At this point, I’d like to think all ballplayers are utilizing medicine balls in their training for a plethora of reasons. But if you’re NOT or you’re just dabbling - like a college ballplayer I talked to yesterday who said his coach doesn’t “believe” in med balls let’s run through some of the facts and fun about WHY med ball rotational training is SO POWERFUL for well, POWER DEVELOPMENT.
Rotational medicine ball work is some of the most specific work we can do as it relates to the demands of your sport BASEBALL. Remember the PRINCIPLE of SPECIFICITY: In order for an exercise to be TRULY specific it must match the competition exercise in:
Amplitude and direction of movement - geek speak for same direction.
Accentuated region of force production - geek speak for must match the region of force produced (in terms of throwing and hitting we’re starting force production at the lower half and finishing at the hands
Dynamics of movement - geek speak for INTENT
Rate and time of maximal force production - this one is pretty straight forward
The regime of muscular work - AKA the muscles doing the job are the same.
So the long and short is: the ONLY thing that is 100% SPECIFIC to throwing is, well, throwing. BUT the more of these criteria we can match the more “specific” are training becomes, and therefore the more potential for carryover onto the actual playing field, slope, or in the batter’s box.
Medicine ball work is BALLISTIC in nature. What does that mean? Ballistic essentially means that there is NO deceleration moment. If the question is “Should I do medicine ball work or velocity based barbell lifts?” Medicine balls are the only answer (although we utilize both - hey now) because with any barbell lift, you HAVE TO DECELERATE the BAR. Medicine balls gets decelerated by the WALL not by you. Making it all gas pedal work which is great if we’re trying to build a rotational MOTOR.
P.S. there’s absolutely work we can and SHOULD do for deceleration with medicine balls, that’s just a different topic entirely - for the purpose of this article we’re talking about building ROTATIONAL POWER.
Example of some DECEL work with med balls - another post on this coming soon.
Last but not least medicine ball training is relatively easy to recover from, even at high volumes. In the off-season we could easily have our medicine ball work be apart of 3 or 4 training days per week and athletes would recover from it quite well. Although the intent is HIGH with much of our power driven medicine ball training ballplayers bounce back much faster than say a tough sprint session or a high intensity high volume day of traditional barbell lifting.
So there you have it - king of BASEBALL POWER TRAINING is the medicine ball. Get to breaking some!