How to Increase Batting Strength in Baseball

Since I have played baseball for a number of years, I am going to provide my take on how to develop batting strength. I played at a high school where we consistently ranked as the best team in the state, and also finished in the top 3 in the USA Today high school baseball poll. Our coach has been very instrumental in sending many players to college, and some even have made it to professional baseball. He gave us all an off-season regime for developing baseball skills which included batting.

The keys to having more batting strength are strong forearms, wrists, and grip on the bat. This can be developed in a variety of ways.

The first thing you have to do as a batter to increase strength is to swing a bat often. This includes swinging one as often as possible during the winter months as this will help improve your technique or unique swing over time. After a period of time, you can increase the difficulty of swinging a bat by adding weight to it. This will further develop the swing.

The next thing that you can do to develop batting strength is to squeeze a tennis or rubber ball. This will develop strength in the wrists, forearms, and fingers which are all essential in batting.

One of the other keys to increasing batting strength is to weight train. You don't want to lift heavy amounts of weight too often as a baseball player because your range of motion could be altered by it. Basically, you want to increase strength more so than you do adding bulk. Adding bulk can decrease your speed not only in the field, but out of the batter's box when contact is made on the ball. If your coach recommends that you need to bulk up, then you would want to lift more heavy weight. Just remember that a person's appetite will increase with weight training because muscle mass also increases.

One other thing to remember to do especially in the winter months is to hit a baseball off a batting tee. You can do this indoors if you have enough space in the place you live in. However, replace a baseball with either a tennis or some sort of plastic ball to reduce or prevent possible damage that occurs indoors. This will help you out with not only improving your swing, but keeping your hand-eye coordination sharp as well.

Always remember to properly warm-up and stretch before performing these exercises. You should take a minimum of five minutes to warm-up before swinging a bat or starting any sort of related weight-training exercise.

Before you even start any kind of exercise or weight-training program, speak with your coach or athletic trainer(if available) about a program that will help and is right for you.

Thanks to my old baseball coach Dale Ijames for helping us to develop into better baseball players in high school.