Hunter Pence's Back Squat Baseball Workout

Hunter Pence of the Houston Astros shows a baseball workout, detailing the advantages of squats. ""We tell our players that their moneymakers are their glutes, I mean, that's where all the power comes from. You initiate forces through your legs, you transfer those forces to your trunk and you play them with your hands and arms. Though the purpose of the squat is to train the glutes too fire it up, we use a smith squat, we used to use a free squat, but we were finding that we have a large number of players from foreign countrues that don't speak English and don't have have access to this. The Smith machine is just a little bit safer, so what we lose in terms of effectiveness we feel like we pick up in respects to safety. Basically what we are doing is we are trying to train the glutes and the quads, so we are trying the legs from that standpoint. Typically what we see is that some players put their feet too far forward and it ends up being more of a hack squat, but with the Smith machine we can correct for that, and can adjust their posture properly. We ask them to go parallel, the research says if you don't go parallel you are not working your glutes to the max. So our goal is,(if all possible) to get them to parallel. In Hunter's case what we will do because for this season he is a center-fielder, center fielders have a lot of ground to cover and our guys aren't that fast, so Hunter even has more ground to cover. We need to train him like a sprinter, so we train him like a defensive back, we talked to the Tennessee Titans and the Cowboys and said ""Hey how do you train your defensive backs?"" We are doing a moderate load explosively with a few reps. In Hunter's case, he will do a warm-up set of 185, and he will do three sets of three with 225. What you will find is that we can maintain his strength if we give him a little bit of explosive power, and he doesn't get that soreness he would get if he would be doing higher volume work. Since we are doing three sets of three and the load is not that heavy, we give them anywhere from 45 seconds to a minute.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• Astros
• baseball
• Houston
• how
• Hunter
• Pence
• stacktv
• to
• training

[TheRugbyidiot]

I feel sorry for ball players who's trainers won't let them do truly beneficial exercises for fear of injury.

[jdhartman]

no what made him a worse player is that he's squatting only 2 plates...WTF?

[PSULION315]

@Jakestir08 you are a fucking idiot

[Jakestir08]

get on a squat bar and do some real weight. Training like this makes baseball players look bad

[bigjared420]

Machines don't teach your muscles to balance and control the load. They are useful as as an adjunct but are by no means any kind of replacement for the real thing. It isn't surprising the Astros are so terrible when they don't even hire a basically competent strength coach.

[allsports249]

it looks like its working for him ...........he has a 20 game hitting streak

[narehs2]

@jdhartman word

[ImBordCanYouTell]

@SadegoGG your 100% right

[MattmanAZ09]

@NickC1973

You don't squat do you.

[drivelinebaseball]

Back squats on a Smith machine are irresponsible and provide very little training effect for anyone, much less professional baseball athletes.

[MrPowerlifter1]

It doesn't matter if he isn't putting much weight on the bar....he can hit and catch baseball and that's all that matters

[NickC1973]

@baseballjock30 lifting more doesnt make you more explosive. it makes you slower. squats are garbage for sports. Squatting trains your nervous system to support the weight on the heel, when are you ever on your heel in sports??? never, so why do they ruin athletes by doing this?

it's crazy