Baseball Speed: 4 Ways to Get Faster

Yes, baseball is a sport that requires specified body movements that must drilled constantly, like those for hitting and pitching and fielding and catching. Often it’s so overwhelming to get proficient at these skills, that you spend all your practice time working on them. And then your kid gets thrown out at home, and the third base coach complains that he runs like he has a piano on his back, and you realize you can’t neglect speed.

Focusing on speed will:

Raise your kid’s batting average
Make him a fielder with more range
Put him in contention for the leadoff spot in the lineup -and-
Give him the edge against comparable players who are not so fast

It must also be mentioned that speed exercises often work on the same muscles that help your kid’s power at the plate and ability to throw hard.

4. You Must Have a Weekly Routine to Get Faster in Baseball

You need to treat speed drills like you do tee work and bullpens for pitching. If you only do it every now and then, your kid’s not going to get faster.

During the season, though, there’s always an emergency: Your kid’s not hitting. He’s not locating his pitches. He’s booting ground balls. He’s having emotional meltdowns.

You’ll want to do extra hitting work or take more ground balls, and skip speed. Don’t do it! The truth is there are no “emergencies” in youth baseball.

Your overall goals should be:

To make sure your kid keeps enjoying the game -and-
To develop him so he’ll have success in high school and hopefully college

It’s like the tortoise and the hare fable: slow and steady is going to win the race.

Your kids is also going to like baseball much better and have more confidence , if you don’t live and die on each one of his at bats and act like a momentary downturn in his performance is a crisis warranting a change in his routine.

Example of Weekly Baseball Speed Routines

A good friend of mine who was an amazing college player — and lightening fast — told me the following was his running schedule when he was 14 up through high school:

Monday: Jog two miles and run the bleachers at the high school.
Tuesday. Run sprints for half hour. Starting at 20 yards and going up to 80 yards.
Wednesday. Jog two miles and run the bleachers at the high school.
Thursday. Run sprints for half hour. Starting at 20 yards and going up to 80 yards.
Friday. Jog two miles and run the bleachers at the high school.
Weekend. Off.

Nothing complicated here or expensive. Also, if you have a game on a weekday, you’re not going to want to do your running before the game and hit the field with tired legs.

You Don’t Need to Go to a Private Running School

Private speed and agility schools have started cropping up around me, including the Parisi Speed School. I actually signed my older son up for a package with Parisi last year. The instructors were great and it did help his running mechanics.

But the thing is, you don’t need a formal program like this to fix your running mechanics or do speed drills. The downside of these speed programs include:

Wasted time. It takes time to drive to the speed facility, have him take the hour lesson, and then drive him home. It’s a better use of time to have your kid do running drills outside your home for a half hour, and then work on his hitting/fielding/pitching skills. If I lived across the street from the facility, I might feel differently.
Expense. At a time when it costs $80 to take your kid out to dinner, it’s best to save the money, when running outside your home costs nothing.

3. Speed Training Aids Help Make You Faster and Quicker at Baseball

To be a faster quicker baseball player, you’ll want to do drills that work on acceleration and explosiveness. The goal is to reach your top speed as quickly as possible. You don’t need to go nuts with the training aids. But you should buy the following:

Why You Need a Parachute

In the old days, we would get an old car tire and tie it to our waist with a rope and use that for resistance for sprints. You can still do that if you’d like, or run up hills.

The modern way to create that resistance is with a parachute that easily ties to your kid’s waist.

I have one of these for my son and have him run the first half of his sprints with it on.

Why You Need a Jump Box

Jumping and doing stair-like leg lifts are some of the best exercises out there to create leg and core strength. Having a jump box will let your kid do these exercises, and you can store it inside your home, allowing your kid to do the exercises in the winter and when it’s raining.

Why You Need a Jump Rope

I know that agility ladders are all the rage, but I actually think a jump rope is the better product to increase your kid’s foot speed. There’s a reason boxers have been using them forever to get quicker (and build endurance).

I’ve also found it’s a lot easier to get my son to do jump rope than agility ladders. We leave the jump rope by the couch in our TV room and he actually jumps rope during commercials.

It’s also pretty bad ass to be able to jump rope like a boxer. Check out the drill above.

2. Do High Step-Ups for Baseball Speed

We can thank none other than the Balkan country of Bulgaria for popularizing arguably the best exercise for thigh and hip power: the high step up.

A former professional scout with the Mariners told me about this drill and stressed that I start doing it with my son to help with his explosiveness and speed. And it’s really worked. My son has gone from being slow of foot to being one of the faster kids on his club team.

The exercise entails slowly stepping up to something fairly high and stable like a a jump box.

You go up and down one leg at a time, so, for example, up and down 8 times on your left leg, and then up and down 8 times on your right leg. When you get good at them, you can hold weights while you do the step ups for more impact.

We already had the traditional jump box, but I found with my son it wasn’t quite high enough to really work his muscles. So I wound up placing the jump box on our hardwood pitching mound to give it few more inches, and it works great.

Note that you don’t want the jump box to be so high that your kid is really straining to do the step and risking injury. But you also want it to be high enough so that he has to exert himself and gets the benefit of the exercise.

1. Do the Speed Exercises Along with Your Kid

Like I wrote above, the only way your kid is going to improve his speed for baseball is if he has a dedicated routine. And I have found that when I do the speed exercises along with my son, he actually doesn’t mind doing them and gets much more out of it.

When I used to have him do it by himself, he would complain a lot and dog it most of the time.

Maybe he’s taking to the drills when I’m doing them with him because he wants me to lose weight and be healthier. Maybe he finds it funny to see his middle aged dad doing sprints and high step ups. Maybe he likes kicking my ass in the drills.

Maybe it’s just a better dynamic to have us both doing them, where he can critique my form while I critique his, rather than the criticism being so one-sided.

Whatever it is, it works and he’s getting faster.

Also, it’s not like you’re going to take batting practice or do a bullpen along with your son, so this is one opportunity to actually participate along with him.

Now I know he’s eventually going to have to do all these things without me, but it’s also somewhat unrealistic to expect a thirteen-year old to embrace a dedicated running routine on his own initiative.

So do the running drills with your kid at first and hope the process and hard work sticks.

DO YOU HAVE ANY TOPS FOR INCREASING BASEBALL SPEED? LET US KNOW IN THE COMMENTS.

For information about the emotional side of baseball, see:

For information on hitting, see:

For information on pitching, see:

Baseball Speed: 4 Ways to Get Faster

4. You Must Have a Weekly Routine to Get Faster in Baseball

Example of Weekly Baseball Speed Routines

You Don’t Need to Go to a Private Running School