VSP Spotlight: YAC Baseball 14U Heat

This week’s VSP spotlight is on the 14u YAC Heat baseball team! The Heat are in their second full off-season training with us at VSP & they are absolutely killing in! Heading into their season we prioritized speed & power development. The consistency and intensity that the boys have been bringing have yielded fantastic results thus far. 

Let’s dive into it! 

Speed

Like previously mentioned, speed development has been a big focus for the boys this season. Each session starts with some aspect of acceleration or speed focused work before transitioning into the weight room. Due to the fact that baseball is a sport that heavily relies on starting and stopping, & less on max velocity sprinting, we focused more on shorter distance sprinting at high intensities. 

Through our testing & retesting of the 10 Yd Dash we can see that nearly every athlete that tested improved their time, resulting in an overall team average increase of 5.26%. 

Power

In addition to speed development, power development has been another main focus and component of our off-season training. On lower body focused training days, plyometrics were a staple. This allowed us to focus on being explosive with our lower body and increasing our power capacity. On upper body focused training days, the use of explosive med ball drills were our go to. This allowed for similar properties and feel as our plyometric work, being explosive & increasing that upper body power capacity. 

In the images below we will highlight the increases in lower body power. Through our testing and retesting of the vertical jump, broad jump, & triple jump, EVERY SINGLE ATHLETE that tested improved their metrics on EVERY SINGLE POWER TEST!!!

Thus, resulting in an overall team average of 7.8%, 9.3%, & 8.1% respectively. 

Force

Lastly, we want to emphasize the increases we saw in our force production. Through lower and upper body focused strength training, we were able to see increases in how much force the boys were able to produce. 

One test we want to emphasize is our mid thigh pull force test. This test is especially pertinent to baseball players because it focused more on how much force we can produce with our posterior chain. The posterior chain is where baseball players will generate most of their power from when loading in the throw, pitch, or swing. 

Here we can see that almost every athlete increased how much force they were able to produce with their posterior chains in this test. Thus, resulting in an overall team average of 2.83%.

Overall

This highlight has shown the incredible progress these boys have been making. In only 2 months of training, we have seen increases in all phases of speed, power, and force development. These gains are a testament of how much effort, consistency, & intensity these boys have been putting in. 

With the season right around the corner, we are excited to see how all of these gains translate to their performance on the field.
 

Keep it up boys!
 

Written by: 

Jake Lebovitch – Sports Performance Coach & Liaison to Athletes