Baseball is a rotational sport. From pitching to batting to the fancy jump throw over to first base, rotational power and strength are vital to any player’s success. While technique, practice, and repetition are important for baseball training, improper strength in the core and rotational muscle groups will hinder your efforts to hit the long ball or fire a baseball on a rope.
What is Rotational Power?
What do we mean by rotational power? To put it simply, it's the force produced from your legs that works its way up through your hips, core, and arms. This force delivers higher velocity to the action you take, creating a higher ceiling for your specific goal.
Keep in mind, rotational power does not come solely from training in rotational movements. It is important to develop a strong base of strength, especially in your core, before training specific rotational movement patterns. However, once your body is ready, training these specific movements can put you over the top.
Since power production is mostly very plane-specific, rotational training will help you develop the power for those movements on the field. While most workouts are done in the sagittal plane (squat, bench press, cleans), these have more of an effect on similar movements in sports such as acceleration, sprinting, and jumping. Training rotational movements specifically can have a huge impact on the amount of torque you can produce, improving your game dramatically.
Rotational Exercises
What are some rotational exercises? The list can go on for a while but some of the most popular include:
- Medicine ball slams
- Medicine ball throws
- Barbell landmine rotations
- Barbell landmine presses
- Woodchoppers
All of these exercises will activate your core and additional rotational muscle groups to build the necessary strength for power production.
Of course, the core is part of just about every movement associated with baseball training. Don’t worry though, every exercise mentioned above, along with the countless amount of rotational power training exercises available, will develop your core strength as well.
Rotational Training with ChopFit
When it comes to woodchoppers and rotational chopping movements, ChopFit offers highly effective exercises and workouts, along with an ideal fitness tool in our Chopper. With a combination of chopping motions and dynamic movements such as jumps, squats, lunges and bounding, ChopFit a complete program to train the necessary muscles for power production.
So with ChopFit, you're not only getting the benefits of rotational power, but you're also building strength in importance muscle groups and improving your overall endurance.