How to Train for Velocity

Measure

You NEED to have a radar gun. A Pocket Radar is very good and relatively cheap. If you want any hope of reliably improving your velocity, you need to know which throws are fast and which are not. Feel isn't enough — your body and brain are terrible at judging effort and efficiency together. Especially when you're learning to move in a new way and throw faster than ever before, you can't be your own judge. You're too biased. Radar is the most essential tool in learning to throw fast. There's no skipping this step.

Less Is More

Your feel and mechanics at low velocity don't translate to high velocity. They're too different. In a bullpen, try to ramp up to high velocity quickly so you tax your arm less. That way, your next velo session can come sooner.

If You Don't Have It, Shut It Down

Some days you go into your velo session with a specific goal in mind, and it's clear after 10 throws that whatever you were working on just isn't working. Instead of trying to make an adjustment in the middle of the pen, I find it's more useful to try again the next day, after taking time to recollect and process what went wrong and how to fix it. The success rate of making an important change mid-session isn't zero, but it's very low. And the cost of 20 or 30 more max-effort throws is high when you could make those throws the very next day with a better chance of success.

Take Video

Even if you don't want to look at the video during the session, having it for later is crucial for figuring out what you were doing differently on a day when your velocity was or wasn't there.

While you're working on large mechanical changes, you're going to need video feedback between throws to verify whether you made the change you intended. It's very common for a player to feel like they made the change they're working on, only to look at the video and see that the difference is minuscule and not at all what they intended. Just like radar, video doesn't lie, and you need objective feedback to make real improvements.

That being said, once you get rolling, most velocity improvements are a faster sequencing of the same mechanics, and they don't look much different on video. A larger stretch, a faster uncoil — once you reach this point, checking the camera between throws isn't necessary, but having the video available later for recall is still very important.

Recover

Having a system for identifying where you get sore and how to recover between throwing sessions is crucial for maximizing velocity. Your brain wants to protect you from injury, and if you go into a session not feeling near your best, it's unlikely you're going to hit a velocity PR. Stacking small PRs on top of each other, month after month, is how you make real gains. A single-session improvement is great, but if you can't repeat it and then build on it, it wasn't a real gain. It was a blip.

Identifying What to Work On

A good coach helps steer a player toward solutions that are likely to work. But no two players are exactly alike, and what helps one player may hurt another. In the quest for improvement, no stone should be left unturned, but a good coach can point a player to the stones most likely to pay off. I'd like to think I've looked under almost every stone there is, and I have a good feel for which ones are likely to help.

For more on my coaching, check out my YouTube channel, Stockyard Baseball, or see my offseason coaching.