Are short and longterm goals really that important? Is distance running useful for pitchers? Or is it the devil? And, what should we all know about launch angle and its importance in baseball?

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Full Transcript: EP99 – How Important Is Launch Angle? Distance Running & Are Goals Actually Useful?

Welcome back to Dear Baseball Gods. On today’s podcast. We’re going to cover three different topics. Number one, is distance running important? Is it bad? Is it good? We’ll figure it out. Number two, how important is launch angle a? Is this something useful to work into someone’s swing? Is it good, bad, the devil, whatever we’re going to solve that as well.

Lastly, we talked a little bit about longterm goals. How important are they? Are they overrated or are they underrated? Okay. So first is distance running important. Now distance running has been demonized by much of the strength and conditioning community of which I’m a part. The basic tenants here are that distance running use a different energy system than you use when doing an explosive, uh, action.

So swinging a bat is an anaerobic, very explosive exercise. And we obviously all know that you can’t maintain that sort of effort level, that sort of intensity or explosiveness over a long distance or long period of time. Right. So where you’re jogging for 30 minutes or biking for 30 minutes or whatever.

You know, those user aerobic system, it’s a much different type of exercise then, you know, doing something like throwing a medicine ball, throwing a baseball, hitting a baseball, sprinting, jumping things that are anaerobic that are very explosive. So. The big thing here is for years and years and years pitchers just ran polls.

And one of my favorite books, ball four, they talk about how much running is done. And there’s a, an ongoing discussion in that book, even back, which was written in the seventh or the, it was written in 1968, I think, uh, that you know, is running actually beneficial. Like we, we run it every day is pictures, but why,