Year Round Pitching Workouts

Each phase of a year round pitching program is important and has its own goals and objectives for maximizing your pitchers' abilities. Beth Torina, head coach at LSU and with the USSSA Florida Pride, guides you through the thought process for building year round workouts.

Off-Season
Fundamentals and conditioning form the back bone of Coach Torina's off-season pitching workouts. Torina lays out how the Tigers structure their off-season workouts breaking down each pitch and developing their pitchers' spin and body position.

Off-season workouts are essential to ensure that your pitchers come into the season with their pitches working, as there is not a lot of time for major overhauls once the season begins. This is also an important time to focus on conditioning and speed development, and Torina offers four drills to develop this area.

Pre-Season
At LSU, the pre-season is a time to work on a little bit of everything. One major focus of the pre-season is location. If a pitcher misses their spots frequently, they will either give up a lot of walks or hits. Torina offers eight workout drills to practice location, as well as throwing "believable balls" on 0-2 pitches. She also provides ideas for working on the break points of pitches to make them deceptive and for getting the pitcher in shape to throw 7 innings (a full game).

In-Season
Now it's time to get results! Although it's important to continue to maintain fundamentals, Torina explains how you can develop workouts that involve situations and counts on imaginary batters. Learn how you can get your pitchers thinking in terms of game situations and their thought process behind each pitch, because the pitcher should understand and have confidence in every pitch she throws.

Using Coach Torina's ideas and philosophies, any coach can easily develop a structured plan for how to best prepare their pitcher for when the games mean the most.

59 minutes. 2013.