explosive

Take a look around at your gym, weight room, or training facility. Do you see a squat rack? Good. What about a bench, free weights, or maybe plyometric boxes? Awesome. Maybe if you’re one of the fortunate ones, you see some resistance bands, medicine balls, or kettlebells? Terrific. This means your place for training is like 100% of the population. This can be a good thing. You have strength equipment, speed equipment, and power equipment. This sounds like it covers all the aspects in being a great athlete. However, the majority of training programs lack the single critical component in creating the ELITE athlete. This is of course being prepared for every chaotic movement involved in sports. Continue reading →

I know this may seem like an interesting title to one of my blogs as I normally write about conditioning regimens, workout equipment, or how to improve an athlete’s baseball specific skill set. However, my father and I have realized in the past few years that although a lot of the products Oates Specialties carries is designed with a baseball, softball, or throwing athlete in mind, the equipment has one universal characteristic: athleticism. What I mean by that is most of our conditioning tools encourage, require, or even demand that an athlete be as explosive and athletic as he or she can. This realization led us to begin promoting our equipment not just as baseball specific, but as tools that transcend individual sports to the broader theme of developing well conditioned and explosive athletes. Continue reading →

Giant flat band resistance loops are fairly common in the sports and conditioning world. However, many people do not know just how versatile these bands can be. They can be used to assist stretching hamstrings, groin, hips, glutes, and quads. Others use them in the weight room as they wrap the bands around the ends of weight bars while doing exercises such as bench press and squats. Continue reading →

These past couple of posts may be a complete revelation to you or it could be something you've been incorporating for years just from intuition. A little over a year and a half ago it was a total eye-opener for me. I had been seriously training since I was about 17 years old and yet my world changed at age 23 in terms of training. I had just arrived home from playing in the Appalachian League and met with my pitching coach/trainer Ron Wolforth (of Pitching Central and The Baseball Ranch) to talk about the upcoming offseason. He gave me a short lesson on the body's energy systems (much like my last article) and how we needed to target the ATP system. Continue reading →