I am having a difficult time coming up with the ratio of aerobic/alactic/lactic work for baseball, and hockey athletes, so I thought I would define the work first, than calculate the ratios. Would the 100 - 200 m distance be to long for tempo work for baseball / hockey athletes? Should they be shorter? What would be the max distance for speed training for baseball player, since it is primarly acceleration oriented? And lastly, can you improve acceleration speed through maximum speed work? Very unsatisfied with the training information and methods used in the development of speed for baseball in the traditional sense!
Nap,
Baseball is speed and power. I would think that you could train a baseball player like a sprinter and get fantastic results. (allowing for additional training to practice the game skills)
Surely, baseball players aren’t still going for long jogs as they did in the past.
Baseball players on this forum - help out Nap.
Football Coach
Ill be working with a DII baseball player this weekend, I will meet him after he participates with his team in a 5K run. No minimum time, just have to finish standing.
I will train him more like an athlete, emphasis on power and explosiveness, and a lot of the concepts discussed here do transfer well to training athletes.
His 60 time is a little pedestrian so we’ll work on sprints, jumps, bounds and plyos. I’ll check his running mechanics first, though.
Still a lot of resistance (no pun) from the sport coaches on this type of training for baseballers. 
Slav,
If all your guy has to do is finish standing tell him to dog it. Get in behind a couple of guys and draft. That way he won’t be too tired when he gets to you.
His coaches may yell at him a bit but they’ll soon forget when he puts a couple over the fence.
Football Coach
Message delivered.
He is a freshman so he may try to impress. The 5K work will come in handy if he hits a homerun so impressive he circles the bases about 60 times.
I’ll adjust, but he’ll soon see what has value in his training and what doesn’t.
Thanks guys,
Wanted to make sure I’m not out to lunch, Bompa, and Javorek, said train my baseball players like sprinters and javelin throwers. People look at the way I run practices and wonder at times if I’m training track athletes, or baseball players! Also had my Midget AAA team in the weight room 2-3 days a week.
It was the first year I coached this level and we made it to the National Championship Final Game.
That’s pretty impressive. What were you doing with these kids? What were their lifts like (just out of curiosity)?
These athletes ages range from 16 to 18. I had two catagories of athletes, novice (most had verry little to no strength training), and intermidiate, those who were already training with me, some up to 2 years.
The programs for the novice athletes were of the general physical preperation
type (anatomical adaptation), and the experienced athletes were doing structural lifts in a maintanence program. Both groups would also perform sport specific scpaular shoulder elbow complexes. The strength of my program is that I could control all aspect of training, and therfore set the intensity levels of all my athletes from week to week (microcycle to microcycle). This allowed me to intensify, regenerate, unload and peak where we need to. All other teams in our conference did not have the facilities or a strength component in their training programs. Their athletes performance tailed off from the middle of the season on, and we were able to maintain and at times slightly improve.
I am very good at the baseball part of training but, wish to improve in the area of speed development.