The times are lean for women’s softball – the IOC voted to drop the sport from the Olympic program.

Australia Won bronze at Beijing Australia Won bronze at Beijing
Images: Duane Hart Sporting Images

A “Back Softball” campaign, headed by the Australian hitter Danielle Stewart, was promptly organised. The girls lobbied tirelessly to have their sport reinstated for the 2016 Games (“It was a task that was very close to my heart,” says Stewart. “All of last year was spent on the road.”) But in the end it was wasted energy – golf and rugby were given the nod. “The next push will be for 2020,” says Stewart. But there’s a weariness in her voice: “It’s so far off.”

In Australia, it’s a body blow the sport can scarcely afford to take. Already the girls were operating on a shoestring budget – now the shoestring’s been snatched away altogether. Media attention has dried up, sponsorship dollars have evaporated. Without Olympic funding from the Federal government, the girls now have to pay their own way to every tournament. It’s taken a toll – of the 15 girls who won bronze in Beijing, just six will travel to Caracas this month for the World Championships.

And one of those six will be Stewart. A noted hitter who has now racked-up over 150 games for the Aussie Spirit, she hopes to slug her sport back into the Australian consciousness with World Championship gold. Here’s the program that will get her there.

Changing Times

Our gym work of late has been very different to what I’ve previously been exposed to. We used to do lots of short, sharp movements – lots of jumping and bounding. Over the past six months, however, we’ve had a new coach come on board – Jeremy Shepherd, the AIS strength coach – so we’ve gone into a different phase of lifting. Personally, I’ve benefitted a lot. I’ve noticed my core strength has improved and that’s really transferred to my hitting.

We do all these workouts in four-week blocks with the reps and sets varying each week. After a month, we switch programs. Ideally, we want to be lifting three times a week, but because we’re approaching the world champs we’re only doing two sessions. It’s still our responsibility, however, to do a lighter third session on our own time.

Building Bulk 

At the moment we have two solid weights sessions a week. In the warm-up stage we’ll start off with a snatch squat and dumbbell overhead walks. As warm-ups, these movements are meant to be very smooth, very controlled. After that, we move into the maximum power and strength section. Typically we’ll start this section with a front squat. We generally do three to five sets with reps varying between three to six. Rest in between sets is no more than a minute. From there we’ll move on to a dumbbell lunge. With this exercise the reps are higher, the sets lower – normally two to four sets of around ten reps. After that we do dumbbell bench, then a wide-grip seated row. These exercises are good because they break up the heavier leg work.

Having done this heavy workout, we then move into one of four different circuits. For example, we’ll do a shoulder circuit. This begins with medicine ball throws where we take a 2kg med ball and hurl it against a wall to replicate the throwing dynamics. After that we’ll take a med ball that’s connected to a rope and swing it against a wall to replicate the swing motion. We’ll then move to a seated row and lying dumbbell rotations for our shoulder blades. We’re not pushing large weights – all these exercises are done in sets of ten reps with the weight between three to five kilos. We’ll then finish the shoulder circuit with a “dumbbell combo” that includes bentover flys, dumbbell raises and side raises, all in continuous sets, so it’s a real cardio workout. We’ll normally do two repetitions of the circuit. After that we finish with a specific trunk circuit – we have four ab exercises that we repeat four times.