Stop wasting your time

As, we get back into the weight room this offseason, my message to my my players is to be as efficient as possible and to train the body as a system.

There are many misconceptions about weight training as it pertains to baseball (you can check out The Top 7 Mistakes Baseball Players Make in the Weight Room).  But there is one more that has snuck up on me...  The desire of baseball players to spend 20 minutes per workout on forearm curls.

When pressed about why they do so many wrist curls they say that it is so they can snap their wrists on contact.

There's a few problems with their theory:

1.) The wrists/forearms don't generate much force in the swing.  They are the last part of the kinetic chain and they transfer force that was generated by the body from the ground to the bat and ball.

If a player is using their forearms as a primary force producer in their swing, they probably won't hit the ball very hard.

2.) They usually only train the forearm in one plane, flexion (sometimes they train extension as well), and that is not the primary movement the forearms make during the swing.

As you will see in the sequence of photos below, he top hand of the swing rotates around the radius, and the bottom hand rotates around the ulna, but this happens well after contact has been made and is more a reaction than action.

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3.) The sum of the parts does not equal the whole.  Many people think that if you train each part of the body individually, when it comes time to use it as a system it will magically work together.  This is not the case.

So doing 20 minutes of wrist curls probably won't be as effective as doing a full body workout that improves forearm strength such as a farmers walk.

In fact, I only have isolation exercises in my offseason training program because I know how much teen age boys like doing bicep curls, and I know if I don't have them in my program, they're going to go out on their own and do them.

We train the body as a system, to move as a system, with multi-joint movements that mimic what needs to be done on the diamond.

In short, our players certainly can do 20 minutes of wrist curls, but they better have completed their entire program first, and they'd better realize I will shut the weight room down on them if they are just doing isolation exercises.

Now if they want to get an extra few sets of deadlifts in... I'll keep the weight room open!

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