I am a big advocate of the Olympic lifts. There isn’t a better lift to increase the performance of an athlete, especially a baseball player, than the Olympic lifts. The reason is these lifts are the only lifts that develop power. Power is force times speed. This means athletic performance is built around power. The best athlete isn’t the strongest or the fastest but the strongest and fastest athlete on the field. It is about being Bigger, Stronger, Faster not just one or the others.

When you train with the Olympics lifts you can not only focus on strength, because to move the weight from the floor to the chest, like with a power clean, you must move it quickly. This is because when power cleaning heavy weight to get the weight from the floor to on your chest, you must throw the weight to the position. This means you must have a lot of power, which is the strength to lift the heavy weight and the speed to throw it up on your chest. This takes a lot of fast twitch muscle fibers. These muscle fibers are bigger, capable of contracting harder and fire quickly, hence the expression Bigger, Stronger, Faster.

To perform the Olympic lifts you do not need much equipment. All you need is a squat bar, squat rack and weights. I would suggest rubber weights because this way you can throw the weights around without destroying your floor.

These lifts have a tough learning curve but once you learn them it is like riding a bike, you never forget. I would suggest you learn the lifts from an Olympic lifting trainer before going on your own because they can cause injury easily if you do not know what you are doing. To get you started I would suggest you follow the links below to educate yourself more on the Olympic lifts.

Recommend links:

This is a link to Coach Gayle Hatch’s instructional videos for the Olympic lifts. http://topvelocity.net/coach-hatch-instructional-videos/

I would recommend this workout for a beginner who wants to begin learning the Olympic lifts http://topvelocity.net/baseball-pitching-workout-beginner/.

I would also recommend you read this article on why the Olympic lifts increase throwing velocity http://topvelocity.net/olympic-velocity/.