Getting back into the swing of it: July ASA Baseball

Getting back into the swing of our plyos/conditioning classes at ASA Baseball is going to take a while. Lisa came to the class today. It was good to see her. She's been talking about coming for a long time now. I brought the fan again today. The breeze from the fan feels soooooo good! I'm glad I started bringing it. I think I may have to buy one for ASA, if they can't figure out to buy one themselves.

Started with ladders. Each ladder was done two times. The usual:

• LR-RL-LR-RL
• hop outside, hop inside
• traversing the ladders facing the wall, L in, R on top, L in, R on bottom
• ali shuffle
• hopscotch: L, both outside
• hopscotch: R, both outside
• hopscotch: L, both outside, R, both outside, together, both outside
• hip rotations: both outside, then twist 90° so that one foot is in square one, the other in square two, twist back so that both feet are outside, advance & twist so that one foot is in square two, the other in square three, continue.
• hip rotations with the other foot leading
• hip rotations alternating leading foot
• L in, L out
• R in, R out

Phew! We're warm now!

Running a gi-nor-mous shuffle circle (there may have been 20+ stations), shuffle one or two steps in, then back out to the next cone. Some of the shuffles required several steps, others were closer. We went clockwise, then counterclockwise. After the first set of clockwise/counterclockwise, we did it again, with a ball thrown at us, which we had to throw back. The weight of the ball increased from 6# to 8# as we did more sets.

We then did passing shuffles. Two people stood about 6' apart from each other and, following the starter's lead, shuffle the length of the room, pushing a medicine ball between each other. We shuffled down and back three times for one set. We did three sets.

Next was weighted walking lunges. Holding a weight with arms at about 90° (I did 25#), lunge walk the length of the room down and back, twisting with the weight on the lunge. The head stays looking front, only the torso twists. The first set was down and back twisting to the outside of the forward leg. The second set was twisting to the inside of the forward leg. The last set was twisting outside on the way down and inside on the way back.

Next was box jumps. We were taking it easy today, so we did eight jumps landing both feet, eight jumps landing right foot only, and eight jumps landing left foot only. I told Lisa the trick on landing on one foot is to pretend until the very last possible moment that you were going to land both feet. Otherwise, you'll balk or mess up some odd way. Gino enthusiastically agreed.

The last was abs. We did minimum 45 seconds of the usual suspects:

• bicycles
• russian crunches
• V ups
• 6" leg lifts
• lower back
• weighted balanced twists
• opposite leg V ups
• partner leg throw downs
• partner push downs

Easing back into. Yeah. Right.