What's up softball players -- today I'm gonna talk about my five favorite
strength exercises for softball so if you're looking for softball workouts, if
you're looking for new exercises that will help you with your softball speed,
your bat speed, your throwing speed--all that stuff--then I think these five today
are gonna be pretty helpful. So these are more geared for beginners players who
have maybe a training age of zero to two years so training ages just like how
many years have you been training because you know you could be eighteen
years old and look you know pretty physically strong but you might only
been training for a year so training age of zero to two years means you're still
a beginner you're still learning the basics safe four exercises are a little
bit better obviously than some really advanced stuff. So for me as a former
strength coach and baseball academy and softball academy owner, we've worked with
kids with all at all ages. So our goal was always to give them the best
exercise for them and their training age and their body and their experience
level and all that stuff. So today I'm going to go over five great strength
exercises for softball players that you can do at any gym almost that you're at
your house if you have some basic equipment and they'll really help you on
the field.
Okay so exercise number one for softball is the goblet squat. So the goblet squat
is the exercise that we use with almost every single kid as their first
introductory squat so rather do bodyweight squats you know with your
hands and prayer some like that or your hand or your arms like crossed out in
front we would typically just give them like a five pound dumbbell or a ten
pound dumbbell and they would hold it right here so the goblet squat is a
really amazing exercise because when you put loading on the front of your body as
instead of having a barbell on your back it keeps your posture naturally safer it
forces your low back into a neutral or arched position which is much safer than
having your back rounded which you never ever want and so the goblet squat is a
great intro exercise for beginners it's very safe it teaches proper form it's
easy to get all the way to depth which we love because as a beginner you want
to just start to learn the basics do you want to get stronger but you want to
just really set your foundation of doing exercises properly so the goblet squat
is my number one squatting exercise for beginners of pretty much any sport but
softball in particular it's an excellent one so definitely check out this the
goblet squat and for all these exercise in this video today I have links to them
in the description below from my warbird academy youtube channel so we have like
tons of exercises over there like 200 of them so you can see all these
demonstrated and the ones you're seeing overlaid on the screen right here okay
so number two is the one-legged hip thrust so the glutes are actually the
prime mover of sprinting so when you're sprinting everyone thinks about your
quads and squatting to get faster and obviously squads do help you get faster
tremendously but the glutes and the hamstrings are actually the muscles that
propel you backwards they extend your leg in your hip and they're the ones
that actually push you forward your quads are more like up and down kind of
leg muscles so your squats if you want to if you're a volleyball player or
basketball player and you really want to increase your vertical jump squats are
gonna have a little more bang for your buck then hip thrusts and hamstring
stuff though all of it is critically important so don't misunderstand they're
all a big piece of the puzzle but for softball players especially you want to
get faster who want to hit the ball harder your backside
your hamstrings and your glutes are really important so the one legged hip
thrust is extremely safe it's a bodyweight exercise you can load
you can add weight on your hips with like a we would use like a dumbbell
sitting on the hip bones or a body bar which is like a neoprene padded bar they
have in every health club those are easy ways to load that one and they're
difficult and they give you some lateral hip strength cause you have to stabilize
because you're on one leg so it's a great intro and then from there we
always progress players do a barbell hip thrust which we won't cover in this
video but it's also an excellent exercise so the one-legged hip thrust is
awesome for players who are trying to increase their sprint speed and how hard
they can hit the ball at the plate in addition to the throwing speed because
the glutes are everything okay my third strength exercise for softball players
is the farmers walk so forearms are really important obviously you're
holding the bat with your hands grip strength is a really critical component
of pretty much any sport that is implemented that means you're holding
something in your hands with it's hockey lacrosse baseball softball those are all
implemented sports they use an implement so with farmers walks when you're
holding heavy dumbbells they have a number of benefits number one increased
grip strength which can help your throwing it's gonna help your hitting
and also when you're holding heavy dumbbells and walking with them you have
a tremendous amount of strain on your core so it's a lot of really good core
strength it's extra an excellent for posture and it's excellent whole body
strength and its really good for fatigue resistance so it's it's good
conditioning right so at the end of a long weekend we where you played you
know a triple header and two double headers you get pretty tired and wobbly
so farmers walks and really challenging yourself with weight going heavier with
dumbbells makes a big difference in your overall conditioning and your overall
toughness okay so mentally challenging very much so this is something that we
give to kids at all ages and when they're young and they they start with
fifteen pound dumbbells but kids progress pretty good and and with our
softball players especially for high school age softball players we wanted to
see them at least doing forty five pounds if not into the 50 60 70 range
when they're getting pretty strong and that's tough so for mental toughness for
grip strength for overall body strength and conditioning farmers walks aren't
awesome exercise for every softball player every player
should be doing them number four the sliding leg curl so again I talked early
about sprint speed and how important glutes and hamstrings are and for
hamstrings there's not as many good hamstring exercises that aren't either
difficult to learn at first for beginners or require some kind of weird
equipment or just like a little bit technical but the sliding leg curl it
only requires a pair of frisbees or paper plates if you've like a hardwood
floor or gym floor or these little furniture sliders that we used on carpet
and sliding leg rows can be done on any floor any surface they don't require any
weight they're incredibly hard like you're watching them right now and they
don't look like much right they look pretty simple they are really really
hard and you can load them also so you can add a little weight to your hips
makes it a lot harder you can also add bands or on your ankles so it's like
pulling your feet back away from you there's a lot of really creative ways to
do it and because it requires very little equipment and very little
external loading very little weight added resistance added you can do these
in the gym floor with your whole team you can do them in a very large group
which we did training a hundred volleyball girls they were all doing
sliding leg curls it's a really versatile exercise it's really great for
injury prevention for sprint speed and just for overall leg strength so
definitely add the sliding leg curl to your repertoire if you're a softball
player and you want to get faster alright in my last strength exercise for
softball players is the push up plus so upper body strength because women have
less testosterone naturally than men it's really really important so working
hard on your upper body strength whether it's chin-ups push-ups all that
stuff is really important and the foundation should be the push up but
there's a way to make the push up better that also has a major arm care component
built in and that's the push-up plus so in the push-up Plus you can do it
elevated with a bar so if you can't get do good push-ups on the ground no
problem you can do an elevated bar push-up which you're gonna see here in
this video and also the advantages of the push-up plus are good for arm care
so the push-up Plus is like a regular pushup whether again whether you're
doing on the floor on a bar and basically when you get to the top
you're just gonna extend a little bit farther and completely protract push
your shoulder blades as far out like a cat as you can so basically you get here
at the top of the push-up instead of just stopping here you keep going and
it's this really weird stretching sensation and they're actually really
difficult just doing 12 pushup plusses is hard so the push-up plus is a great
exercise to build these little muscles right here they look kind of like
fingers on bodybuilders it's called the serratus anterior and the serratus
anterior helps keep the shoulder blade flat on your back and the shoulder blade
is really it's critical to arm care it's critical to our macare throwing
mechanics and to rotator cuff and shoulder health in general so if you've
had shoulder pain you've had shoulder problems strengthen your serratus
interior is always gonna have a positive impact on your arm health so the push up
plus strengthens the serratus anterior by adding that little extra bit of
protraction for your shoulder blades at the end of each pushup
and it's a great exercise it's very difficult and again it's just without
sort of like getting more efficiency out of your workout you could do push-ups
which are awesome it's the one of the most foundational exercises for upper
body strength and every player should slowly learn to do good push-ups on the
ground all the way down with with excellent form but the push of applause
just adds a little more of an arm care component and it gives you more time
efficiency and that awesome arm health benefit in the end okay so the push-up
plus is something you should definitely integrate into your team's workouts or
your personal workouts if you're looking to get stronger and improve your arm
health all right so thanks for watching hopefully my video here on on softball
strength training exercises that you can mix into your team workouts or your own
personal workout hopefully they were helpful these are some great ones that
we've used for years with lots of players and they're gonna be safe and
really effective so I'll turn it over to you what exercises do you do what
exercises do you feel really passionate about that it helped you a lot with your
game leave it in the comments below consider subscribing to the channel and
I'll see you here on the next video thanks for watching.