In today's video, I'm going to show you how to build your own softball workout and
what some of the best strength training exercises are that you should include
at the, and I'm gonna show you how to order it, how to put it all together.
And I'm also going to give you a free link to a great new strength training
program that I've built just for softball
in today's video, let's go over the overview.
So, number one, I'm going to talk about a bunch of different components that
you want in a great softball workout.
Number two, we'll cover the different exercises.
I'm going to give you a bunch of different exercises that you can do today
that you'd want to put in a workout.
And then after that, I'm going to show you how to order it.
So what way to structure your workout.
And then after that, we'll talk about some final details and I'll give you a link to
my brand new program called early work, which is a softball, specific strength
and conditioning program that includes arm care and pretty much everything that you'd
want to get better, faster, stronger.
This upcoming season.
All right, so let's get to it.
Okay.
So first keys to a great softball workout.
Number one, we want it to be a whole body.
That means push, pull hinge, uh, squatting motions, rotational motions,
core stability, forearm strength, arm care, lateral, hip strength.
Those are all, some of the big components in a good softball workout.
So the four major human movements are pushing things.
Pulling things squatting at the knees and hinges at the hips.
But beyond that, there's, again, things that make it more
softball specific like rotating.
So learning how to hit, you know, hit the ball harder, swing faster,
throw faster, all that good stuff.
Those are the things that kind of make it work.
We'll workout, softball-specific.
Number two for fast pitch.
We want to make sure we have some knee injury prevention exercises.
So ACL tears.
Are much more prevalent in female athletes than male athletes.
So we want to definitely put some lateral hip exercises in the
program because your lateral hips control the tracking of your knee.
So we want to do our best to give you every chance to stay healthy.
So if you have strong lateral hips, it's going to prevent
your knees from caving in.
If you take a weird step or any of that.
So you want to make sure we can mitigate that risk as best we can.
With some good lateral hip strength exercises.
Next we want to cover throwing arm strengthening and injury prevention,
which they're pretty much one the same.
So another way to make a softball workout softball specific is that you add stuff
that strengthens the throwing arm.
Cause obviously you wouldn't put throwing arm strengthening
exercises in a soccer program.
Right.
So having a dedicated.
Uh, arm strength regimen is important, but we can also mix a lot of those
exercises into an overall softball strain of conditioning program.
Number four, we want to focus on upper body strength because female athletes need
more of that than their male counterparts.
So we want to make sure there's a lot of upper body pushing and pulling
exercises because building that upper body strength is a really important
foundation for a softball player.
And lastly, we definitely want to hit tons of glute and hamstring strength,
because those are also important for keeping your knees healthy.
And glutes and hamstrings are two of the prime movers in sprinting.
And speed is really, really important in fast pitch.
So we want to have a bunch of exercises, like a stronger ratio of gluten hamstring
exercises compared to your quadriceps.
So we definitely wanna include a lot of stuff for your glutes, hamstrings, and
not as, not quite as much squatting and lunging, even though those are really
great exercises and they will be in here.
We want to still balance that out with a lot of hamstring
and glute dominant training.
Okay.
So let's jump into some of the exercises.
So, first one, we're gonna talk about either the front
squat or the goblet squat.
So the goblet squat is the best beginner squatting exercise, and you can do it.
Who's holding a five or 10 pound weight on the front of your chest and holding
a weight on the front of your body is important because it helps your
back automatically stabilize itself.
So if you have a barbell on your back, You can easily fold over
at the waist and hurt your back.
And that's a common.
It's a it's a common problem with young players, young athletes, but really it's
better to teach them and teach their back how to get stronger and how to stabilize
itself and how to have good posture, uh, just from the exercise itself.
So the, the goblet squat is very safe.
The anterior position of the weight helps automatically put your
back in a safe, strong position.
The same as the same, as true with the front squat and the
front squat is sorta like the progression from the goblet squat.
So if you're brand new to training, The goblet squat is going to
be the better version for you.
And then if you've got a little bit of strength and you've sort of, you can
do 40, 50 pounds on a goblet squat.
Then you can graduate to a front squat and the front squat is pretty much the
exact mechanics of the goblet squat.
It's very easy squad to perform safely.
Uh, but the barbell is going to be on the front of your shoulders.
Great.
For beginners as the goblet squats, you just want to choose which of
those squats is right for you.
And again, a great strength coach in person is going to
help you make that decision.
All right, the next exercise is the chest supported row and this is a great.
Easy to perform safe exercise, to help build strength and size in
the back for any great athlete.
Their sort of foundation is their lower half and their back
of the back keeps your posture.
It keeps you durable over the long season.
Your back is always helping to decelerate your swing decelerate,
uh, your, your throwing motion.
It is obviously it's critical in your arm swing when you sprint.
So having a strong back is really, really important.
After that we're going to do the lateral band walks.
So the lateral band walk is for the lateral hips.
This is going to strengthen those little tiny glute muscles
in the side of your hips.
And again, as I talked about earlier, these are going to be key strengthening
exercises for the muscles that control the tracking of your knee.
So having weak lateral hips means your knees cave in a lot more easily.
Strong lateral hips are going to help protect the knee.
When you land awkwardly after a jump or you, you know, you roll your ankle inward.
If your knee caves too far, that's how you can tear your
ACL, your PCL, your meniscus.
If you have strong lateral hips, those can kick on and save that knee from
going into far and hurting itself.
So we really want to make sure we have lateral hip strengthening
exercises and pretty much every workout for female athletes.
And so the lateral band walk.
It was a great one to do that.
The next exercise is the pushups.
So the pushup is a foundational, upper body strength exercise.
Obviously every second that you're doing a pushup, you're also doing a plank.
Cause you're in plank position, right?
So it's a great double duty exercise.
It's also great for your shoulder stability and for the
movement of your shoulder blades.
So it's almost like an arm care exercise and arm strengthening exercise in
addition to an upper body exercise.
So most softball players can not do a proper pushup on the ground.
So what I would encourage you to do if you're a beginner or if you don't
have a ton of upper body strength yet, Is do it with an incline.
So, you know, you can see in the video here, you want to do a bar pushup
where you're at a higher incline and that reduces the resistance, and
then you can slowly lower the bar.
So you put the bar down farther and you put your hands lower, or you put your
hands on a bench and you slowly get closer to the ground as you get stronger.
It's the same way.
As adding weight, this is adding weight by lowering yourself, which increases
the resistance against gravity.
Essentially, obviously gravity never changes, but as you get closer to
the ground, you know, it's easy.
You'd be super easy to do a wall pushup.
So the push-up is a foundational exercise.
That should be a goal of yours to be able to do three sets
of 10 good quality pushups.
Most players cannot.
And so starting on the bar is a great way to get there.
After that we're going to do the shot, put the medicine ball ShotPut with a Crow hop.
Obviously you want this workout to be softball specific.
So softball specificity is arm care.
It's lateral hip exercises and it's rotational power exercises.
So throwing a medicine ball and rotating through it is a rotational power exercise.
That's going to help your bat speed and your throwing velocity.
So that's obviously super important to include in any good softball workout.
So that being said, this one adds a Crow hop into it.
So it makes it, you know, the foot work a little more softball specific.
And that's great, but again, having some rotational exercises is critical
in any good softball program, and we're going to pair it with
this one, the one leg hip thrust.
So the one leg hip thrust, as I mentioned before, is for
the glutes and the hamstrings.
Predominantly the glutes strong glutes are critical to running
faster, to jumping higher.
And to putting a little more oomph into your, into your swing.
And obviously glutes are super important for fast pitch pitchers and for
overhand throwing, and your glutes are important in every aspect of the sport.
So we definitely wanna include some exercises that directly
strengthen the glutes.
Sure.
You get some glute activation from squats and lunges, but research has proven.
That hip thrusts are the highest glute activation of any exercise.
So the barbell version, which I'm not including here and the
leg version are both excellent.
The barbell version has the most glute fiber activation and the
one leg hip thrust is pretty much the exact same exercise, but with
one leg and without a barbell.
So you can actually add weight to this.
You can just hold weights on your hips, but the one leg exercise.
Is a, it's a very safe, very easy for beginners.
It's not actually as easy as you think it looks.
Uh, but it's a great glute strengthener, because again, if you want to run faster,
you've got to get stronger glutes.
And then lastly, we're going to finish this workout off with a set of Blackburns.
So Blackburn's are an amazing shoulder strengthening exercise.
They're great for your scap stabilizers for your stamina of your scapula.
And sh and softball players have a lot of problems with shoulder
stability and shoulder laxity.
So lots of female athletes, because they have less testosterone
compared to the male athletes.
They tend to have looser joints.
And I think we all sort of like intuitively know this to be true.
Like women are more flexible than men and that's in part due
to just genetic differences.
So.
The thing is having that flexibility is advantageous in a lot of sports and in
a lot of activities, but in softball, when you're throwing, having a little
more laxity in your shoulder can often lead to injuries because that joint
isn't very stable as you're throwing.
And so it sort of like rattles around and it can cause injury to
some of the soft tissues in there.
That's where like the long and the short of it.
But you want to have a shorter joint.
It's actually very.
Stable and held together well with those rotator cuff and shoulder muscles.
So the Blackburn's exercises, it's six exercises one minute for each of the six.
So it's six minutes, total.
Those are great stabilizing exercises.
They're great for their shoulder movement and the shoulder blades.
And, uh, it's just one of the easy ones you can do as a team.
You can lay on the ground doing it, watching TV, and we use them.
Over and over with all the kids in my Academy.
It's great for posture.
So if you're on your, you know, you're texting all day, uh, Blackburn's
really helped to open up that posture.
Okay.
So those are the exercises for your softball workout.
Now let's put it together.
So the first thing that you would do is you want to start to
pair exercises into super sets.
So a one.
And a two.
So our first two here are the front squat or goblet squat
and the chest supported row.
So you would do one set of front squats and one set of chest supported rows.
Then you go back and forth and do them until each exercise
is complete for front squats.
I would do four sets of eight for goblet squats.
I would do four sets of 12 and for chest supported rows, I would do.
Three sets or four sets of eight to 12 reps, somewhere in
that rep range is totally fine.
So you go back and forth until you've done your four and your three or
four of both exercises, and then you move on to the next superset group.
So the next superset group we call the B group would be the
lateral band walk and the pushup.
So you do one set of lateral band walks, and I would encourage you
to do three sets of 40 yards total.
So you're walking laterally for 20 yards one way, then 20 yards, the other way.
And then B2, you do three sets of 12 to 15 push-ups.
And again, these could be bar pushups where you're at an incline.
You're not on the flat ground.
Just make sure you're doing full range of motion and very good quality pushups.
Even if that means you're not doing them on the floor yet, the next
superset would be the med ball shot.
Put.
And the one leg hip thrust.
So these two are great to pair together because after you do your med ball throws
and your core is a little bit tired, you can do the one leg, hip thrust, which
doesn't really use your upper body at all.
And so your upper body and your core resting as you're doing your lower
half, your one-line hip thrust, which are mainly for your glutes.
So you go back and forth between those two until you've done your three sets
of each, I would say three sets of eight is good for your medicine ball throws.
And three sets of 10 to 12 is good for your one-line hip thrust.
And then lastly, you've got Blackburn's.
So the Blackburn's very straightforward.
I would do six, uh, all six positions, one minute, each six seconds down
or six seconds up with a one second break and then six seconds up again.
So you do basically like nine or 10.
You know, reps have six second hold with a quick one second break.
You go through that for your minute.
Then you go to the next position.
So that's pretty much how Blackburn's work.
So hopefully this video on softball workouts was helpful.
Cause obviously it's tough to know what exercises you should choose,
how you should order it, why you're picking different exercises, you
know, for a fast pitch workout.
There definitely needs to be a lot of the big lifts like front squats,
like hip thrusts, stuff like that.
But there also needs to be this, the softball specificity, right?
So the, the lateral band walks for your lateral hips, the ma the, you know, the
medicine ball throws for your rotational power, which helps your bat speed and
your throwing speed, all that stuff.
And obviously the arm strengthening for your, your throwing arm and your,
your pitching velocity, all that stuff.
So that's what makes a workout softball specific.
So.
If you want a ready-made for you program, the early work program,
which I've created along with coach Andrew Sacks is a great program.
You can get a free trial and see if it's right for you with no risk whatsoever.
So if you want to just jump in into a great, brand new softball
workout, I'd highly recommend that you check it out in the links
below and see what's right for you.
All right.
Thanks again for watching.
Be sure to subscribe, share this with a friend and I'll
see you here in the next video.