The Mariners say bye-bye to barbells

No pumping iron for the M’s:

Just got out of the Mariners weight room down here, which, I have to say, is almost completely devoid of weights. The Mariners, as we mentioned yesterday on the blog, have signed a three-year contract with Dr. Marcus Elliott of Santa Barbara, Calif., founder of the Peak Performance Project (P3). Elliott has been working with Mariners trainers the past couple of months to overhaul the team’s entire approach to fitness. In a nutshell, the idea is to focus on reducing injuries and making Seattle players more athletic through a series of workouts that have little to do with traditional weightlifting.

Instead, the team will focus on strengthening the movements used in baseball -- things like the ability to generate force through a player’s hip rotation.

Used to be that people said baseball players shouldn’t lift weights because they were supposed to stay limber and loose. Then everyone lifted weights and credited that for all the home runs. Then everyone said that the weight lifting didn’t do anything, it was really the steroids. Now we’re trying something new.

I have no idea what sort of conditioning really works the best. Usually the best results are realized by whatever conditioning program the really good baseball players are doing. If the Mariners win 95 games this year more teams will sell the weights next year. If they win 79 people will forget this little experiment ever happened.