Softball Training Tips – Exercises That Help Prevent Injuries
If you’re an athlete, I know you’ll understand it perfectly when I say that injuries are the bane of any athlete. Injuries can side line you for a few days to weeks, while major ones – and those that recur – could spell the end of your athletic career altogether.
But there’s hope. You can at least protect yourself and lessen the impact of injuries on your body. In fact, I’ll be sharing with you some exercises that will help prevent softball-related injuries, so you can play the game for a lot longer.
Practice Yoga
Wait, yoga? Yes, some poses in yoga can help you prevent injuries in certain areas of your body. Put particular focus on poses that help increase the flexibility of your spine. Doing this for around 2-3 times per week for several months would give your trunk an added range of motion that could greatly help in preventing injuries in that part of your body.
And there’s an added benefit to practicing those poses. Golfers know for a fact that making their spine and trunk flexible helps them hit the ball further. And because the swinging motion in golf shares a lot of similarities with swinging the bat, yoga can also help improve your bat speed and power.
So go out and try yoga today and see how it changes your game.
Post-Game Stretches
I wouldn’t recommend you to go stretches before a game, and do dynamic stretches instead. However, I would recommend you to do your stretches after a game.
Just like practicing yoga, post-game stretches help increase the range of motion of the muscles and joints that you stretch. And what happens when you increase the range of motion of these areas? You got that right, it helps prevent injuries.
What’s more having more flexible muscles can help you run faster, something that’s important if you want to steal more bases.
In fact, this was confirmed by a study conducted by Caplan, Rogers, Parr and Hayes published in July at the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. The study’s entitled “The effect of proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation and static stretch training on running mechanics” and it found that stretching improves the joint’s range of movement and running mechanics, thus, an improve in your performance.
Softball-Specific Dynamic Warm Ups
Warm ups are intended to help loosen up your muscles before doing an intense physical activity. But if you’re warming up the wrong muscle groups, then the muscles that you’re going to use but have not warmed up might get injured come game time.
That’s why I recommend that you do softball-specific dynamic warm ups because it focus on the muscles that you will actually need to use in the game such as you your arm and shoulder muscles. No more pulled muscles after you thought you’ve had a good warm up.
Injuries are a part of an athlete’s life because you push your body to the limits. But performing the exercises I have recommended for you above will help lessen the impact of these injuries and help you prevent them before they happen.