A lot of trainers spend a good portion of baseball pitching workouts using baseball pitching drills. However, the vast majority of these drills aren’t really very effective and don’t accomplish what they are aiming for, which many times is greater pitching speed. The issue with these drills is that they concentrate on one particular part of the pitch and/or one part of the body that is used during the pitch (usually the arm) to the exclusion of the rest and in the process can end up throwing off the rest of the pitch rather than enhancing the pitch. Doing a lot of exercises can also make a pitcher think too much when they are pitching and over analyze what they are doing, which has a negative effect in the long run.

The towel drill is one of the baseball pitching drills that is generally not very effective. This drill focuses only on arm extension, and correct pitching requires the whole body to work together. If you concentrate on one part of the pitch to the exclusion of everything else, you can actually end up throwing off the whole pitch. Other common baseball pitching drills that do not really assist include the long toss or using weighted balls, or pitching from flat ground instead of the mound.

Any drill that focuses on increasing arm strength is not going to help improve the velocity of the pitch because velocity doesn’t originate in the arm, it comes from the rest of the body. You use your whole body in order to throw a pitch, and if you learn pitching tips about the way the body works you can use that to your advantage in order to throw the ball harder without actually using more arm strength. If you learn to pitch properly your arm will be doing less of the work and be unlikely to feel pain after just a short time pitching.

The only type of baseball pitching drills that can really help are those that are designed to assist pitchers train their bodies the proper ways of pitching, and teach them the positions that they should travel through during a perfect pitch. If a pitcher can get their body trained to use the correct pitching techniques they will be able to throw at a greater speed and with high power. A great way to understand where a pitcher might be having problems with body positioning is through the use of a video camera that allows you to go frame by frame and in slow motion when viewing the video.