Understanding Speed Training For Baseball Players: An In-Depth Guide

Speed is the variable of success for baseball players.

At Relentless Baseball, this has been the mantra that we've preached for years to players at all levels, and it continues to get more and more true each season. Talking with Coaches and Scouts from around the game they all say the same thing - the number one attribute that separates good players from great ones is speed.

Not only does the game continue to get faster and more dynamic each season, but if you have the ambition to take your game to a higher level - you need to prepare for a whole new level of speed. The difference between a 4.3 and a 4.1 second home-to-first time can be the difference between a routine out and beating the throw. That fraction of a second matters.

Whether it's going from high school to college, Division II to Division I, or the minors to the big leagues - the speed needed to thrive at your current level won't be enough to dominate at the next level, in fact it might not even be enough to keep up and play your game.

While baseball has traditionally undervalued pure speed training in favor of other attributes, the modern game has evolved. Speed can no longer just be chalked up to being a "natural talent" that some players are gifted with. Rather, it's a set of attributes that you can deliberately enhance with structured training both on and off the field.

In this article we're taking a deep dive into the different facets of speed training, the current research on speed and baseball, and more importantly how ambitious baseball players can put speed training into practice to take their explosiveness, agility, and their game, to the next level.

Let's dive in.

Understanding Speed for Baseball Players

Speed training for baseball is complicated, and often misunderstood.

In biomechanics, traditional speed is often broken into stride frequency × stride length. This simply means the amount of steps a sprinter can make is multiplied by the distance of their strides to determine their speed.

For baseball players, this equation holds true, but we need to expand our thinking to encompass the unique demands of the sport. Baseball speed isn't just about straight-line sprinting – it's about explosive first-step quickness, rapid acceleration, multi-directional movement, and the ability to change direction instantly while maintaining body control.

This is why we propose a more comprehensive speed equation for baseball players:

On-Field Speed = First-Step Explosiveness × Acceleration × Directional Control

The third component - directional control - is crucial for baseball players who need to maintain optimal body positions while fielding, base running, and reacting to plays. An efficient player expends less energy on movement and can maintain speed longer while focusing on gameplay.

There's a reason that elite college and professional baseball programs place significant emphasis on power output measures such as the vertical or broad jump in addition to sprint times. Studies of Division I baseball players consistently show that jump measures are strong predictors of on-field explosiveness and speed. Research published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research demonstrated that vertical jump height was one of the strongest correlates to base stealing success in collegiate baseball players.

The intended takeaway from all of this is that focusing on faster feet isn't necessarily the answer to getting faster on the field. While "quick feet drills" were considered speed training the norm in the past - a multi-faceted approach to speed training is what actually translates to the diamond.

Lastly, whenever discussing speed and baseball players, it's inevitable that a traditional coach weighs in that game speed can only be improved with more gameplay, batting practice, and fielding drills.

While we'll be focusing on the off-field attributes of speed in this article, it's important not to understate the importance of refining on-field mechanics. All elite players carry a level of technical proficiency that allows them to more efficiently and effectively express force on the field.

It's no secret, the most elite players in the world continue to work with movement and position-specific coaches. Top NCAA programs and professional teams have specialized coaches focused on movement mechanics, and many players actively seek out coaches in the off-season to refine and dial in their technique.

Saying that, even the most refined sports car isn't competing if it has a basic engine under the hood.

This is why Strength & Conditioning and Baseball Coaches often work hand in hand. With the elite players we work with through our Coaching Program, we'll often be in communication with their position coaches to see where we can maximize their off-field training to support their on-field results.

At the end of the day, Baseball Players need to focus on improving foot speed and athleticism, getting stronger and more powerful, and becoming more technically proficient with their movement skills.

Let's dive into how you can unlock and develop more speed that translates.

Quick Feet for Baseball Players

Understanding that on-field speed has multiple components means that we need to be actively trying to improve our ability to move our feet faster while maintaining control and power output.

While quick feet training is the most common area players focus on to get quicker, faster, and more agile - it's also the area of training where players can waste a lot of time if not done properly.

For younger players, classic quick feet and ladder drills are super valuable. These drills improve both coordination and kinesthetic awareness, ultimately allowing players to refine their movement skills and have a better basis for motor learning on the field.

But this is where some debate starts - are quick feet drills valuable for older and elite baseball players?

While this is often a spirited debate amongst Strength & Performance Coaches at all levels, let's skip the philosophical discussion and keep it practical. I can say that after working with thousands of baseball players at all levels of the game - I'm confident that quick feet drills are valuable for baseball players.

Saying that, it's important to make each one of these drills intensely intentional and deliberate. Going through the motion of these drills makes them essentially just a poorly executed conditioning drill. Instead, we want to make sure that players are focusing on getting dialed into their movement mechanics and finding better positions while pushing the upper limits of speed capacity.

That means that for quick feet drills, Baseball Players should focus on three primary aspects:

1. Lighter feet
   Baseball players can develop the tendency to get "heavy" in their feet, especially infielders who tend to have more physical movements. The golden rule here is that loud feet are slow feet. The slowest players tend to make a lot of noise in their footwork because they make heavy and aggressive steps, whereas the fastest players tend to be light and quiet in their footwork. We want to practice being light and on our toes for all of our quick feet drills.
   
   
2. Better Movement Patterns & Athletic Postures
   This is essential for players at all levels. Often when baseball players are challenged to move quickly, they default into tall postures and can find sloppy movement patterns. We want to use quick feet drills to challenge players to find low-hip positions that allow them to get into an athletic stance, thus creating better movement patterns that translate to fielding, base running, and reacting to plays.
   
   
3. Athleticism & Fluidity
   A fast player is an athletically fluid player. For younger players this is essential, but even for our elite players, we want to find drills that challenge them to move multi-directionally and find new movement patterns that we can master. This means choosing drills that aren't just straight lines, focusing on one repetitive movement, and require novel movement skills that mirror the unpredictable demands of baseball.
   

So while baseball players tend to love doing footwork drills, we need to make sure that we're hitting them with intensity and intention. More reps and pushing the pace aren't necessarily better here.

As we try to enhance that upper limit of speed capacity, it's important to recognize that we're not just making physical changes - but neuromuscular changes. This means that we don't want to turn this into an absolute bagger, but instead allow our body to recharge and find more speed for the next rep or set.

Recommended Further Reading:
Quick Feet Drills for Baseball Players - This article takes a deep dive into some of our favorite drills (with videos) that Baseball Players can use to improve their foot speed and athleticism.
The Best Ladder Drills for Baseball Players - Speed ladders seem to be a staple for most athletes, and this article breaks down the most effective drills for baseball-specific movement.

Change of Direction Development for Baseball Players

Improving your ability to change direction can completely transform your game.

If you look at today's most impactful players, they're often the ones with the highest ability to change direction with power and control.

For infielders, the ability to quickly change direction means getting to more ground balls and making plays that other defenders can't – like that sharp grounder in the 5-6 hole that requires a quick plant and explosive redirect to make the play at first. For outfielders, it means covering more range and cutting off balls in the gap – turning doubles into singles and preventing runs from scoring. And for base runners, it means taking extra bases, successfully stealing, and avoiding pickoffs – like reading a ball in the dirt and advancing from first to third when other runners would stay put.

When you have the elite ability to stop and start, cut sharply, or shift directions quickly - you have the ability to determine and dominate the play. Not only does this allow you to make more plays defensively, but as a baserunner, it means you're a constant threat that pitchers and defenses have to account for.

Simply put, more opportunities come from the ability to rapidly change direction, whether it's on defense or offense.

So does this mean we need to do more quick feet drills? Not quite.

While rapid and explosive first steps are essential for changing direction, there's also an intensive power and technical demand.

Let's think about fielding a ground ball up the middle, planting the back foot, and then explosively rotating to make the throw to first base.

This sequence means that we've started with speed, we're then rapidly absorbing that speed, and then expressing it in a completely different direction. A challenging set of movement patterns if we're really breaking it down.

Researchers and Sport Performance Coaches have broken this sequence (and all change of direction) into three distinct phases:

1. The Braking Phase – taking speed and rapidly decelerating, like a baserunner approaching second base preparing to round the bag
2. The Transition Phase – also called the "planting" phase, in which athletes have absorbed speed and are in a position to express power, like a third baseman planting to charge a bunt
3. The Propulsive Phase – where athletes have expressed power to accelerate in the opposite direction, like an outfielder redirecting to track a ball that's caught in the wind

This is helpful to understand, because it allows both players and coaches to create drills that focus on these demands, while also intensely feeling and finding better movement skills through these phases.

For baseball players, we place a lot of emphasis on trying to master that transition/planting phase. In comparing an elite player with a lower level player, this phase is where we can see the most significant differences.

The elite players, regardless of the type of change of direction, typically find lower positions that allow them to generate explosive power. In contrast, lower level players will often leak power by standing up, being too tall, or not fully absorbing into low positions that allow them to generate more power.

The best infielders in the world all share this ability to get low in transition moments, creating the perfect platform to explode and make the play.

Take the shortstop who needs to field a ground ball up the middle, stop his momentum, rotate his hips, and fire a throw to first base. Or the center fielder who has to sprint to his right, plant his foot, and redirect to make a diving catch on a ball slicing the other way. These game situations all demand elite change of direction ability.

So while this topic deserves a deeper dive, along with specific drills to improve your change of direction capacity, there are three areas to focus on if you want to take your CoD to the next level:

1. Power Expression - You want to get explosive? You need to train your strength and power to be able to generate more in each push and cut.
   
2. Finding Lower Postures - Sometimes this is a mobility challenge, especially with players with tight ankles or hips, but in most cases this is a movement skill that can be challenged and improved with deliberate practice. The ability to drop the hips quickly creates a more powerful base to push from.
   
3. Aggressive First Steps - Note that this isn't just quicker first steps. The ability to plant and generate power in a new direction requires aggressively hitting the gas. This is a combination of both short burst power expression and foot speed.
   
   

That's why we created the Relentless Explosive Speed program for baseball players - to specifically target these critical components with a proven system that translates to on-field performance.

Agility for Baseball Players

What's the difference between change of direction and agility?

Agility is commonly (and wrongfully) used as a blanket term for everything from quick feet training, to change of direction, to speed work.

The truth is, while agility may be one of the most important attributes for baseball players - it's also the most complex.

Let's quickly define agility so that we can look at it from a deeper perspective.

Agility has been defined as: "a rapid whole-body movement with change of velocity or direction in response to a stimulus".

This last part is the most important.

Agility is the ability to read and react to a developing play, see an opportunity and act on it, track a ball off the bat, or anticipate a runner's move - it's the ability to be responsive to the game.

Researchers have broken agility down into three key components:

1. Cognitive - this is the ability to read a stimulus (a play, an opportunity, etc.) and choose the appropriate physical response as quickly as possible. Mental agility could be an article in its own right.
   
   
2. Physical - after choosing the right physical response, how well can you physically respond? This involves strength/power, speed, footwork, etc.
   
   
3. Technical - this is more motor skill related, and can be closely related to our section on change of direction. How good are your movement mechanics, how low do you get in your CoD, simply put - what skills do you have to respond to a stimulus.
   
   

If we understand this, we can then understand that ladder drills or any sort of repeatable pattern drill isn't going to improve our agility. It might improve aspects of our agility, but unless we're intentionally creating drills that challenge us to read and react - we're not improving agility.

So if there's a heavy cognitive or mental component of agility - is it actually trainable?

The answer is absolutely yes.

Both in the gym, and in research, we're seeing that athletes can actively improve their agility with reactive-based drills designed to challenge their ability to "read" and then "react" with the appropriate movement skill or pattern.

Most commonly these are with a partner or coach.

With a partner, these often involve "mirror" drills - where one player leads and another player must follow. The most basic version of this can start with a simple mirror shuffle, and evolve into more complex drills that allow the lead player to create more movement variance and options. If you have a training partner or teammate nearby - we highly recommend you use these drills. Not only are they super beneficial, but they also demand a compete level that can be tough to find off the field.

For baseball players, these drills are particularly valuable for infielders who need to react to ground balls, but they're equally valuable for outfielders tracking fly balls and base runners reading pitchers and fielders.

With a Coach, parent, or anyone else, you can use an assortment of drills that involve responding to verbal or physical cues.

This could be as basic as having different colored cones laid out and having a Coach call out a color or number that you need to respond to.

As this evolves, we often like to challenge players to read our body positions starting with a point in a direction and evolving to reading postures such as which way the hips are pointed and responding accordingly.

As long as you're creative in creating a mental stimulus that requires you to read and react to - you can be endlessly creative with agility drills.

A couple of training considerations:

1. Make sure you do agility drills at the start of your workout. We want to make sure that you're fresh for all your agility work. Do these types of drills immediately after a warm up so that both your body is ready to fire and your nervous system is primed.
   
   
2. Make sure you're giving yourself adequate rest. Because agility is both cognitive and neuromuscular, research has shown that ideal work to rest ratio is 1 to 4-6, meaning that you should work all out in a short burst (e.g. 10s) with a long break (e.g. 40-60s). Focus on quality not quantity.
   
   
3. Compete and get aggressive. These drills are the perfect opportunity to really push the pace. Going through the motions here, or even just going 80%, essentially turns these drills into conditioning drills. We need to push the upper limit that we can read, react, and fire.
   
   

Strength & Power

Enhancing power is by far the easiest and most effective way to improve on-field speed.

That might seem like a bold statement with so many coaches and players focusing on quick feet drills - but we've seen hundreds if not thousands of players who unlock that extra gear in their first step through structured and intensive strength work.

Most of the elite players we work with in our coaching program will typically take time in the off-season to focus strictly on work in the gym. The number one thing they nearly all say getting back on the field is that they can't believe how much extra explosiveness they have in their movement and how much more dynamic their play has become.

The research supports this thesis too.

Studies of collegiate baseball players consistently show that measures of lower body power, like vertical jump, are strong predictors of on-field speed and performance. The correlation between power metrics and base stealing success has been demonstrated in multiple studies.

So, what is power?

Power = Force x Velocity.

We'll spare the sports science nerdy definition and simply say that power is the ability to express strength (force) as rapidly as possible (velocity).

This is actually super helpful for players to understand, for a handful of reasons:

1. Strength is paramount. Your ability to express power is ultimately defined by your level of strength. Strength can essentially be considered the horsepower of our engine. If you want more fire power, you need the strength to express it.
   
2. Power has a central nervous demand. Your ability to fire your strength is intensely CNS dependent. This means your power is defined by how efficiently and effectively your nervous system can recruit and fire your muscles.
   
3. Power isn't trained by doing 100s of box jumps. This is likely the most important takeaway. A lot of players hit box jumps for rep after rep and think that they're getting more powerful. You might be getting more efficient at jumping on a box, but you're not developing the strength and power that translates to explosive first steps and dynamic fielding on the diamond.
   
   

Think about what happens when a middle infielder executes a perfect double play turn. In less than a second, they need to catch the ball, transfer it to their throwing hand while simultaneously planting their foot on second base, and then generate enough rotational power to fire an accurate throw to first base ahead of a sliding runner – all while a baserunner is trying to take them out with a slide. That's power expression in action.

Understanding this means that there are two areas of focus for all baseball players in the gym.

First, they need to be actively developing strength. This isn't just functional exercises. It's developing the lower body strength that matters. In all of our programs, we make sure that we're developing the strength that translates with heavy lunges, split squats, hip thrusts, and deadlifts. Players that want to get faster need to get stronger.

Secondly, baseball players need to be developing the power that translates. There's a wide variety of training methodologies that baseball players can use to improve their power output. Popular methods such as plyometric exercises have been shown to specifically improve power output and speed measures in field sport athletes. We'll dive deeper into the types of power and the best way to train each in a separate article, but simply put - baseball players need to practice expressing force as rapidly as possible.

For baseball players, don't neglect rotational power. The ability to rotate explosively not only enhances bat speed and throwing velocity but also improves fielding capability by allowing you to change direction more powerfully. When a shortstop needs to go deep in the hole and make that Derek Jeter-style jump throw, it's rotational power that allows them to generate enough force to reach first base from an awkward body position. When an outfielder needs to quickly pivot and fire a throw to home plate to prevent a run, it's rotational power that creates the velocity on that throw.

Exercises like medicine ball rotational throws, landmine rotations, and cable woodchops can all develop this crucial aspect of baseball-specific power. We've seen players add 3-5 mph to their throwing velocity and significantly improve their range in the field after just 8 weeks of focused rotational power training.

That's why all of our baseball workout programs incorporate both strength and power development with specific emphasis on rotational power. Our Relentless Off-Season program was specifically designed to develop the type of power that translates to the field for baseball players.

Other Factors

If you've gotten this far, you likely realize that speed is a complex topic for baseball players.

While foot speed, strength/power, and agility/change of direction capacity are the core tenants that all baseball players should be focused on - there are a couple of other factors that we should consider.

We could consider this the bonus material. For most players, 90% of their speed gains will be from improving the above attributes, but these facts do make an impact.

Mobility & Speed

Stretching and mobility exercises can make you a faster player.

It's a concept that players rarely consider as enhancing performance, but optimal mobility is vital to movement mechanics and optimizing power transfer for speed and explosiveness.

Baseball players often develop tightness in key areas - particularly the hips, thoracic spine, and shoulders - due to the demands of the sport. While often players and coaches consider this a health focus rather than a performance focus - poor mobility will make you slower.

This can be attributed to creating suboptimal movement patterns that causes players to incorrectly utilize their body's natural kinetic chains and often find sloppy mechanics.

Think about a catcher who needs to drop into a low squat 150+ times per game, then explode out of that position to throw out a base stealer. Or a first baseman who needs to go into a full split to save an errant throw. Without proper mobility, these athletic demands become nearly impossible.

While the most notable example of this can be tight hips limiting your ability to get low in your fielding stance (and thus limiting the range to express power), it doesn't just stop there. Lack of ankle mobility prevents middle infielders from properly pivoting on double plays, thoracic spine stiffness limits rotational power for hitting and throwing, and poor shoulder mobility can restrict a pitcher's ability to properly decelerate after release. Every position has specific mobility demands that directly impact speed and performance.

A stretching and mobility routine isn't just to stay healthy, pain-free, and injury-proof the body - it pays dividends when it comes to performance.

Feel tight and restricted? It's slowing you down. Get into focused mobility work.

Recommended Further Reading:
5 Mobility Exercises Baseball Players Should Do Every Day
The Importance of Hip Mobility for Baseball Players

Body Composition & Speed

There's no way around this - the more extra fat you're carrying, the more you're slowing yourself down. We've tracked this with players in our program and consistently see that for every 1% drop in body fat, players typically shave about 0.05-0.1 seconds off their 60-yard dash time. That might not sound like much, but it adds up – a 3-4% body fat reduction can mean the difference between above-average and elite speed.

This is the specific reason why we created our Lean & Agile program. We'd constantly see players who were strong, powerful, and highly talented athletes just always missing that extra gear because they were carrying unnecessary weight. This isn't just opinion, research has shown this too, with body composition and speed being directly correlated in collegiate athletes.

It's easy to conceptualize. A player carrying extra weight needs to work harder, express more power, and has a higher cardiovascular and physiological demand on every movement.

For all positions, but especially middle infielders and outfielders who need to cover the most ground, body composition can make a critical difference in performance over the course of a game and season. Just imagine playing a doubleheader in 90-degree heat, or going into extra innings late in the season – that's when optimal body composition becomes a massive advantage. The outfielder who can still cover the same ground in the 12th inning as he did in the 1st has a significant edge over his competitors.

We take a deeper dive into this topic in the recommended article below, but the important takeaway is that if you want to be fast - you need to be lean.

Recommended Further Reading:
The Optimal Body Composition for Baseball Players

To Wrap It Up

Alright, so that’s all for this article. 

Our goal here wasn’t just to give you some quick feet drills or speed workouts to follow – but actually create in-depth understanding of how baseball players get faster. 

One trait we find with all of our pros is that they have an obsession with understanding the how and why behind their training – so that they can maximize their work and be focusing on the right thing. 

The key takeaway from today should be that speed can be improved. But it’s not about just speed drills – but it's the intense and intentional focus on improving all the attributes that translate to speed.

Structured Strength & Conditioning is the answer when it comes to speed development. 

If you’re looking to get really dialled in with your training, I encourage you to check out our Relentless Baseball strength & conditioning programs.

They’re the most comprehensive & proven training systems for baseball players that specifically focuses on the attributes baseball players need to enhance their game. We’ve seen thousands of players enhance their speed & velo while becoming more dynamic players. 

You can see all of the programs here. 

Now get out there & get relentless with your training! 

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