Pitching under pressure is what Colby Lewis does best. “It’s all or nothing,” Lewis said after his Texas Rangers dropped Game One of the World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals Wednesday night. “You go out there and you don’t know if you’re going to get the ball again … It’s kind of hard not to get pumped up for it, you know?”
Oh, we know. The Rangers will send Lewis to the hill to start Game Two tonight, and with good reason. Lewis posted a 3-0 record last postseason, including the Rangers’ only World Series win against the San Francisco Giants, plus two wins against the defending champion New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series.
The usually calm and collected Lewis was getting a different kind of “pumped” this past off-season, and the hardcore workouts he completed have been a significant factor behind his achievements over the past two postseasons.
His “Hour of Power” workouts, which he performed with Pat Brown, owner and operator of Lifetime Fitness in Lewis’s hometown of Bakersfield, Calif., consisted of high volume, high-intensity circuits to improve his conditioning while building muscle through the process of hypertrophy (learn more about weightlifting techniques for building muscle).
“I want to keep his muscles full-looking while maintaining a lot of power,” Brown says.
The video above presents the first section of Lewis’s “Hour of Power,” targeting his upper-body muscles. And watch Game Two of the World Series tonight on Fox. First pitch is set for 8:05 p.m. EDT.