As ever, we remain strong adherents of Driveline Baseball for arm care, throwing training, and velocity development. Having moved his business to open his own facility, we only get to see Coach Kyle Boddy weekly. Arbolito remains dedicated, following the program, throwing as prescribed in the garage when we cannot get to the Driveline shop in Puyallup, Washington to train in person.
Kyle's move from the Rips Baseball facility also left open the question of where arbolito would carry-on his off-season strength and conditioning. Last offseason, Kyle wrote his program and the kid downright blossomed by spring. That mystical combination of good food, hard training and lifting, and a stew of adolescent chemistry flowing through his body lead to remarkable strength gains and physical changes. Rips puts together a very good winter workout program every year. But this year arbolito was ready for a custom performance program to support his gifts and put him on an even more productive path.
For us, the choice was an easy one, even in Seattle, a market with manifold outlets for advanced athletic training. Riley Athletics is what I call a "boutique" gym and looks nothing like what you find in 24-Hour Fitness or LA Fitness gyms. Five power racks, a ready collection of rubber bumper- and iron Olympic plates, Prowler Sleds, battle ropes, a nauseating slew of medicine balls and kettlebells, this place demands purpose and exacts work. Owner Ryan Riley is a Seattle kid with a pro-baseball career and a Clemson degree in, as he describes it, "Weightlifting."
Ryan and his trainers run specialty performance training, of mostly baseball athletes, in very small class format. Sharp, short, diverse workouts hit major attributes of athletic performance in every well-rounded session: absolute strength, speed strength, explosive power, and endurance. The added ingredients of attention to formal detail creates a great gym habit for the high school, collegiate, and professional players training at Riley Athletic. Top it with a special sauce emphasizing mobility training and collaborating with physical therapy professionals, and you have a performance dish that represents a real training value for athletes striving to play their sport at increasingly more competitive levels.
The nature of a niche is the narrowness of the market. Riley Athletic expands his business model running beginning and intermediate strength training, also in class format, and has made a stock-in-trade of the fitness bootcamp. Increasingly popular in the gym business now, and found under many brand names, metabolic conditioning is the combination of groups of seemingly random exercises in varying patterns of intensity and duration, with very short invervals of rest. The bootcamp moniker is appropriated from military bootcamp training where recruits go through several weeks of regimented exercise designed to accomplish physical training and identify the mentally tough soldiers.
Having watched arbolito integrate Riley's athletic training and pick up almost instantly where he left off after last winter's training, I had to admit I was really impressed with the Riley program. At about the time I was sold on the athletes' class at Riley Athletic, Riley offered a six-week bootcamp personal "challenge." The Challenge represented a great training value that I jumped on as quickly as a Chinook salmon on a smelt plug. The next few posts will hopefully highlight (or lowlight as the case may be) some of the experiences I gained during the Riley Personal Transformation Challenge I just completed.
