My brother is a baseball player (He's a junior in HS on the Varsity team) and was wondering if it would be beneficial or not to have him go out with me on long rides as i hate riding alone.) He does ride sometimes but only for about 10 miles. My dad said that cycling does not use fast-twitch muscles that running fast requires and said cycling wouldn't be that great for him to develop speed. (He is a biologist/geneticist so he knows [partially] what he is talking about)

So would taking him out for 30-40 miles a day during the summer hurt him more than help? It'll definitely help his aerobic capacity but not too sure about his running.

No offense, but baseball isn't the most aerobic sport. Of course cycling would help overall fitness, but wouldn't do much good in relation to baseball.

The large quads I developed from cycling helped my sprinting a little bit. Allowed me to push off the starting block a bit harder than the rest of my friends. So maybe that will help him sprinting from base to base?

Other than that I don't see how cycling would help him at all. Like soccerismylife said, baseball isn't the most aerobic sport so he probably doesn't need really good cardio, although it would he good to have. Just in case;)

If he's someone that wants to build some quickness (like stealing bases) or if he likes to hit those "in the ballpark" home runs, it wouldn't hurt to build up your aerobic fitness. Besides that, it will keep him in even better shape than if he did nothing for aerobics.

Tell him to go for it. Mix it up with lots of endurance rides and some interval training for building up speed.

Koffee

My brother is a baseball player (He's a junior in HS on the Varsity team) and was wondering if it would be beneficial or not to have him go out with me on long rides as i hate riding alone.) He does ride sometimes but only for about 10 miles. My dad said that cycling does not use fast-twitch muscles that running fast requires and said cycling wouldn't be that great for him to develop speed. (He is a biologist/geneticist so he knows [partially] what he is talking about)

So would taking him out for 30-40 miles a day during the summer hurt him more than help? It'll definitely help his aerobic capacity but not too sure about his running.


P.S. Tell your dad that if he's doing the intervals and working on power drills, you ARE working fast twitch muscle fibers. But if your dad was talking about pure endurance rides, it will not build up fast twitch muscle fibers as much. Still, there are always ways to train so that you're doing tempo training rides and lactate threshold training rides. Then fast twitch muscle fibers will come into play.

Koffee

I am not an expert on fast/twitch versus slow/twitch muscle groups, I'd listen to Koffee on those issues, but I was a baseball player for a long time. Where I could see potential benefits and overlap in muscle groups would be with pitching and batting. Despite what many may think, pitching and batting strength comes predominately from the LEGS. For a pitcher, the power comes from the thrust off the mound and for a batter, the rotation of the hips generates batspeed. Nolan Ryan, who continued to throw in the high 90's well into his forties, would ride a exercise bike for a hour after every game he pitched.