Is Weightlifting Safe for Softball Players?

In this week’s video blog, I explain why Olympic lifts are extremely beneficial and safe for softball athletes when coached correctly. I hope I am able to dispel some misconceptions and reconstruct your perspective. I’ve also added a video of one my athletes, a high school freshman pitcher, performing the lifts. The final video is a montage of training sessions from the UMass Lowell softball team’s off season workouts. This is the best collegiate softball training video I’ve seen to date.

Here are few diagrams that identify the critical similarities between the the push off phase of the windmill sequence and the acceleration phase of an Olympic lift. In the first pictures, I use the green lines to show you the similarity in joint angles in the set up. In the other pictures, the red line represents the force applied into the ground by the athlete and the green line demonstrates the direction of the reaction force and subsequent movement of the body