Youth Baseball Drills

By Jon Doyle, MA, CSCS

Kids these days often want to jump straight into traditional youth baseball drills with weightlifting and other strength training programs. Of course, they are influenced by so called gurus and experts who suggest picking up a barbell as soon as you can grasp it in your hand. Not only is this a strategy that can lead to injury and even stunt proper body development, but it won't translate into the desired results on the baseball field either. Instead, it's suggested for youth baseball training that kids begin with a focus on learning proper movement patterns.

The body, the brain and all of the muscles are intricately connected within the body. It's easy for us to think about our biceps or our hamstrings as being individual muscles that are specifically called upon, but really everything is much more connected than that. The body is a whole, and baseball movements on the field require many different muscles and groups of muscles in order to be efficient and effective.

By learning these proper body movements in your youth baseball drills, the actual movements and techniques that are utilized as you're hitting, fielding and running, you are teaching your body how to respond to a situation. You then build up a series of strong neurological connections in your brain that are specifically for those movements. Some people call it muscle memory, other people call it neurological adaptation and others have their own name, but it means training your body to be efficient and successful at something through direct practice and repetition.

Think about it like learning multiplication, or another educational subject. If you want to be able to quickly multiply two numbers in your head, you have to learn through practice about how to do it, and what the results will be. Well, with your muscles and your body it's the same way. Through practicing the proper movements that you'll be performing in your youth baseball drills, you'll be creating strong connections that you will be able to call upon for as long as you play.

You can form these connections and improve on your natural body fitness and strength long before you're old enough and your body is mature enough for true strength training and weightlifting. Those youth baseball drills will build up your reflexes, your natural strength, your body's speed and efficiency and more. Not only will you be a more healthy and more effective baseball player, but your body will be more finely tuned, and will be primed to get stronger through strength and resistance training once you're old enough.

Once you do begin weightlifting, you have to ignore the temptation to just stand in front of the mirror doing biceps curls or other similar "vanity" exercises. You want to use youth baseball drills and programs that teach true functional strength, and that will really transfer the benefits of the exercises onto the diamond. Compound exercises that train multiple muscle groups help build explosive speed and power, and help prepare your body for the real demands of the baseball field.

Also called Focus Lifts, there are some specific weight training exercises that every player should utilize once they're ready for classic strength training and muscle building. These are compound exercises that have been proven successful over and over again across generations at building strength, body efficiency, explosive power and speed and more. They include squats, dead-lifts, the bench press, power cleans and power snatches, the push press, and more.

All of these youth baseball drills target multiple large muscle groups, and you'll be able to pack on the strength. You'll also be continuing to teach your body's muscles and joints to work together in unison as opposed to acting as separate, unconnected pieces. With just that handful of exercises above, you'll target all of the muscles and muscle groups in your body, including your legs, back, shoulders, arm, chest and core.