In my last interview with the legendary guru of Speed and Strength Training, from D1 Sports in Tennessee, Kurt Hester, stated that Major League Baseball is using glorified physical therapy instead of strength and conditioning. This was a shot at the lame approach to training and rehabilitating athletes in the MLB organizations. This is coming from a guy who trains some of NFL’s most explosive athletes and who was label as Gorilla Ball, when he was training the LSU tigers in the 90′s.

Kurt says that fear is a major problem with baseball players. They train the way they do because of the fear that comes from the higher levels of the game. He also says that if young baseball players trained like Major League ball players, they would never get better. The fear is that weight training, especially heavy weight training, will make you bulky and will cause injury. Kurt says the MLB’s athletic trainers are running glorified physical therapy programs and not actually training their athletes to become bigger, stronger and faster.  This is why I believe top draft picks and big salary pitcher’s like Mark Prior leave the league with a career ending injury, after only 3 years in the show, and never make it back.

This is the reason players like Barry Bonds carried his own trainers and doctors almost everywhere he went. Kurt said what makes athletes better is increasing force production. If you can train to move more explosively in a vertical or linear direction, then you are a better athlete because of it. This force production translates into running speed, bat speed and throwing velocity. This is the same approach he used when he trained the LSU Baseball team to 5 National Championships in the 90′s and 2000. He enhanced the force production of every athlete on the team and yes, even the pitchers benefited from it. They all became so developed that they were calling the LSU style of play, Gorilla Ball. This style of training, developed by Kurt Hester, was not only revolutionizing LSU baseball but the entire game. Kurt was receiving calls from Major League Managers who wanted to know why they were hitting so many runs, stealing so many bases, and their pitchers collecting so many K’s. When he would tell them that he was focusing on force production, through heavy load and triple extension training, these Major League Coach’s wanted to use his program but everyone of them shied away from the program because of the worries that they would be scrutinized for using this type of heavy load training in the MLB. Kurt says baseball is behind Golf when it comes to strength and conditioning.

Learn More about Kurt Hester

Kurt Hester is the National Director of Training for D1 Sports Training. He is known nationally for his energetic approach to training top-tier athletes.

Kurt is D1′s primary authority on sports training and is responsible for instilling the D1 training philosophy and making sure all D1 coaches properly implement and teach training programs and techniques. In addition, Kurt oversees D1′s NFL Combine Training Program.

Prior to D1, Kurt ran and owned HS2 Athletic Performance in New Orleans for nine years, where he turned out more than 400 collegiate scholarship athletes and trained more than 50 NFL draft picks. He also trained numerous MLB draft picks, high school All-Americans, state championship teams and collegiate National Track & Field finalists. Prior to HS2, Kurt was a strength & speed coach at LSU, Tulane and Southeastern Louisiana University. In addition, Kurt is still an active strength and speed consultant at Florida State, Tennessee, Illinois, Ole Miss, Alabama, Nichols State, Grambling State and the Unviersity of Miami.

Kurt, a graduate of Tulane Unviersity, was inducted into the Strength Coach Hall of Fame and holds various certifications through the National Strength and Conditioning Association, United States Weightlifting and the Speed, Agility and Conditioning Association. Kurt learned under USA Weightlifting coach, Gayle Hatch and speed coach, Tom Shaw.

If you would like to watch the interview with the legendary Kurt Hester, it is hosted on TopVelocity.net and is also a part of the 3X Pitching Velocity Program.

I was in the same position as you in my career. I was an average ball player and wanted to always play at the next level. Eventually my genetics wasn’t getting the job done, so I had to find something that would reconstruct my DNA and turn me into an elite athlete. This is when I met the legendary Coach Gayle Hatch and his protege Kurt Hester. If you want to learn more about them, then you must watch this priceless interview I did with the Godfather of strength and conditioning, Coach Gayle Hatch.

You will learn in this video that what they taught me was that if I wanted to be a successful baseball player then I needed first to become an athlete. I needed to develop more than just strength, I had to develop explosive strength. As Coach Hatch says, strength is of very little use to an athlete but explosive strength is what makes you effective on the field. Once I started training with his protege Kurt Hester I learned quickly what explosive strength was and how little of it I had. This was when I started to work to achieve my success, instead of just waiting for it.

This is one of the best programs out there for developing explosive strength. This program will model your body to have more fast twitch muscle fiber which will increase your running speed, hitting speed and throwing speed. This program will build joint integrity which will protect your joints as you increase the load of stress you are now putting on them because of the increased speed. This program has been proven and tested over and over and over again. It is called the Fusion System because it is not just focused on one muscle group, one series of exercises or lifts, or one method of training. It encompasses a fusion of exercises, lifts and methods of training to build the elite baseball player.

This program isn’t for everyone. It takes a tremendous amount of intensity and commitment. This isn’t a training program that you should just tryout. It is a program that you should have total faith in because you are certain that it will help you accomplish your goals and transform you into an elite athlete. Commitment doesn’t happen when someone takes an associate position. This means being committed in this program must begin when you purchase it. This is the reason this program is for sale. If it was free then this program would be setting you up for failure. You are asked to spend your hard earned money or your parents hard earned money to pay for something that will change your life. If you didn’t make this financial commitment in the beginning then you would be starting on the wrong foot towards your goals. So make the commitment from the begin when you spend your money on this program and don’t look back. This is the only way you will make it to the promise land one day!

The famous military leader of France, Napoleon Bonaparte once said, Fail to plan…and you plan to fail. If you are going to complete this program and achieve success then you are going to have to plan your schedule which is ultimately your level of commitment. Before you start this program you need to make sure you have the gym and equipment necessary and you need to make sure the entire program fits into your schedule. You must do this first before starting the program. Once you are ready to make the commitment and you have planed your sucess then purchase the manual TODAY!

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Last week the Assistant GM for the New Orleans Hornets called me about implementing a core strength and flexibility program for the team. My reply was not taken well by him because I laughed. After I regained my composure I explained that if you have a well thought out strength and conditioning program, core strength and flexibility components are built in and done on a daily basis. I felt it was a waste of the teams time for me to go in once a week for thirty minutes to train explicitly on core and flexibility work. Needless to say; he was not very happy with my reply.

This conversation did trigger a host of thoughts about past training concepts, present training concepts and future training concepts. I remember the days when strength coaches had a background in either power lifting, olympic lifting or bodybuilding. Then high intensity training became the fad of the day. That was followed by sport specific training. Sport specific training gave way to core and stabilization training, which gave way to functional training. What do all these training methods have in common? A lot of books and videos have been sold. Yes, I am jaded and sarcastic by nature. I just want to know; what ever happened to a basic well thought out training cycle? I think coaches and athletes are so impressed by the latest line of training equipment and the latest training fad that they forget about the basics of performance: power, strength and speed. This is not an indictment of training philosophy, but an article to provoke thought.

I incorporate some faction of every training philosophy in my training cycles. I pride myself on being able to steal from the best and worst programs. If I can find one thing to make my training cycles better than my athletes are getting better. When it comes to training I do not dismiss anyone or any system. I will learn from anybody, anywhere, anytime.

Now if you employ this technique when writing a training cycle things still have to mesh and it has to be logical. I have seen training cycles thrown together that made absolutely know sense. There are facets of training programs that you can use to enhance your training cycles. For example:

Bodybuilding – a ridicules repertoire of exercises
that can be performed.

Power lifting – absolute strength lifts, max effort
lifts and dynamic effort lifts.

Olympic lifting – explosive power and speed lifts.

HIT – lifting for muscle hypertrophy, endurance
and volume.

Core/Stability – building your athletic foundation.

Functional Training – isolateral and balance training.

Rehab -joint stability work.

Sport Specific Training – there are few exercises that truly mimmick sport. This has always been a catch phrase that I have true distain for. If you’re an athlete who is getting stronger, more powerful and faster then your getting better athletically.

You can take bits and pieces of different training philosophies and mold them into a coherent and concise program. Do not pigeon whole your athletes into one training system. Let your guard down and absorb knowledge form non traditional sport training areas. Don’t be swayed by entire training systems that come around every two to three years. Stick to your basic philosophy and enhance it with sound practices of other philosophies.

Every coach knows that speed is the most dominate factor in sport. Coaches recruit fast athletes and design their offenses and defenses with that speed in mind. If these afore mentioned assumptions are correct, then, why are strength coaches training these same athletes to become slow and un-explosive.Training an athlete to become faster is not relegated to speed work on the field. You don’t take a highly recruited, gifted and genetically superior athlete into the weight room and do nothing to improve his speed and
explosive capabilities. Whether it is intentional or unintentional, strength coaches around the country are training their athletes in the weight room to become slower.

This is not an attack on training philosophy. It is an attack on the lack of common sense in the strength field. No matter what your training philosophy – Power lifting, Body-building, Olympic lifting or High intensity training, you can improve your program with a little common sense.

CST (Common Sense Training)

Rule #1
Train for strength not endurance. Remember your training for strength not a triathlon. Don’t spend an extreme amount of time in a hypertrophy phase or endurance training. Train at five reps and
below at eighty percent and above. Do this as soon as possible in your training cycle. You have to be strong to run fast, so why train above six reps? Your goal is to get strong – to run fast, not to lift long – to run slow and long.

Rule #2
Train explosively. Olympic lifts train the athlete to explode and use maximum possible force. Athletes will develop a high rate of force, a key point in sports training. Athletes who implement these lifts in their lifting program will train fast twitch muscle fibers, the fibers employed to give you speed, explosiveness and power. In essence performing an Olympic lift is performing a fast, explosive weighted jump. Sprinting in essence is a series of fast, explosive bounds. These lifts will directly help an athlete run faster Implement lifts such as: power clean, hang clean, power snatch, hang snatch, split jerk and jerk from the rack. The amount of weight does not matter as much as bar speed.

Rule #3
Train your VMO. Training the vastus medialis will help decrease ground contact time which is crucial to increase speed. Incorporate exercises such as: chain back squat, chain front squat, walking lunge and split squat into your program.

Rule #4
You need hamstring and low back strength. Because the back squat is one of the test for lower body strength in most programs, strength coaches sometimes over look the hamstrings and lower back. The hamstrings are connected to the glutes and back extensors. This is through the sarco-tuberal and dorso-sacral ligaments All lower body workouts should involve exercises for both the hip extension function and the knee flexor function Knee flexion exercises: leg curls and glute/ham raise. Hip extension exercises: Romanian deadlift, goodmorning reverse hyper and back extensions.

There are coaches with superior educations and impressive resumes who either over think while writing their cycle or under think while writing their cycle. When all else fails just use some common sense..

The only reason I was able to play Professional Baseball after a major rotator cuff tear in my first college appearance was because of one thing, Velocity. For five years all I focused on was getting back to my velocity before the surgery, which was about 86mph and then adding as much more as possible. I never expected that I would soon reach 94 mph. This is why I started this website and also started the Guerilla Baseball Academy in Louisiana.

The biggest question I get is, how did I gain so much velocity after surgery?

Well, during those five years of starting over with the skill of pitching, I obsessively read ever book I could find on strength and conditioning and pitching mechanics. This helped put me headed in the right direction and then I started training with Kurt Hester who was the strength and conditioning coach at LSU during the 90′s when they were called “Gorilla Ball.” Kurt changed my career.

Kurt put 35 pounds of fast twitch muscle fiber on my body through Olympic lifting and plyometric training. After one year of his program I was throwing 90 mph. At this point I didn’t have much time left in my career so I decided to go to California and tryout for the Golden League. This is an independent minor league organization. I hit 91mph in the tryout and was drafted in the first round. I then meet one of Tom House’s certified pitching coaches Mike Layseca and he taught me about hip to shoulder separation, which I had none. When I started my season in San Diego, one month into it as my mechanics got better, I topped out at 94mph. At this point in my career I felt complete. I had made it to Pro Ball and beat the odds against me. I also got to play with a childhood ideal, Jose Canseco.

I would have never made it to the professional level without learning all of the secrets to Velocity. I would have never increased my velocity from 86-94mph without this knowledge and hard work. This is why I created this website and put together the Ace Pitcher Handbook. You are not going to find this type of information in books or websites that are created by athletes who didn’t overcome the impossible to achieve the success that they claim to have had. Those athletes are just giving you or selling you information that helped them to maintain what talent God gave them. Therefore if you are an athlete who is trying to overcome the impossible then you are wastering your time and money learning from those nature athletes. Even if they label themselves as All American or Major League.

If “YOU WANT TO GO PRO” then you must learn from those who made it to the professional levels and came from a similar background as you!