What We Do + FAQ
It's our mission to guide baseball and softball players to their fullest potential using validated methods, technology, and clear communication.
Ignite uses state of the art technology to capture and quantify every piece of your swing movement and ball flight.
The three pillars of Ignite’s hitting program are maximizing how quick and athlete can get their barrel into the zone, maximizing how long their bat is in the zone, and maximizing power output.
Technology that we use includes: Hittrax, Rapsodo, K-Vest, Blast Motion, Slow Motion Video Analysis and SpinBall (A Spin Rate Control Pitching Machine).
Ignite use a state of the art technology to not only quantify the flight of a thrown ball, but to also the stress on the arm.
The three pillars of Ignite’s throwing program is health, velocity, and command. Where health is the most important of the three.
Pulse, the wearable technology, allows us to quantify how much stress has been put on the UCL during a given throwing session, allowing us to program throwers in a way that maintains their health.
Other technology utilized: Rapsodo and Radar Guns
Ignite is different when it comes to strength training. The vast majority of the exercises that we do incorporate the whole body, and train the way the body actually moves when throwing, hitting and running.
This prepares athletes to compete on the field in a way that is unique, and well above industry standard.
This program is designed for throwers to improve their velocity, and for hitters to increase their exit velocity. Once the strength training component is done throwers will throw, and hitters will hit. Athletes that both pitch and hit can select hitting or throwing on a day-to-day basis.
When it comes to online training, we set up your programming every month to match the needs of your swing (we’ll have throwing plans soon). Almost everyone has a part of their swing that doesn’t work properly in hitting lessons, we are able to improve the movement, but not able to increase the power of the movement to the degree that all athletes need.
Strength training is important, the problem is most strength training does not support what athletes actually do when they hit and throw. Our strength training does, and you can do it from the comfort of your own home without buying thousands of dollars of workout equipment. We can work with athletes across the world, and athletes that already train with us in our facility.
For athletes across the world, you will submit us a hitting video and a movement screen every month. We will use this information to make a decision what type of plan you need, and what custom correctives you need to work on your movement deficiencies. One month later you’ll will send us another hitting video, and another movement screen so we can reevaluate. You may need to continue on the same plan or we may need to move you to a different plan to meet your needs. Plans start at $139 per month.
For athletes that train in the facility, we already have plenty of video of you, and we already know what movement deficiencies you have. Just sign up for the $79 a month plan and we’ll get started.
If you already do throw fast, hit hard, stay healthy, should you sign up for this? Absolutely, we know there are times where your schedule does not allow you to come in and train as often as you would like. This will give you something that you can do at home, to continue to improve even when your schedule does not allow you to make the trip to the facility.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should my son or daughter train?
Answer for athletes under 13 years old: In order for lessons to be successful, athletes will need to work on things at home so they can improve. Often times those things will take a while to master. So you will often need a week in between lessons to practice what you have learned. So if you’re doing lessons you’ll want to do one a week per lesson type you’re signing up for. So if you’re doing pitching lessons you only need one week. If you’re doing hitting lessons and pitching lessons you’ll need two a week, one of each.
Answer for athletes 13 years old and up: Let’s answer that question with a question, how good does your son or daughter want to be? And what is their needs? In sports you can simplify development by placing it into two categories. One category is skill and the other category is athleticism. Things like your strike zone discipline, the sequence of your movements, and your throwing accuracy fall into the skill category and are easily worked on in a lesson format. Athleticism is much harder to work on in a lesson format. Things that fall into the category of athleticism are how fast you can run, how much power you’re able to generate with the rotation of your body, and how fast you can throw. Moving the needle in the athleticism category is a long-term commitment to training the body to execute movements with power, stability and proper sequence. If you want to build your athleticism the best way to do that is to train in our Throw Fast, Hit Hard, Stay Healthy program. You’ll want to train with us two or three times a week and an additional time on your own.
Not everyone has the same needs though. If your kid is physically strong and fast, and needs a lot of skill work, lessons will be the route we’d recommend. If your kid is a solid baseball or softball player but doesn’t hit, throw, or run fast enough, you should be focusing most of your energy on our small group strength work.
The reality is most kids need improvement both on skill work and in the athleticism department, so they probably need a bit of both. But talk to one of our instructors, they will be able to help you on an individual level.
My son trains at Ignite, does that help him obtain a spot on US Elite Baseball?
The straightforward answer is no, but there are some shades of gray. In that if you’re training at Ignite and we know that you’re good enough to be on one of our teams because of what you display in training at Ignite, that will definitely help you make a team. But when it comes to overall team selection, we can’t play favorites when it comes to selecting of teams.
The purpose of our travel teams are to prepare players for the next level of baseball, so if you were a middle school player we are preparing you for high school baseball. If you are a high school player we are preparing you for college baseball or higher. The reality is there’s only a certain number of kids that A, want to play college baseball, and B, have the ability to potentially do so. Many kids play travel baseball just to compete and have fun with their friends. There’s nothing wrong with that, but our program is for athletes that also want to strive to play baseball at the next level.
Should I sign my kid up for Hitting VS?
If your kid is 11 or older with solid barrel to ball skills, Yes. You need to train to hit game relevant pitch speeds. This is how we get you ready.
When working with throwers/pitchers how do you set up the year to make sure kids stay away from overuse injuries.
During the season March-October (Schedule is different for kids that don’t play fall ball): Everything that we do in facility is based on how much the athlete has been throwing in the past week/month. When the athlete threw, how intense the throwing was, and how much they threw, are all important factors that we consider. There are lessons and group trainings where athletes don’t throw at all, in these scenarios we work on movement things that the athlete needs to improve on, as well as arm care (stimulating blood flow, building stability and functional mobility around the arm/shoulder complex).
Everybody has deficiencies in the way they move and our program is designed to correct those in a way that supports the throwing motion. We look at no throw days as opportunities to improve the way the athlete moves.
The Off Season October – February: October and November are times when we can work on the athleticism of the athlete without concerning ourselves too much about throwing. Athletes during this window may throw a little bit, but it’s not the main focus of our training.
December, January, and February: High school tryouts typically happen in late February. So between December and February the primary focus of our training is preparing our body for the workload that we know is coming during the season (both from a throwing perspective, and from an overall rotational perspective). We’ll slowly build your throwing work load up so when the season hits in full force you’re clicking on all cylinders and the risk of injury is low. Strength will still be a focus, but it will dominate less of our time in the facility as we approach the start of the season.Us