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Ask Lee: Baseball Training Workout Tips

4,645 views · Published 22 February 2013 · 4:47 · Indexed 4 November 2026

Channel: Total Fitness Bodybuilding · 2013 · People & Blogs

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This Ask Lee Video Q & A covers some workout tips to improve strength and explosiveness for baseball.

Even though the tips covered in this video were directed to a baseball player, they would still apply to how you would go about weight training for most sports.

One of the main differences between weight training for athletic performance and weight training for bodybuilding is how you go about your sets and reps in the gym. Bodybuilders tend to focus on high volume workouts and pushing the muscle to the limit by repping out to failure and sometimes beyond failure with forced reps, drop sets, partials, negatives, etc.

While this can certainly help maximize muscle stimulation for growth, but is this the best way to develop strength and explosiveness for athletic sports?

I think not...

In order to plan your weight training workouts in the gym for baseball (or any athletic sport) you need to analyze how your muscles work when on the field. Baseball consists of multiple bursts of short high intensity activity. 

For example, swinging a bat, pitching a ball, or sprinting to first base all involve short duration but all out intensity. So you can mimic that in the gym by doing multiple sets of low reps stopping short of failure.

That's one of the key differences between a bodybuilding workout and a athletic workout. You don't need to rep out to failure. Just think about it, does a baseball player swing a bat until failure? Does a baseball player pitch balls until failure? Or does a baseball player run from base to base until failure?

No, everything in baseball is stopped well before you reach muscular exhaustion or failure. So training to failure in the gym in order to improve your baseball game is kind of pointless. All this will do is over stress your central nervous system and make it harder to recover between workouts.

So rather than killing yourself with just a few sets pushed to absolute failure, you'll be better off doing higher sets of lower reps, stopping short of failure, but training fast and explosive just like your muscle perform on the field.

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