Blueprint for Conditioning

port-specific training—improving performance via exercises that mimic on-field motion—may be commonplace in major league training rooms now, but it had its genesis thanks to a Hopkins collaboration. Ed McFarland, M.D., one of the country’s foremost sports medicine researchers and Orioles assistant team physician, teamed with Tim Bishop, then a strength and conditioning coach in the Orioles’ minor league system, to develop a specific workout program that would maximize a player’s potential. The collaboration, published in the National Strength and Conditioning Association Journal, represented a blueprint for baseball conditioning. Plyometrics, exercises geared toward explosive first-step movements, are the key.

because all baseball is stopping and starting,” says Bishop, who now serves as strength and conditioning coach for the major league club. “All night long you’re running 60 feet, 90 feet, you’re running after a ball, you’re stopping, you’re starting. That’s what plyometrics is ... up and down on a box ... or over and across a line, back and forth. Stop. Do it again.”

For a shortstop who depends on lateral movements, plyometrics emphasizes side-to-side shuffles. Conversely, a pitcher tends to explode upward through leg drive, requiring exercises geared toward vertical jumps. McFarland, a former fellow with the famed Kernan-Jobe orthopedic center and onetime team physician for athletic powerhouse University of Florida, knew that the “one-size-fits-all” approach to training had long outlived its usefulness. The doctor drew on his own extensive cross-training research to give Bishop’s program some heavy medical credibility. “Ed’s very well respected,” Bishop says. “He was key in pulling together the medical side of why we do certain things, how they affect the body from a medical viewpoint, whereas I’m more from a performance/functional standpoint.”

So does the program work? Well, consider the three Orioles Bishop worked hardest with preparing for the 1999 season. By August, Cal Ripken was one of baseball’s best-hitting third basemen, B.J. Surhoff had made the All-Star team for the first time in his career, and Mike Bordick was hitting well above his career average. Bishop downplays his role in their success, saying the trio is reaping the rewards of hard work.

Still, a little science never hurts.