Strength

[irmobaseball]

Can anyone give me a list of things a pitcher should do as far as exercise to gain mph on his fastball...and what muscle groups to foucas in on...thanks!

[Zac Robinson]

Can anyone give me a list of things a pitcher should do as far as exercise to gain mph on his fastball...and what muscle groups to foucas in on...thanks!

First, work on strengthening your core, to include your hip extensors and flexors, abdominals, lower back, and glutes. Do a lot of abdominal exercises including stabilization like planks, and one of my favorites is arms extended squats, hold a weight at arms length and shoulder height in front of you, feet shoulder width apart and squat, will keep abdominals tight and give you a little glute, hamstring, quad work. As for the backside, do hyperextensions, supermans, reverse-hypers, and if you have access to a glute ham raise, do those, all of these exercises strengthen your posterior chain (lower back, glutes, hams) and this is very important. For these exercises repetitions in the 10 to 20 range would be appropriate.

After you have sufficiently strengthened your core, start focusing on exercises like squats, deadlifts, good mornings, power cleans, hang cleans, seated rows or dumbbell rows, and bench press. Also, incorporate unilateral work like, step ups, lunges, dumbbell presses, etc. For these exercises start with around 8 to 12 repetitions, and as you increase strength, decrease the repetitions and lift a more challenging weight.

All of the above will help to strengthen and help to balance your core (very important for injury prevention).

As for arm health, do all the rotator cuff exercises, but focus even more on external rotation, throwing is very internal rotation dominant, so to balance it out you need to do a lot of external work, this is a good reason also as to why you shouldn't focus on bench press too much. Also, to keep the elbow healthy incorporate biceps curls and triceps extensions.

Finally, warm up the shoulder and elbow properly before training by doing light range of motion activities, then after training, stretch them appropriately.

Incorporating all of this stuff will make you bigger and stronger and help to prevent injury, and will most likely make you throw harder, but of course you also need to improve mechanics as this will probably be the biggest factor in increased velocity. Hope this helps, good luck.