Slogging

Slogging is not in the Oxford dictionary so don’t bother looking it up. It appears disguised as training, usually included as integral part of warm-up or disguised as aerobic work. I am beginning to think it is a disease. It consists of thousands of very percussive negative foot contacts repeated very slowly. Slogging is slower than jogging. Yesterday I was driving by one of the Major League baseball complexes here where I live when I saw a painful sight up ahead on the sidewalk. There were eight big guys (pitchers) slogging along doing their “flush run” to remove the lactic acid after they pitched. All I could think of was why? It was a flashback to 1986, I thought that we had progressed from this. What does this have to with pitching or anything for that matter? It is certainly not preparing for the ballistic explosive movements involved in pitching. It is not removing lactate because that was metabolized in the time it took them to walk off the mound. Slogging will make you slow and compromise explosiveness. So why do it? It occupies time. If you slog eventually it will compromise velocity. It is a simple proposition you are what you train to be. If you train slow, sooner not later, the body will adapt and you will be slower. Instead use short sprints, in place jumps, short shuttle runs, power endurance circuits, intervals with short rest on a slide board, all would be better use of time than slogging. If you feel you need to do aerobic work then find a mode that allows the pitcher to work with a degree of intensity and that is low impact. If you do aerobic work I recommend nothing over twenty minutes and no more than one out of every six workouts. Remember the goal is create adaptable rather than adapted athletes. Slogging is not even good for general fitness, it creates more problems than it solves.