Should Baseball Players Run Poles?

My quick answer is no.

It’s a little complicated though, because players how they are supposed to stay in shape and recovery after a pitching outing.

The reality is that sprints will have better impact on recovery for a few reasons.

1) Sprinting at maximum effort will get your heart rate up higher than would typically occur while running poles. The benefit of getting your heart rate up, is that our bodies release growth hormone and testosterone at a high beat per minute. Since our heart rate will be higher with sprinting, we will get more of a hormone boost than we would with pole.

2) Endurance training has been shown to DECREASE power production. Running distance trains Type I muscle fibers, which are the “Slow Twitch” muscle fibers. Pitching is a highly anaerobic effort, like max effort, sprinting, which means it is primarily focused on Type II muscle fibers. These are also known as the “Fast Twitch” muscle fibers and are largely responsible for the power production in both pitching and also hitting.

These are just a couple reasons we don’t recommend running poles.

Check out this article by Eric Cressey for further reading.

The complicated part is that pitchers do need endurance to make it deep into a ball game. So how should a program be designed to sprint and build this endurance.

We train our baseball pitchers to Sprint 90ft at maximum effort and walk back to the starting line. As soon as they reach the starting line, they are to perform another maximum effort sprint for the 90ft. This will keep their heart rate up and simulate a pitching pattern.

The overall benefit is to train the anaerobic fast twitch muscle fibers while simultaneously building endurance.

We get into more specifics when we assess each athlete and what their individual needs are.

If you want help programming for pitching specific performance training…let us know!

P.S. Nobody likes running poles.