3 Tips For Adding Velocity For Baseball Pitchers

In this video, Scott Haase shows baseball pitchers 3 different tips that can add velocity to their fastball. He discusses how Healthy Velocity is created, moving faster can allow you to throw faster, and then the pitching mechanics that everyone wants to know about.

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Full Transcript (will update):

You know, so often I get asked the question, how do I throw harder? How do I add Velo to my fastball? And as much as I would love to give everyone the answer to that question, it really does depend. so hear me out, I'm going to give you three different ways that you can think about it. The first one being health, the next one being speed. And then the last one being your actual mechanics, because all of those do play a factor. But that is also removing a big factor, which could be injury, it could be where are you in the development curve, it could be where are you in the adolescent curve, and pre puberty, post puberty, in the middle of puberty, all of those things are going to be taken into account. But let's break down each of those three, and talk about the things that you can do that help effect adding your velocity. None of this is guaranteed. But the things that I teach guys, that can help them best try to add velocity. So number one is health. The reason I named my company healthy, below healthy burst, is because health is super important. I spent almost a decade as a health coach and a personal trainer, working in corporate wellness, working with adults, kids, middle age, senior citizen, all over the place, not only or in addition to all of the players that I've helped over the last 10 to 12 years, at different ages, from every age, from the youngest to the oldest. And the biggest thing that they are not considering whether it's the player, the parents, or the coaches, is health until they get injured. And those tend to be almost all the time, I'm most dedicated athletes, because they had the perspective of what losing your health does to your career, to your velocity, and your trajectory. So if you're not taking care of your health, obviously, when you get injured, you know, that's important. And that becomes an issue. But if you're not taking care of beforehand, it's a big thing. So what does that mean health, being healthy with velocity, it's sleeping more, if you're getting only eight hours of sleep or less, and you're playing competitively baseball. So you're from the age of like, you know, eight to 30, something, eight hours is just not gonna cut it. Now, I understand that sometimes circumstances happen, and there's tests, or there's just things that happen, I get it. But if you are active in the way that you should be in taking care of your health and exercising and all those things, nine and 10 hours is really the goal to get to. Now you can break that down and say, Am I really a nine hour guy or a 10 hour guy, and I know we're a 15 minute guy, the way you do that. You can write in a journal, you can take notes in an app on your phone, and you can go to sleep for the night, make sure you forgot when you're on bed when you wake up, and then track it and write down how many hours you got, you know, seven hours and 15 minutes of I was asleep. And then here right how you felt that day, during the morning, the afternoon and at night, and knew that for a week, you're going to have a really good idea. You can use your watch to also track something like that and see what your sleep was like. Because there's a lot of different factors. But just to start, do that for a week, and see how your sleep is. The next one is going to be nutrition. How do you eat? What's your hydration? Like? How when do you eat, all of those factors play a huge role in your health.

So the sleep, your recommendation nine or 10 hours, your health is for most guys, they just need to eat better. It's not about having to have broccoli, or cauliflower, or even should have carrots I heard that's good for my eyesight. No, for most guys to start, it's eating better. It's introducing vegetables into your day, introducing vegetables into each one of your meals, introducing snacks. The reason that nutrition hydration was you should be getting at least those 64 ounces. But for athletes that are super active, which should be you, you're talking 100, sometimes 150 ounces, I can't legally tell you, because I'm not a dietitian, but I know that half of your weight usually is a bare minimum and you should be getting more and let your thirst kind of let you know. So the reason that your your hydration, your nutrition and eating better and your sleep are such an important factor with your velocity is because when you take care of those, your body performs better the output of energy and force and speed and your velocity and your focus. And your ability to perform in the weight room and exercise and in practice improves because you're taking care of your foundation of your health. And then when your body needs to recover from all of that hard work during the day, that happens at night. Now when you don't have the proper nutrition and hydration or sleep and you go to bed and you don't have that time to heal and heal as best you could. You don't then recover the next day in the ensuing days as well as you could have. So by not taking care of yourself attrition and your hydration and then not getting enough sleep, you've then compounded the effects of bad health not recovered as well. And now you can't expect to perform at your highest the next day. If you don't do that, over time, you can look back and be frustrated and say, hey, you know, I was working out a lot, which that's great. And I was showing up to practice and I was putting in a high amount of effort. But look at the things you did, again, compounded over years. And you'll look back and regret, I should have been taking a little bit better control of and being more mindful of my health. Because you do that slowly over time, then you understand why you are getting the better results that you end up getting. So taking care of your hydration, your nutrition, take care of your sleep, and then exercise two, you definitely have to take care of that. So if you're not doing anything, from a health standpoint, to take care of yourself, just get yourself in the game, start doing one thing at a time, do one little thing like introducing vegetables, or drinking more water or tracking your sleep don't try to do all at once. By all means you can if you're able to attain that, but most guys tend to need to be able to start smaller with one goal and path possibly writing in a journal and build from there. So that's the health component and how it can affect your velocity. Because again, you can be trying all the rest of these. But if you're not taking care of your health, healthy below, it just you're not going to be reaching your full potential. So that's health. Next is speed. Okay, if you're not moving fast and training fast, guess what, you're probably not going to end up being as fast as you possibly could. You don't see sprinters, waiting until competition day to decide to run fast. Now there are times that they don't run as fast, and they maybe do long distance instead of Sprint's and different types of training. But if they're not training speed, at some point, their body, their nervous system, their muscles are just not used to moving as fast. So although you may be naturally gifted in throwing harder moving faster, if you don't continue to train that you can't expect to continue to improve that speed. And there are a lot of guys, that when it comes to pitching to a catcher or a target, or in a bullpen or in a practice on a game, they're told from their coaches, their teammates and the crowd that they just need to focus on throwing strikes. And although yes, that is part of the deal, to get guys out, although you don't always have three strikes to get guys out. But although that is part of the deal, and getting hitters out, you still have to want to be able to throw hard, and I talked about Chuck it, Chuck, it is pretty simple. Move fast. Make sure you know why it's important. Make sure you've earned the right to do so. And then do it.
So I talked about learn it, earn it, chuck it, learn why it's important. When you move faster, you tend to smooth things out, it's like walking on a tightrope, or Washington tightrope, tightrope, when you were walking on a curb or balance beam, when you are really really slow, there's a lot of wobbling, the faster you go, the smoother it is. So you can by moving faster, you smooth those things out mechanically is what we're talking about a lot less room for error when you're moving fast. So learn why it's important. Because you're going to smooth things out, you're going to train yourself, like I said, to be able to throw harder, your arm is going to be in better condition because you're not waiting until the game to try and throw seven innings. You're practicing throwing at high intensities. In all your bullpens and practices that when you get to the game, your body is already used to it. So learn it, why it's important, then you got to you do have to earn it, which is you got to put in the work. You got to take care of your health, you got to do the progressions, and the bullpens. And high intensity throwing, maintaining your health and being smart with that, and working on your mechanics and all that. So you learn why it's important. You earn it by doing the work. And then you go and chuck it. So that's as it pertains to just throwing, but even when you're in the weight room, there is a basic level of strength that needs to be developed. But once you start to introduce that to your body, you got to start picking up the pace with at least some of your exercises, guys that are more highly trained and are stronger, tend to be able to do a little bit more of something called Velocity based training VBT. And that is just where they're trying to move the bar or move to implement or themselves faster. They're just trying to do it very, very fast to focus on getting their body moving fast, the weight moving fast, and just their nervous system and their mind used to that speed over and over and over to try and get little jumps. So it starts with your basic foundation of strength. And then you start implementing speed. But even if you're not there quite yet, you're not an advanced 2345 year lifter of any kind. med ball is great. Even just things kind of a beach ball doesn't matter. Just training speed is always going to be good to take your health Take your speed. And then lastly is yes, mechanics, you can't have a guy that has never thrown a baseball and expect him to throw at really elite high levels. It just rarely ever happens if they've never thrown a baseball or an implement of any kind. So there are Javelin throwers that throw really hard. There are cricket ball throwers that throw really hard. There are softball players that throw really hard. So it's not just specific to the baseball. But if you want to be able to throw it a high level, there are certain mechanical things that need to happen. And within the mechanical realm, you're going to have arguments from people, you know, online or different coaches and saying, Well, this is the best I know that's the best. And really, again, it all depends why? Because the best example is to tell you, if a guy doesn't have his left hand, you can't tell him to throw left handed because left hand is the best way. Now that makes sense. Yeah, like, Okay, well, it's not that easy. Sometimes it is. There are different tests you can do with your body to test whether or not your leg can turn inward. As much as the next guy, guess what, if it can't, and it gets stuck, because it's tight, then you can't expect the athlete with a tight leg in a tight hip area, pelvis area, to be able to do this type of thing. If you think mechanically, your knee is supposed to come across, guess what there are guys that they just can't because it's too tight in there. There's all kinds of things like that. So it does depend. Now the things that tend to be true for most guys, is that they all come set up your toe, the rubber you come set, they do some type of like lifts, some guys like high some guys like medium. Some guys like a slide step, again, you're gonna hear arguments all over the place. But what tends to happen is they get once they lift, they start to move down the mound, and they do bend their knee, their ankle and their waist, it's called a hip hinge, it's called bending at the knees, bending the ankle. So those three areas do tend to bend, there tends to be a fairly good posture, there are some guys that are hunched over, there are some guys that are way back here, there's a bunch of variations, but a maintained posture tends to be something that you're gonna see across the board. So a bend in the lower half a decent posture. And then what's going to happen is, again, as you lift, those players start to move down the mounts on the left atrium, this is down the mound for me, they lift and as they lift the moving down the mound with their body while in a band, and then the band helps get a stretch into the muscles. Typically in the glue, I mean, it's all over, but in your glutes and your boots, butts here, and then you're going to rotate, and you're going to contract those muscles into rotation. So there's a bending component, as you're moving down the mound, there's a rotational component as you move down the mound, and then you do end up
landing into your front leg. And typically that's going to be stabilized by basically not moving or moving backwards, those are kind of the two things that you'll typically see. And then the upper body rotates, and the upper body is rotating, they call against a firm leg. So if my body rotates, and this leg keeps going forward, there's just not much behind the throw. But if my body, my front leg stops completely, and this now does hear, and I'm able to throw, I've got a more stable base right here. It's kind of like if I were to shoot a basketball with wobbly legs, like it just wouldn't be as efficient. I could Yes, perform the task, but not as hard and as in control or consistent so that His leg is maintained or comes backward as the hips rotate, your pelvis rotates, it happens in order, typically, you're going to have the bend while you're moving, you're going to have the rotation, it continues to rotate. Now the torso is rotating, the shoulders rotate, and then the ball comes out. That tends to be mechanically what happens again, there are variations of there guys that been less, there guys have been more there are guys that are rotate a ton while their shoulders are back a ton. There are some guys that rotate and what's called hip and shoulder separation a little bit less. There's some guys that have a bent front leg, some have a straight front leg. Some guys are right here, some guys want. So there are a bunch of variations. But that tends to be why moving forward, there's been rotation, stabilization, and then release. Now, again, there can be a ton of different variations based on tests. Also based on just natural, given ability. If a guy wakes up, wakes up out of bed, let's say Mike Trout, you know that that dude from a hitting standpoint, is just going to be able to do things that you may not be able to ever do because he was gifted with the frame. If you look at some of his high school pictures, the dude was not as big as he is now. He was a big dude. Now, some of that is probably a lot of hard work. I can almost guarantee that. Also there are Some people that when you're in fifth grade, and you do a race for your middle school or Intermediate School, and there's just people that are faster than you that have never exercised to train in their life, and you're like, oh, that person is faster, that person is faster, or this person is slower, I'm kind of in the middle, that's where I was. You just know, they wake up at a bed, and they're faster than me. If I haven't trained for it, there wasn't a specific exercise that they did, or some type of magical potion that they took or something, they were just faster. And now the two of us, we trained at the same level, they just come tend to be faster, so I'm gonna have to be able to catch up. So let's recap here. Health, very, very important. Take care, your sleep, take your nutrition, your hydration, stress is a big component to make sure you're taking care of your stress, breathing techniques, all kinds of things. Next thing is your speed, your intent, feel a Curie or intensity or move really fast. You're gonna hear you're gonna hear about it in a bunch of different ways, but it's just Okay, your body needs to move faster if you want to be able to move faster. And then lastly is mechanics. Make sure there's some Ben, make sure there's good rotation stabilization, and then you're releasing the ball