Baseball surface training should be part of your baseball fitness training plan. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, every single aspect of your physical and mental approach to the game of baseball has an impact in your performance and the end results that you see. One of the areas that most individuals take for granted is that baseball is played on two separate surfaces, grass and dirt.
However, when we’re done with our actual practices, are any of us training on grass and dirt? Or do we hit up some hard surfaces like asphalt, or the rubberized bottoms of gym floors? If you want to maximize the way that your body performs on grass and dirt, then you should certainly be training your body that way, and utilizing the right kinds of baseball surface training techniques to make the most out of your every move.
A great baseball player is going to have explosive power and speed on both grass and dirt, whether you’re hauling in a deep fly ball in centerfield or you’re looking to steal your second base of the day. Whatever it is, you need everything in your body working to its maximum potential so that you succeed. You can fine-tune your mechanics all you want, but you also need to train the way that you play if you really want to maximize that explosion.
The power in your body is generated from the ground up. That first step you take and your acceleration after it, your lunge to the side to make a diving stop at third base and anything else, it all comes from the ground up. If you can’t generate this power from the ground and from your base, then you will really be hindering your own results and the progress that you’re making.
In order to be able to perform explosively on grass and dirt, you have to train that way. Each kind of surface, not just in baseball but in all sports, plays differently, and affects minute details in your movements and rhythms. Without fine-tuning your approach and training on these surfaces, you’ll never fully optimize the way that you’re able to perform and produce, and it will affect your speed, your explosive power, the cohesiveness of your movements and more.
Baseball surface training is all about utilizing the surfaces that you already play on, as well as other, varied surfaces, to help add diversity to your training while optimizing your performance. By training on multiple surfaces, your body is never going to adapt, and that’s actually a good thing. You want your body to never quite be comfortable, so that it always has to go all out and function at its top capacity, as opposed to getting used to coasting through something it recognizes.
Your fast twitch muscle fibers, the parts of your muscle responsible for that explosive power and speed, respond excellently to surface training techniques like this. In addition, you’ll also be teaching your body’s muscles how to accept a force and redirect it. That might not sound like something that applies to a baseball field, but everything you do out there involves that concept. Planting down your left foot and diving out to your right for a fast ground ball, your first step accelerating across the field, driving into the ground and unleashing your full power on a fastball, it’s all taking a force and redirecting it into your own power.
Finally, by working on varied surfaces and keeping the approach fresh, you will be more fully developing your stabilizing and supporting muscles. It’s the same approach as using free weights as opposed to machines. Machines lock you into place, but free weights force your body to keep everything straight and in line, developing those stabilizers. Utilizing different surfaces ranging from dirt to grass and more will do the same, providing an uneven and unstable platform that your body has to account for.
BASEBALL SURFACE TRAINING SUMMARY
Clearly, there are many different benefits to baseball surface training. The bottom line though is this, if you’re playing on dirt and grass, why are you training on asphalt, or concrete, or rubber? Utilize different surfaces and train the way you play, and you’ll develop a more complete game, and a fully optimized body that’s waiting to unleash its explosive power and speed.
Additional reading: check out Jon Doyle’s baseball drills website, where you will find more insights on baseball strength training, hitting techniques, baseball warmup and more.