![]() Baseball, which has a history of lagging behind the times in improving sports performance through science, is even beginning to catch on. Many throwers from track and field continue to use the overload underload concept with great results. This has provided excellent results and was recently used by soccer phenom Freddy Adu who trains at IMG academies, a training academy that has a history of improving the performance of the world’s best athletes. The sprinters and swimmers attach themselves to cords that either provides resistance from behind or a slight tow from in front of them to create a pace that is slightly slower or slightly faster than their top times. Elite sprinters and swimmers have been effectively using a form of overload underload training to continually surpass old world records. Today, a number of the world’s top athletes use overload underload training to gain the edge on their competition. If you want to increase your bat speed, you have to practice swinging as fast as possible with perfect mechanics. The take-home message is: if you want to throw faster, you need to practice throwing FAST. Changing those 3 variables makes the outcome of the training drastically different. They are both running, but the differences lie in a) intensity, b) volume of training, and c) rest intervals. A marathon runner runs for miles at a time in training. A quick example would be looking at a marathon runner vs. To become fast and explosive, you must train to be fast and explosive. That means someone wishing to increase his bat speed must take each practice swing with perfect technique at game speed in order to have the hope of making noticeable improvements. Coaches often use the phrase “practice makes perfect”, but in reality only perfect practice makes perfect. That means in order to accommodate the additional or reduced load, the athletes would change their movement pattern-which means, in baseball terms, they would change the way they swing or throw, making the training essentially useless. When objects 20% heavier or lighter than the original objects are used, then the biomechanics of the movement is changed. This again goes back to the fact that timing and biomechanics are essential to sports, which require a high technical component. By using too much or too little resistance you will be putting in a lot of effort and time to make yourself better, but it is actually time and effort wasted. The Soviets also found out that when greater than 20% resistance was added or subtracted from the training implements, it not only didn’t increase performance but it actually decreased it. This was a huge find since strength and power gains from traditional weight training often doesn’t transfer well to more complex sporting motions such as throwing and hitting. After experimenting with their Olympic throwers (shot put, javelin, hammer, and discus) they discovered that by increasing or decreasing the resistance of the projectiles that were thrown in practice, they could produce significant gains in throwing distance (and velocity) with objects of regulation weight. These countries took great pride in their athletic accomplishments and poured millions of dollars in research into more efficient ways to build better athletes. The Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries studied this concept extensively back in the 1970’s. So, for baseball that would mean swinging a baseball bat or throwing a baseball that is roughly 20% over and 20% under the normal weight one would usually encounter. Overload Underload training is a training concept that uses resistances slightly above and below what one would encounter in his/her respective sport. Unfortunately, the concept still remained a mystery to the majority of the general public until recent years. HISTORY OF OVERLOAD-UNDERLOAD TRAINING The concept of overload-underload training is a simple one that has been used since the 1970’s by Olympic athletes to get dramatic performance increases in relatively short amounts of time. Overload Underload Training - How it will increase Bat Speed.
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