vivid color, ushering in harsh cold and beautiful white snow. Picturesque as it may be, it’s not very helpful if you need to practice fielding fly balls or pitching from a regulation mound.
That’s the challenge for baseball players all over the region. How do you develop an offseason conditioning program and stay in baseball shape when you can’t use a field more of the year?
Developing an offseason program is crucial to your regular season success. Tim Hopley knows something about that concept. He is going into his 17th season coaching the Clippers at Portsmouth High School in New Hampshire. His teams have won four consecutive state championships and last year extended their national record for consecutive wins to 83.
Hopley says you can’t overstate the importance of following an offseason conditioning program.
“It’s enormous,” Hopley said. “I coach three different sports. I coach football, I coach basketball, and I coach baseball. And we tell all of our players in all those sports the same thing — it’s almost impossible to make players better during the course of the season. In baseball, players aren’t made from March to June. Players are made from July to February. That’s when players get made — in the offseason.”
Michael Gambino, head baseball coach at Boston College, agrees.
“If you try to get yourself in shape during the season, you can’t do it,” Gambino said. “The preseason isn’t for getting yourself in shape. That’s for getting yourself in baseball shape.”
Gambino says players need to realize the goal is to keep in shape to avoid injuries and keep themselves on the field when the regular season comes around, though sticking with it won’t be easy.
“It’s tough sometimes when you’re working and grinding and there’s no wins or losses coming immediately,” Gambino said. “It’s November, and your first game is not until the end of February, and it seems like it’s forever off. So it’s very easy to skip a rep, skip a set, take a day off because you think, I’ve got time. But it doesn’t work that way. You can’t work out twice as hard tomorrow to make up for today’s workout.”
Where to start?
The first thing you should do is consult your head coach or strength and conditioning coach. They may have a program tailor made for your position. This applies even if you think you have your own program set out.
“Run anything you want to do, even if it’s at home, by your strength and conditioning coach,” said Mauricio Elizondo, short-season baseball athletic trainer for the Boston Red Sox and Lowell Spinners.
They may have thought of things you haven’t, like what supplements you can and can’t take.
“A lot of players are being bombarded by nutrition and supplements they can take,” Elizondo said. “Anything that you’re thinking about putting in your body in college or as a professional, it needs to be run by your strength and conditioning coach.”
The second thing you need to think about after a long season is letting your body heal.
“It’s very important each of the players has time off right after the season, because the body needs to recover,” Elizondo said. “A lot of players make the mistake of not getting enough rest after the season, which, to me, is the most important part.”
How long that rest period lasts may depend on whether you’re playing in high school, college or the pros, and what position you play. This is especially important, Gambino says, for pitchers.
“Sometimes these kids, they go into the spring, they pitch all spring, they go all the way through summer, they hit these showcases in the fall, they go into their winter, they’re throwing all winter, and they never have any downtime,” Gambino said. “The biggest thing a pitcher needs to realize is, more is not always better. They have to create an offseason for themselves.”
Coming up with phases
This also depends on what level of baseball you’re playing. In high school and college, you may spend the first part of your offseason keeping in shape by playing another sport, something Hopley recommends to his athletes. He believes it helps them physically, and exposes them to how other coaches might motivate. What carries over from one sport to another, though, is something each athlete has to find for himself.
“The trick for them is to find that common ground between focusing on the sport they’re playing at that particular time and making some time for the strength and conditioning aspects for the demands of baseball,” Hopley said, “which may be a little different than the demands that football or basketball may require.”
For the baseball-specific program, Hopley depends on his seniors to help direct the younger players and keep them in shape.
“The senior pitchers are in charge of the younger pitchers and making sure they’re getting to where they need to be,” he said, “making sure they’re getting home from there, making sure they’re doing the things that they, as seniors, know we expect from them. And then the same thing goes with positional guys.”
Elizondo’s players with the Spinners have to govern themselves, with Elizondo checking in every so often to see how they’re doing. He gives them a program of general conditioning, aerobics and muscle training from October through December. That phase is just as important as the skill-specific training that comes later.
“Some players will say, well, this isn’t related to baseball,” Elizondo said. “And it isn’t, really, but it is important to have that background first before you start baseball-specific activities in January and February. Because then, if you start with specifics very early in the season, then you get overuse injuries very early in the season. Or you get other acute injuries because your muscles are not prepared for specific activities later in the year.”
In the general conditioning phase, it’s easy to find places to work out. A lot can be accomplished at your local gym, and even at home. Trapped inside? No problem. Use a ladder or even just a towel on the ground for agility work. Or just bounce a ball off of a wall in your room or your garage.
Elizondo suggests weighted bands, products such as TRX machines and dumbbells, and he recommends staying away from some of the fancier products you might see advertised on TV.
“Unless it’s approved by the specific strength and conditioning coordinator on your team,” Elizondo said, “then I would probably stay away from it and just go old fashioned and just use regular dumbbells and bands and stuff like this.”
Hopley also recommends simple dumbbells to his athletes — you can even use tennis ball cans filled with sand.
“If you’re in your house and you’re stuck,” Hopley said, “we talk a lot with our players, pitchers specifically, about using low weights and high reps and not looking to get bulky and things like that, and making sure you’re not putting undue stress on your elbows and shoulders.”
Like Elizondo, Hopley stresses aerobic training and moderate weight training in the first phase of your program.
“Then as the season gets closer, you cut back on your weights and you may increase your repetitions a little bit,” Hopley said. “And then focus more on the core of the body when it comes to the strength and conditioning part of it.”
Baseball skills
The last part of your offseason conditioning program gets you back into positional work — pitching, fielding and hitting. This also generally starts in the dead of winter, in January and February, when most New England athletes can’t even see the fields outside. What you can accomplish indoors depends on your position.
Gambino’s athletes enjoy a premiere facility at Boston College, with a bubble that can be set up over the football field that even allows them to scrimmage. That gives them an advantage with outfielders, the hardest position to train indoors.
“With our bubble, we’re allowed to do modified fly balls,” Gambino said. “It’s not full, but you can do a lot of work, working on angles and steps and footwork, and coming to the baseball. But it does become the hardest thing to work on. It’s also the last thing to kind of come in the spring once you get out in the field. For those outfielders, especially in the Northeast, it makes it even more vital during the season to do a really good job every day in batting practice getting their live reads.”
Most athletes college level or below won’t have that advantage. Hopley goes to a gym he describes as the width of three basketball courts at the USA Training Center, which helps.
“We’re able to kind of get the ball up in the air a little bit,” Hopley said. “Not as much as we would ever like when we’re stuck inside, but they’re at least getting used to working themselves behind the baseball and then coming through it so they’ve got momentum going toward their next throw.”
Infielders have a much easier time of it. Gambino has his players work on a racquetball court with no glove.
“There’s a million different games you can play,” Gambino said, “just throwing each other groundballs off the wall and getting your hands and feet working and getting used to getting to different hops and catching balls without a glove and working your hands that way.
“If you can’t go field outside, you’ll probably have to focus on the basics of baseball, which you can do in an indoor facility,” he added. “There’s drills for fielding or catching that you can do on your knees. How to set up the glove, if you’re a catcher, how to come from your knees up before throwing the ball to second. There’s things you can do inside which are very fundamental instead of going outside. But they can definitely be done in an indoor cage.”
If you’re a pitcher and you can’t get outside to throw, Elizondo suggests shoulder exercises.
“Keeping your rotator cuffs strong, keeping your overall dominant side healthy the days you don’t throw,” Elizondo said. “Say you can’t go outside and throw because it’s snowing, you just don’t take a day off. You do some shoulder work that would be beneficial in terms of injury prevention or arm strength.”
And batting cages aren’t only for hitters. Elizondo says pitchers can use them, as well.
“If it’s a 60-foot batting cage, you can definitely get your throwing program in there,” he said. “Sometimes you’re supposed to throw over 120 feet, but if 60 feet is your availability, then increase your throws to make it similar to throwing at 120 feet. Let’s say you’re supposed to throw 120 feet that day but you can only throw 60 feet because you’re in that cage. Increase the number — if you’re supposed to throw only 10 at 120 feet, go 40 throws at 60 feet to try to balance that out a little bit better.”
With batting cages and indoor courts, Hitters might have the best options for practicing in bad weather.
“In some ways, it may be better,” Hopley said. “A lot of the hitting that we do during the season is short-distance stuff with more repetitions and you don’t have to worry about shagging and gathering and doing that stuff in a big, open space. What you’re basically working on is the mechanics of your swing.”
Cage work is extremely beneficial, but Gambino warns against getting too mechanical with your swing working against a machine.
“You start worrying too, too much about exactly where your hands are and you can actually lose your swing just getting overly analytical about your mechanics,” Gambino said. “Sometimes you have to play some games, whether it’s target hitting and creating games and creating at-bats and creating innings, just to sort of switch it up so it’s not constantly talking about your mechanics.”
Final pointers
Most coaches stress working on your flexibility. Hopley says that’s hard to teach but it has won games for his teams since they started concentrating on it.
“Our infield defense — especially plays that they’ve got to make on the move — I know I can look at five or six incidents in the last two or three years that it has won us a game,” he said.
Hopley also says to make a point of listening to your body. Know when to push yourself and when you’ve reached your limit.
Elizondo believes that New England players can be just as well-prepared as anyone in warmer weather regions.
“I think if you’re well-instructed and well-coached,” Elizondo said, “I think you can be.”
This article originally appeared in the November-December 2011 issue of New England Baseball Journal.
Nick A. Zaino III can be reached at feedback@baseballjournal.com
