August 4, 2025 • 45 mins
Krista, Ashley, and Laura are back together in this episode to break down the real reason cookie-cutter training plans fall short. From strength and conditioning to pitching and hitting development, they share what true individualization looks like and how coaches can actually apply it.
Topics Covered:
How individualization impacts pitching and hitting development
Why strength and skill need to be aligned
Using data to make informed decisions
The difference between mechanics and patterns
Why experimentation leads to better training
How to take ownership of coaching outcomes
This episode is a must for coaches ready to ditch the copy-paste model and build training plans that truly fit their athletes.
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VkUakrUwAJI
Also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:04):
All right, the gang is all together again again this week
and next week we will be recording live from Pitch stock.
So if you don't already have your Pitch Stock ticket, we have
a few more in person tickets andthen virtual's always available.
Virtual is you could join live, you can interact if you join
(00:24):
live, you can ask questions, we want to do the chat, you can
hear everything or we also provide the recordings to
everyone that purchase it. So if you can't be at every
single session, don't have that be an excuse not to be there.
So it's going to be it's always fun.
I was like this year, you know, we're becoming pros at it.
So I'm like stressed that I'm not stressed about it, but I'm
not stressed about it. It's going to be great.
(00:45):
So join us, talk about return topitch in game data,
individualizing pitchers, which is going to be part of our topic
today. What else we got that we're
talking about incorporating datafor the first time for Staffs,
strength and conditioning for pitchers.
Yeah, got a lot of good topics. So be there or don't.
(01:08):
You'll miss out, but that's being there.
All right, So today's topic, we were talking about some of our
college athletes and sort of their transition back into
campus. And this concept that has come
up in a variety of ways, sort oflike first sparked our brain
from our college athletes. But it's come up in some of the
(01:29):
conversations we've had with college coaches as we're going
into the year of helping supportcollege Staffs.
It comes up with teams and it also comes up with athletes who
reach out to us and want to kindof understand our training and,
and our training model, which isreally this topic of
individualization. So obviously one of our things
(01:49):
is that all of our programs for our athletes are individualized.
We feel pretty strongly that there should be some level of
individualization, but I think often that concept is
misinterpreted and feels really out of reach.
Sometimes when you're a college coach, for instance, and you're
trying to work with 20 hitters, or you're a team coach and
(02:10):
you're trying to work with a, you know, a team or you're an
instructor and you're trying to figure out like this one-on-one
verse group model and what makessense.
And so I think, you know, a lot of the expectations around
individualization sometimes makeit try to be synonymous with
one-on-one training or that, youknow, me and Ashley are going to
(02:36):
be in a cage next to each other hitting and every single thing
we do is going to be different. And so and that level of
individualization is required. And that's really not what
individualization for us looks like.
And so when people feel like it's out of reach in Group
settings, I often just think like it.
(02:56):
That's just because you're maybekind of misunderstanding what it
might look like for athletes. It doesn't need to feel so out
of reach. And really, it should make some
of your job easier. So you would, you know, attack
the hitters or pitchers issues more and also a little bit more
hands off on like you don't needto be in every sort of like
(03:16):
station with them for them to get something out of it.
So we just going to want to likedive through a few examples of
that. Maybe I'll just first layout
kind of how we do programming onan individualized basis and
Ashley can add from the pitchingside and then we can get into
some like specific areas. This comes up in college really
is the big one. But we, you know, all of our
(03:39):
athletes that start with us are going to have some level of
information that they start withus.
So that could be at the most minimal just what they give us.
So playing level, you know, age,we'll have an idea of puberty,
past injuries, what pitches theythrow up their pitcher, just
like general goals. That would be the absolute most
(04:01):
basic information that we would have on an athlete.
Obviously, the level of individualization that can be
done on that athlete is not as great, but we can take into
consideration their age, their training age, their time of
year. You know, there's some level and
really most of that would be like a periodization concept for
that athlete and not as much individualized to their sort of
(04:21):
mechanics of performance. Most of our athletes on top of
that have some sort of performance data.
So ball flight, we have an idea of exit velocity that speed some
general, you know, what pitches do they do, you know, hit well
launch angle for pitching, we have an idea of how they just
break sort of like a pitch profile.
And so that would feed us another level of information of
(04:43):
based on what we see here, theseare the types of things we would
want to attack in training. And then obviously the most
detailed version of what we would receive is that someone
starts with our bio mechanics assessment.
So we get the full story of, yes, this is your performance,
and then also this is how you move inside the skill.
And you know, here's the kind ofareas that we want to attack.
So once we have that information, that gives us
(05:05):
different levels of individualization.
What that doesn't mean is that Sally that only has an intake
form, you know, starts with a template and Susie with a
biomechanics assessment, we go line by line and change it.
That's not true. The the bio mechanics assessment
gives us some buckets, some general buckets of some of the
(05:25):
patterns of the things that we see.
You know, we see loss of posturein the swing.
We see a lack of rotation. We see, you know, different
things that come up. That's and we have some general
systems in place for how we attack those things given those
and we give an idea of what datawe're watching and that's the
concept. Sally that struggles with
(05:46):
posture. This program might look similar
to Susie who you know lacks somerotation at contact that we
might attack some of those things in the same way.
But what I think is important going into that is that the
athlete is very educated and what they are trying to attack
and that they can kind of control that process on their
own as well. So that's how we do programming.
(06:07):
So if someone's coming into our facility to do that, they are
coming in with other athletes, but they are all following their
own individual programs and theyare working through that in a
group setting. So I will have a sense of if
Susie's working on loss of posture and she has hook em in
her program, the types of thingsthat we might want to watch for
(06:27):
that for her. And we would just give some
limited feedback and cues on that and she would work through
that. So that's how we think of
individualization. I think sometimes there's this
idea that, like I said, every line item needs to be different
or I need to be standing on top of that kid for it to be
individualized. Or obviously there's the other
extreme and we can get into thison the hitting side where we're
(06:50):
like, I have 20 kids so there can't be any individualization.
We literally just go through stations together and we do all
the same things. There's kind of those extremes
of understanding it, but I thinkjust getting this idea of what
does it mean to be individualized?
I think it's important for athletes to understand this too,
because I think sometimes when athletes don't feel like someone
is right on top of them or they see that they're doing a similar
job to another athlete, they're like, I didn't even get any
(07:13):
individual work. It's like that also is probably
a little bit of an extreme view of that.
So it's this like balance of understanding that.
Did I miss anything with that concept?
I don't think so. I've got a lot of shit to say,
just wrote. Down.
Yeah, Go ahead, go ahead. Shocking, shocking.
No one. OK.
One of the things I that came tomy brain as you were talking is
(07:35):
I think individualization just generally, I don't think people
coaches always get it right, ButI think generally it's
understood that individualization, some level of
it is necessary, at least in thecollege level in pitching,
because they're everyone has different pitches, right?
Like there is literally an individual nature to what
(07:56):
pitchers do. She has a great change up.
This pitcher struggles with change up.
She's an up ball pitcher, she's a down ball pitcher.
So like we just kind of get thatconcept.
So I'm going to revisit that. But I do think it's interesting
that I think generally hitting really gets the short end of the
stick. I feel like that's no pun
intended, maybe pun intended, but yeah, it was.
(08:16):
But I think hitting really gets the short end of the stick in
that because it's like, oh, it'sswing, it's your swing, it's
posture, it's rotation. And it can become these really
simple buckets. Not to say that you don't start
with these buckets. It's the same in pitching.
It's like your challenge is and there's there's more specific of
like, oh, why isn't that athleterotating?
(08:37):
Well, where does it start? How do we target it?
So it does always start at the like mechanics level for sure.
And there's a bucket and then there's a more individualized
like component to why that athlete even fits in that
bucket. The reason why I think Hayden
gets the short end of the stick is because there's so many
athletes, they don't have individual ball flight.
(08:57):
And so we see coaches kind of goafter these very generalized
buckets. Maybe it is just she does, she's
working on rotation and she's working on foster.
I don't know. I'm, I'm kind of making shit up
here. But like you were just putting
those two buckets And sometimes it's as simple as like we've
seen like motor preference. I see where that where people
want to lean into something likethat.
She's aerial terrestrial. Now there's a whole nother
discussion on whether or not youcan even buck it like that and
(09:20):
training adaptations, whatever. But that's not what we're here
to talk about. What we're here to talk about is
when you just take here's one bucket and that's where 50% of
my hitters go. And here's another bucket and
that's where 50% of my hitters go.
You are it's it's completely missing the mark because in
pitching, take away the pitch types, What you are still
working on is OK, she's this general bucket.
(09:42):
Where in her patterns, where andwhy is that happening?
Where is it like starting and and unraveling in her patterns?
And then what impact is that having on her arm?
So then what implements we've we've talked about this before
of like training implements, overload, underload, all of
these things. What is that doing to her arm?
That same athlete who is struggling with rotation A, this
(10:02):
is a pitcher, Athlete B also struggles with rotation, but
athlete A, what it does, it's turn into excessive elbow
flexion for her or a reduction, meaning her arms outside of her
trunk. And the other athlete it ends up
in being in like a really stiff arm action.
So you have to, what our assessment process is about is,
yes, it starts as a bucket, but the individual nature of why you
(10:23):
have to be able to attack at theroots versus symptoms and then
the arm is what matters. And it's the same in hitting.
It's why we have these discussions.
You can't just say, oh, it's this bucket and that bucket, but
what if then the results of thatis that this athlete's barrel
pack goes here versus here. This is now the individual layer
of like she needs a short bat with a, you know, this whatever,
(10:45):
you know, whatever environments you're designing with, she's
going angle in, angle out. She's being we're throwing her
balls that look like this at this level, at this speed with
this bat. This is where all this comes in.
So in my mind, yes, of course there's individualization and
extra layer of that for pitchers, because now there's a
whole nother. It's why programming takes
forever for pitchers because we start with that which is
(11:07):
identical to hitters, that's an identical process of
individualization. And then there's this extra
layer of like, OK, literally what are our goals for her drop
ball? What are the goals for that
curveball, right? So there's this next layer of
pitch by pitch individualization, which makes
just programming for pitchers more.
It takes more. So do I think that it takes as
much to program to individualizeprogramming for hitters?
(11:30):
I don't, but there's also more of them right and on a team.
And so I think when we're talking to college level, you
could talk about the youth level.
I still think the lesson model pitchers show up and they don't
individualize shit. They just all are doing the same
drills or whatever. So of course there are worlds
that exists like that and that'sjust like, I don't need to be
condescending, but like we don'treally have time to talk about
(11:51):
that. That's just bad, you know?
And so I think when we're reallytalking about the college level,
I do think coaches, they may notgo about individualization in a
way that maybe we think is best,but they are individualizing
because of the nature of the of the beast.
And I just think hitting, we miss it, man.
We go with one blanket, you go and well, I.
Think I think with a. Bucket of whites like that is so
(12:12):
I. Think what takes a lot of, I
think what does take a lot of time for hitting is the the
tracking of the data on the backend.
It's why so the visualizations we're trying to create are
helpful. But yeah, when you have 20 kids
and you're trying to watch trends, it's why their education
on it is important. It's why narrowing down what
you're watching. So I have an athlete who just
(12:33):
assessed and she has her athletemeeting today.
I mean, I was going through her information.
This is the type of things we would see from an assessment and
hit her. She has she like loses posture
in her swing. That's a kind of common things.
Or during her move she loses posture.
She has very high exit velocity.This kid that's already
committed to Division One, she'sgot good power, but in her ball
(12:54):
flight, so we see in her bio mechanics, she loses posture.
She gets under rotated because of it.
It's not actually impacting exitvelocity that much.
So that's interesting for her, which means she probably even
has a higher elite exit velocityon the table, but she doesn't
get to low pitches. So for her specifically, because
of how she loses her posture andthe body position she gets in
(13:16):
when she rotates, she can't get her barrel to that low pitch.
And so as an example, that kid. So she loses her sort of
backside early. Her, you know, the weight she
has on her back leg comes up early and it kind of pulls her
out of posture. So that is something we see in
many hitters. That is a bucket.
I would say that we would have of like she needs to be able to
(13:38):
kind of stabilize through the back leg longer as she's going
through, you know, the start of rotation.
And so we might do something forthat athlete like a hookum start
type, like a sort of pivot starttype is another one we might do
where we're really trying to like have her sit, it's not a
great term, but sit in that backleg longer and hold posture.
(13:59):
And that might look very similarto Susie right next to her that
also struggles with posture. And that's what happens.
Now, similar to what you're saying, what we see is that
those two hitters though likely have different results of that.
So Susie might lose posture and what that causes her to do is
she hyperextends the rotation and she actually can't get the
(14:20):
up pitch. And so those what we attack for,
those things are what you're saying.
That's what determines the different angles we're going
after. It determines the different bats
often that they're swinging outside of just like normal
overload training. And then and sort of most
importantly, it informs how I talk to those two people about
(14:40):
what our goals are in training, what they should expect.
Listen, you your mis hits when you are struggling with this
look like XA low pitch is going to go straight to the ground for
you. Up pitch is going to go like,
you know, I there's a college hitter we have right now that
does that. She gets a kind of a weird funky
bat path. And so she has Max been in her
program. And when she's not making
(15:01):
adjustments, the balls go, they're singing misses or they
go straight up in the air. And she knows that we're working
through posture. It's giving her feedback.
It's specific to her. It's telling her what we're
going for. And then the data that we are
tracking to see whether the program is working.
It's not just like, yes, we postall the time on social media
when exit velocity goes up and things like that.
That's sort of like just like pitch below.
(15:23):
I mean, it's a great, but what we're looking at is you struggle
with low and in. If we are fixing posture, we
should see that start to change.We should see that we can still
hold the outside pitch, but we can also start getting to the
inside pitch better. And so it gives us an idea of
what we're measuring. And so these are the
conversations I'm having with a lot of our college athletes who
have been training this summer is don't go back.
(15:46):
Your expectation should not be to go back into your college
program and someone's going to stand right across from you and
give you a one-on-one lesson andan individualized program.
What your individualized program, like, you know, kind of
what we talked about line by line, what your experience this
summer should have given you is the knowledge to understand who
you are as a hitter and sort of understand when X happens, that
(16:09):
means Y. And this is sort of what I need
to tap into to fix that. That's what the loop is and
that's what individualization and hitting means.
So you could very easily we, we have a whole sort of part of our
hitting training where we talk about team training.
You could very easily, I think as a college be in stations.
Like I don't think this is you need this small group setting
(16:30):
where you only have three hitters.
You could be in stations. It's just going to require some
front end work of whatever levelof access you have to some sort
of assessment, whether that's just ball flight, whether that's
video, I guess, but be careful whether that's, you know, a full
bio mechanics assessment of those hitters.
It's this initial download of information.
(16:50):
It's having a conversation with that hitter of this is what we
see, this is what's going to hold you back, This is what we
see. Like this is what we're going
for. And then really giving them that
front load education of when we're doing this drill.
This is the types of things you're going to see.
And this is the type that might be very different than the
person standing next to you and what they're going to see.
It's going through that you're going to then get to a place at
(17:12):
the end of fall very similar to pitching.
When we get to a place in pitching where we're like,
whatever you have, you have we're not still chasing spin
hitters get to the same place. You're not going to fill every
bucket as a hitter. So yeah, I always think of like
Altuve is like my favorite spraychart because he is a Major
League, one of the best hitters that has existed and has a heat
(17:33):
map that's like one pitch. And somehow he still just
murders it because he's he knowsthat so well about himself and
people, even at the highest level of the game, make mistakes
and he matches it. So you also then get to this
place in the fall, which goes toindividualization to where it's
January and now I sit down with my hitters and be like, OK, we
worked really hard on that and we got to the place where middle
(17:55):
N is covered, but middle, you know, low N is still a tough
pitch for you. And so that's probably not
something we're going to go attack first pitch.
You know, that's not a pitch that you can get to great
because we don't think the outcomes are going to be great.
So that's another level of individualization is educating
them on what are the pitches I am attacking.
If I do see a down pitcher and she knows to really come in on
me inside, well, there's some adjustments I should make.
(18:17):
Should I move in the box like attacking that way?
So that to me is what individualization looks like and
it's very similar it in the way that in hitting your or in
pitching impacts your arm and hitting it usually, you know,
impacts your backpack and that'skind of what you're
individualizing. Yeah, and those the next two
(18:37):
bullets that I wrote from earlier are right on point with
that. It's like what it requires is
prep and planning this front endwork, right.
The reason why coaches think that they need to have a
one-on-one is if that communication is happening on
the spot. If you still if you are a type
of coach where you are going to be educating your athlete on the
spot in the in that training session, yeah, I bet you're
(19:00):
going to take a one-on-one. But it's not.
It's actually like it should be happening like at a table and
chairs, you know, like we shouldbe in the office Now.
You said like, oh, be careful with video.
It doesn't mean your individual plan is needs to be good.
I mean, we'd hope it would be. We think the plans we write are
good because we collect a ton ofdata and objective data and then
we get the data to keep giving us feedback.
(19:22):
But just say someone doesn't have any of that.
You're still going to create goals.
Think about what you think is happening.
Create a plan. It might at the end of the day,
not be a good plan if we were toactually have the data, but at
least it's a plan. That's how to individualize, you
know, so it it requires the like, here's what we think
you're good at, here's what we think we think or we know
because of the data. I don't know.
(19:42):
It just depends on your resources, I guess.
But here's what we think, here'swhat we know that you're good
at. Here's what you're struggling
with, here's why, here's how we're going to attack it.
Let's go through the plan. And so I think it's that front
end. I think the other thing is like,
this is also a very like lesson model.
It's not just the one-on-one. It's thinking that it needs to
get something needs to get fixedat the end of a session.
When you think, then you think you have to have coach oversight
(20:06):
because if your athletes are notcomfortable finishing a training
session and it still wasn't great.
It's like when we build plans, we build multiple days a week
over 4 weeks and it doesn't change and you just keep going.
You keep going. Now in season, we wouldn't be
doing something like that at thecollege level.
We're we're trying to go like what was the issue last weekend?
What are we going to do this week to fix it for next weekend,
(20:27):
weekend? But I'm assume you're in some
sort of like offseason, you know, you're not in, you know,
January through, through May. And so I think basically you
have to know if your athlete is educated, you got to let her
fly. You got to let her to start to
navigate those things on your own.
And then if there's 8 pictures in the bullpen in one day, I
mean, you're probably four and four, six at a time, who knows?
(20:48):
You're kind of walking through, Hey, tell me what's going on.
Hey, I I just feel like I'm still struggling with X because
the ball is still doing this. Look for that information from
them that you spent that front end time, you know, giving them
and then like, OK, what have youdone?
I've done this. I said, OK, let's try this.
You might. Obviously there's the art of
coaching. Give them some feedback, see if
that helps. And then you walk away from
them. You've got to let them get the
(21:10):
education, explore it on their own, go for it.
Make sure they can verbalize it back to you and then keep
flowing with your athletes. I mean it's literally the OJX in
person training setup. Well, I was going to say, and I
think Laura, this would be interesting for you to kind of
touch on, but I think that like I had a conversation with a
college hitter. So she's remote.
And so we we do go through, we do weekly calls and often we go
(21:33):
through video. And I think what has been great
about the transition as the summer goes on is that it starts
as like, and she had an assessment.
We went through exactly what we're going for.
We did talk about the data. We don't have access to regular
data right now, but like the types of fall path that, you
know, off the bat, we would see if we're making some progress in
(21:53):
the things that we want to see. But she went from just like
waiting for me to tell her things each week to this week.
She was like, can you pull up this drill and this drill?
And then we did and I pulled it up and she was like, OK, on the
first one of this, I remember I rolled over it.
On the second one, I kind of flared it to right field.
(22:14):
Can you can we look through likewhat the difference us and what
we got to is like there is no difference.
Those actually are the same result for you.
It's just literally like the pitch location was slightly
different, but they're the same bad result for you.
So the feel that you're trying to correct is similar on those
two. And we talked through it.
We talked through what drill shefeels best on posture that might
translate to that of like, let'sclose that loop for you when you
(22:36):
roll over 1, you know, backspin with something she felt like
helped her posture go back to the feel of what you felt like
you are correcting on back spin on that next one and see how it
feels. So we talked through what would
your process be when you're seeing these results?
I had a similar conversation with another college athlete who
trains in person with us where her feedback was like, I'm
feeling very consistent in my swing.
(22:58):
Like my swing feels more consistent.
Like it's not varying, but the results feel a little
inconsistent still. And then I don't always know.
I feel like I don't always know what change to make based on a
bad result. And So what we talked about is
what she's been doing these lasttwo weeks is now a coach has
been standing behind her, not tocoach, but to slow her down.
(23:18):
And so basically she swings, She's got the viewpoint on hit
tracks where the video is looping for her.
If it's a missed result just, and this is just, we would not
do this forever. She's doing it for two weeks as
practice. She turns around and says, I'm
going to think X, I'm going to try to stay on top of this next
one. Then she does it.
She watches the video and we're just practicing teaching her
(23:39):
that loop. What her and I talked about, and
this is what I think would be interesting to hear you talk
about, Laura, is that like you might say on this next one, I'm
going to drive my hands to the ball.
And I might think that is a weird thing to think about
because we don't drive our handsto the ball.
But as long as I think, you know, that hitter is educated
(24:00):
enough in her swing and the goalshe is going for, she can think
whatever she wants. It does the is the next result
better and is the loop getting shortened for her?
And So what I said to this hitter was that's why you go on
MLB Network and you hear a rod say I drove my nod to the ball
and you're like, no, you didn't.But at some point in his
(24:22):
process, he thought that and it gave him a good result and it
worked. Now what is dangerous and this
is kind of not dangerous is probably aggressive.
And this is what I think would be interesting is when you are
trying to individualize things like that.
It's why one-on-one training is not usually good and actually is
not individualized. It's like individualized by the
coach kind of what you're saying, Ashley, if I'm trying to
(24:44):
control the outcome is what? What is worse is when I go up to
that hitter, she has a bad result and I say drive your
hands to the ball. So she's like got it, drives her
hands to the ball. Hat does do that that has a
better outcome or something thattime and then is like now I'm
supposed to drive my hands to the ball and start sort of like
(25:04):
extrapolating that in a way the.External field, I just thought
of like a, what are they called?Like the marionettes, like the
yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that's what I think of.
That's my visual. Place of like, that hitter
doesn't understand why you said that cue.
You just said a random cue. And then they try to adopt it
very like concretely. They might actually adopt it
(25:25):
very concretely, but then they don't understand why they adopt
it. So now they have a bad result
two months from now and they're like, Oh yeah, I got to go down
to the ball and like, that's notwhat they should be, I would say
in that moment. Probably most athletes rarely
need an A1 on one for a physicalreason.
It's usually a mental, emotional, like I need to
connect. You know what I'm saying?
Laura, go ahead. You were going to chime in about
queuing, I think. Yeah, this, this competition is
(25:46):
so cool. As you guys have been talking
the way I've been, I've been kind of visualizing it in my
brain is like it's, it's settingup a quality experiment, right.
If you're doing that front end work as a coach and you have
your buckets, you have maybe a starting point.
So we, we would call them protocols, right?
That from our volume of assessments that we've had, we
are, we are can quickly now bucket athletes initially and,
(26:11):
and all you're doing there, you're not saying that's where
you're stuck forever. So I think that is the, that to
me is a little of the danger of saying you're 50% or this way
and 50% of this way and you don't change.
I think that's, that's the danger of that is that you're
taking a, a presumed bucket based on your knowledge as a
coach, your, your, your understanding of the outcomes
(26:32):
and the things that they need todo as a hitter or pitcher.
And you're saying this is what Ithink the experiment needs to be
for them. I'm going to set up a plan.
I'm going to write a hypothesis.I'm going to literally put in a
scientific method. I'm going to write a hypothesis.
I'm going to say this is what I think your plan should be.
We are going to do this for a period of time, right?
So again, I'm, I keep going backto like it.
It just completely sort of debunks the lesson model of
(26:55):
controlling the outcome. If I am setting up a good
experiment for an athlete to explore movement to, you know,
Krista, what you said about, youknow, miss hits and
understanding where things went wrong or what your timing was or
maybe an intent piece is amazing.
Like those are the results of the experiment.
They're not things to control and manipulate and and make sure
(27:15):
that the end result is the same every single time.
The experiment is the athlete's application of that program and
your job so that you don't necessarily influence or bias or
try to manipulate. And you know, puppeteer as I
like that word to puppeteer the outcome as you have to let it
ride for a little bit, you know,and the time period is very
(27:37):
relevant to time of year. You know, Christy, you mentioned
we're only doing that for two weeks, but I'm going to guess
that after that two weeks, that hitter now can now more quickly
say, all right, I, I see what I did there.
I felt this. And they can connect those two
things. And it's, it's not just an
internal feel. There needs to be external
information as well to sort of validate that, right?
(27:59):
And so the conversation of, well, actually for you, this,
you know, this challenge in yourswing just resulted in something
different because the pitch was different.
That's external to you internally.
You did the same thing. And so it's, it's the merging of
those two things where you really get to test your
experiment. And so the value of data and
video and you know, all these external pieces obviously gives
(28:21):
that sort of quality of the experiment.
And then to me that that art of coaching is then how are you
helping the athlete to execute your experiment?
How are you helping them to tap into the things that you've
planned for that? We do that for a period of time.
For us, that's four weeks and then we go, did it work or not,
right? I mean, that is just the most
basic application of just setting up an experiment, having
(28:43):
a guess at what you're going to do, see what happens in that
process. And again, time of year, if
we're in season, you know, we don't have time to let it ride
for four weeks. So those approaches are a little
different. But from a development
standpoint, and if you want hitters in season and pitchers
in season to be able to and massive air quotes make
adjustments, they need to know what mistakes feel like to know
(29:06):
how when to make that adjustmentand what mistakes mean what
adjustments. Otherwise they're just flying
blind. They're like, Oh, well, pitcher
beat me that day. And it's like, no, actually,
maybe you beat yourself that day.
And I think like, you know, thatart of coaching, it doesn't
replace the coach. Your job is to guide and
navigate to help, you know, see them through that experiment.
(29:27):
And sure, there are plenty of times, especially very early on
in our work. I think about all the times we
like, you know, change plyo programs sort of like week to
week. You're you are experimenting.
And so it can take some iteration, it can take some
pattern recognition. Our advantage is the volume of
that we see in assessments. And we also see that translate
(29:48):
in training. I think at A at a college coach
level, it's, it's not impossible.
It does not mean, like you said,a one-on-one, but it does mean
setting up your experiments, having some appreciation for all
right, what do I think this hitter is going to need right
now? And even if you're wrong, you're
wrong. It's OK.
It's an experiment. The results of an experiment can
be it didn't work. It's then the art of coaching to
(30:10):
say that's not working for her, that's a bad intent or that's
not a great intent for her, or that you know that short bad or
that plyo weight didn't do it. We got to switch that.
And so that's the art of coaching.
It's recognizing the like response of the athlete to your
experiment. And I I just said you guys were
talking. I kept thinking like, man, you
know, this one-on-one lesson model doesn't do any of that.
(30:31):
It's sort of the opposite. It's influencing the outcome of
the, you know, 30 minute to one hour experiment for a
manipulated end result sometimes.
And, well, it's like. It's there's no longevity there.
The Hallmark? There's no longevity there.
Good one, Larson. It's like the hallmark of
individualization and it's like the worst version of
(30:52):
individualization. So people are like, I want to be
on this. I want to have a coach standing
right behind me. And we're like, that is it's the
worst example of individualization because that's
it's the furthest removed from the reality of how you're going
to be able to make change and adjustments and sort of like the
learning that has to happen. I was just thinking that that
hitter example I gave where she loses her posture and struggles
(31:14):
with low. And then what I also didn't give
is that so we she had the privilege of going through the
force plate measurement, which is what we're starting to work
on with driveline. And so there's some like nuance,
strength and power stuff we got.And so that same athlete was
also came to light from that. And she's very high strength kid
and low, not low, I shouldn't say low.
(31:36):
She's a Division One athlete. So not low 80%.
It's like over 100% and just pure strength and in the 80
percentile mark across all of the sort of power measurements.
And so it's interesting from that standpoint too, is like we
have a athlete who struggles with variability and
adjustability, which often poweris required for that.
(31:59):
This ability to kind of like time, how you're getting your
power off. She has high exit velocity
because she has good strength. So she's able to get this sort
of like force. And so that's another way that
you would individualize that athlete is 1, Her strength
condition should be targeting that.
We shouldn't be just like, let'sjust keep going up and wait and
(32:19):
wait and wait. This is an athlete who already
has the strength required to do things that needs to move faster
and understand it. So that the work we're doing on
the hitting side is matching like, yeah, we're trying to get
variability for this athlete on the hitting side.
And so her her assessment needs to match that.
She also lacked rotation in her assessment.
So it's like these things that we're seeing in there, like
(32:41):
those are also playing into the individualization.
And you're not going to solve all of that on the hitting side.
So there's a level of individualization in where am I
attacking this thing? I'm attacking posture just by
mechanics and sort of the the pattern programming I'm doing
probably some version of that, but am I also attacking that and
the strength and conditioning I'm doing and what does that
(33:02):
need to look like And sort of matching all those buckets, It's
just another level of individualization which should
pull some of it off of your plate as the coach because not
everything can be solved from you.
I remember like years ago, I washaving a conversation with a
college coach, Pitter Penny coach, and then she was like,
we've been doing, you know, I can't remember what she did.
Like she showed like a, you know, thoracic rotation type of
(33:23):
we've been doing this to really work on thoracic rotation.
And I said that's not your job. And she was like, what?
Like getting your hitter's thoracic rotation is not your
job. If that like first of all,
there's no way every single one of your hitter struggles with
thoracic rotation. So the idea that like every
single one of them is doing a thoracic rotation exercise, I
mean, fine, maybe it's part of the warm up or something, but
(33:45):
like just know why you're doing it.
Is it like an activation thing? Like is there a purpose?
But doing that to chase thoracicrotation is not the hitting
coach's job. So I think sometimes
individualization gets very overwhelming when we start also
pulling in things into individualization that is not
actually in my job description. So getting a hitter thoracic
(34:07):
rotation might be something I need to know as a hitting coach,
but it's certainly not somethingI should be responsible for
because that's just not my job. That's the strength coach's job.
You know, getting whatever, knowing that my hitters have bad
hit mobility is probably part ofmy a TS job.
So I think it's just really understanding that too is like
you're not chasing all of those things as as a coach.
(34:31):
And I think that takes a way of like, they should have more
individualization because they should have individualization
across all of these buckets, butless of it should be on your
plate. Then maybe sometimes we take on
as coaches, and we did that a lot when we first started doing
movement assessments were like, OK, got it.
My job now is to make sure this kid can stabilize and have
rotation and separate and do allthese things we're doing, all
(34:52):
these movement preps. And it was like, that's not my
job. So it's like, go see James for
that part and then come back over to me for the hitting part.
And then we'll make sure that those are talking together and
you understand them. So I think that's another piece
of it. And they're warmed up and and
prepped for the task of hitting right.
They're warmed up. Specifically they are there's
(35:12):
there's a dynamic component, we call it movement prep, but there
is a preparation as an extensionor maybe a narrowing of the
skill pitching or hitting. That's an extension of strength
and conditioning. You as the, as the pitching
coach and the hitting coach, when they step in the circle or
the box, that's what you get right in that moment.
You, you're, they're coming in with their mental state, their
(35:35):
physical state, whatever mobility and strength they have
for that moment, that day, that week.
And so your job again is then toapply your program and see
what's not working. And so if if something's not
working and you can identify that is a mobility challenge,
then it's it's got to go back sort of under the coat.
That way so they. Need to hand you an athlete and
(35:56):
that you need to know what theircapacity is.
That capacity can grow, it can change.
We know fatigue is a massive factor not just in pitching, but
in hitting. And it that's what you've got to
understand out of in the moment of that athlete is what are they
bringing into the circle or the box with them.
And it's not necessarily your job to fix that, but you have to
identify the impact that it is having on the their pitching
(36:18):
patterns or their swing. You have to identify.
The, I think, I think a huge part of this, I think a huge
part of this is it's why we don't really use mechanics.
Like I know we're using that a little bit here, but we use
patterns a lot. And I think we kind of did it
unintentionally. I think we just started
switching to that because of what mechanics is tied to.
So often when a parent calls like, you know, I had a parent
(36:40):
call and they're like, she's gotgood mechanics, but we're stuck
in velocity and I am just like, now, you know, whatever that
means. I think there's this idea of
mechanics. It's like getting to the
definition of what is mechanics and they're the idea of
individualization. So your point, Ashley, is like,
it's a bunch of coaches and athletes who think their job is
(37:04):
to chase perfect mechanics and that's not what we're going for
here. I laughed because we had a post
that went out K our our hitting lead put it out.
It was like an athlete saying I don't use T in pregame because T
doesn't really help me prep for the game.
And someone wrote commented, which I hid because I don't like
angry people like get a life, but especially when a kid is
(37:27):
talking in the video. I'm like, OK, but he was like,
this is stupid or something likeGod when you're working on
mechanics. And Kay wrote back to her
credit, her response was like not before a game.
And he was like, well, you can'thit if you don't have good
mechanics. And she really, that's why we
trade. But I was like that that is the
(37:48):
thing, right, Is that literally this person thinks the job of
pregame T warm up is for a coachto like make sure the mechanics
are good, whatever that means, make sure the mechanics are
good. And so I think some of this
overwhelm with individualizationor chasing individualization as
parents and athletes comes from a really big misunderstanding of
(38:12):
like what are mechanics? We, I say this before we go
through every file mic report isthat you're going to see these
shaded norm ranges, right? You're going to see where are
the norms of what most athletes kind of fall into.
And for the most part, we will touch on when you are outside of
those normative ranges or when you don't quite follow the like
timing or shape of those normative ranges, even if maybe
(38:34):
you stay inside, but the the shape is different.
But that doesn't mean every single time we see that we're
like bad, bad, bad. We got the goal is never going
to be to take that athlete and just shove her into the
normative ranges because what you're trying to understand is
when you lose posture, as the kids were saying, what is the
results of that? OK, The result of that for you
is as you lose posture and you fall out of the normative ranges
(38:57):
that we see for posture, it makes you not rotate as much.
It makes you not be able to get to that low and inside pitch.
So we are going to want some correction for the posture, but
like we're not just chasing perfect matching mechanics and
stories to everyone. That's nothing tough so.
No, when you actually have measurement of it.
Yeah, when you actually measure capable of it.
Right. We're just trying to, I think
(39:18):
it's I got three more bold points that I wrote down and
they're. All.
It's not really my vibe usually,you know, but I was just
thinking of like, what people think, making changes, you know,
Like we get really stuck in thisculture, definitely in pitching,
like. The will the.
Want to do it the trying harder?It's like that's just someone
not educated on training adaptations.
Like a pitcher can want to correct her ball path all she
(39:41):
wants, stop having her neutral ball path sliced to her arm
side, and be super committed in her training session.
But literally, we don't know theroot of what's going on and why
her arm action is being put there.
And it's not ever going to get fixed on a single day.
I don't care how good of an athlete she is and I don't care
how how on fire her soul is. And so we have to shed this
(40:04):
concept of like that making a change is about working harder.
That's just like ridiculous. It's about training adaptations.
And training adaptations take time, which is why you don't
just stand over someone and makesure it's better in the session.
You give it time. This is kind of what I was
thinking. Thinking about in that
experimental, you know, like when you were talking about it
being an experiment in experiment law, I thought that
was a really great concept. And when you said like there's
(40:25):
no longevity, that's what it means if you are actually going
to make a change, it requires training adaptations that takes
longevity in the training approach in order for there to
be longevity in the results. The other thing I was thinking
you guys got me talking at 1.5 speed now because first I said I
got. 2 minutes. I'm happy to do, but the
listeners I don't understand. The other thing is.
(40:47):
Not to pull us aside here, but Igot distracted because we've got
an alert that when reality bought Yakritek and when reality
just also bought Blast. So anyways, that's really
interesting and a totally different.
Topic. But another topic and another
topic I do think we should bringon is strength and conditioning.
Strength and conditioning is horrible at the collegiate level
across the board. Not to say every single strength
(41:09):
coach though. The lack of individualization,
we still have athletes doing like the inappropriate exercises
that don't even match what's required in the motion.
A lack of individualization for the similar reasons.
Coaches are overwhelmed, they don't know how to do it.
We've had a couple athletes in the summer program where their
Velo was like APR during the assessment and we've seen since
(41:30):
then that it's just like going down and we've had to, I asked
them about their dynamic warmupsand they don't even like have
dynamic warmups. So we started putting in like
our dynamic warmups to activate to be able to like that's a
click key indicator when you show up in an assessment, you do
how we're like activation seriesthrough our, you know, our
movement assessment and that's when you move the best like
(41:52):
clear indicator, huge hole worthus kind of bringing back in.
This is why oh, and it's just brutal out there.
And I think it's just we bringing James in a pitch stop
to start to like open up this conversation a little bit more.
And also I just kept thinking like, I just, you guys know, I
feel about this and this is a little bit like maybe a little
bit aggressive on my part, but I'm just thinking about, you
(42:15):
know, the hitting coaches and like these waves, it started
with like loose mover, tight mover, like it.
And then like a couple years later we're like, that ain't it?
And now it's aerial terrestrial.We're like, dude, you don't know
this yet, but that ain't it either.
And so I think it's like hittingcoaches in my mind,
overwhelmingly this is aggressive.
They're bad and they don't know it.
(42:37):
And you guys know, I keep sayingthis, but what they think
identifying patterns is, what they think categorizing and
training is, is so it is missingthe mark so badly.
And so you guys know, and I bring it up like every session
because I'm like, I can't wait for HQ to get out there into
more hitting coaches. And we we pushed it more through
(42:57):
the pitching world because when you start to actually see the
visualization and the data, she does not get to that pitch any
better than she did in September.
She is not hitting the ball any harder now.
I think that wave has to start coming.
And I think it's interesting conversation, Chris, that you
brought up like, does hitting have to get better?
As long as the field, the fencesare 200 feet and whatever and
(43:18):
positive conversation there, I get it.
But I think in my experience in working with and with pitching
coaches at the collegiate level,knowing the insurance and outs
of what the hitters are doing, the overwhelming majority of
cases that I have seen, the hitting coaches, they think they
are doing a much better job thanthey are.
They take these very simple, this bucket versus this bucket.
(43:41):
And now we they think, you know,someone's a genius.
And I, I think of like, it's gotto get exposed because I come at
it more of a like, you guys know, like the hitting world,
like always fires me off, pissesme off, you know, because I'm
like, you know, I just think that, yes, the task of hitting
is very, is very difficult. But we just, I just don't think
we are holding it to the same level of like accountability
(44:04):
that we do in pitching. And I think our HQ data
management system is going to start to get that out there.
So anyway, that was all pretty negative.
I'm like, no one understands training adaptations.
Hitting coaches are bad and strength and conditioning is
shit. Yeah, but for my pitching coach.
Pitching coaching, that was. That was spot on.
OK, so I really, you know, that's not really my vibe to be
so negative, but I really do think each of these is an
(44:26):
interesting conversation. And if we're going to push
things forward across the board,you got to expose this stuff.
I mean, this is like how we got in to this world at OGX with
pitching. We exposed even our own shit
like this is not good enough. We are not actually changing
pitchers, right? So I just think it's more of a
call and a demand to start looking at the other components,
which is the other side of the ball and honestly what fuels the
(44:50):
fire to start, which is the basic level of human movement in
trending conditioning. All right, Mic drop, I'm done
saying all. Right, well end anyways because
we're out of time. So hopefully on that note, we'll
see a pitch talk and the next week will be recorded live from
pitch talk with our staff. So see you then, TuneIn, we need
you to like and subscribe and review the podcast so that we
(45:12):
can keep making it every week for you and maybe even drop what
topic you'd like us to talk about or rant about or whatever
we do every week.
All right, the gang is all together again again this week
and next week we will be recording live from Pitch stock.
So if you don't already have your Pitch Stock ticket, we have
a few more in person tickets andthen virtual's always available.
Virtual is you could join live, you can interact if you join
(00:24):
live, you can ask questions, we want to do the chat, you can
hear everything or we also provide the recordings to
everyone that purchase it. So if you can't be at every
single session, don't have that be an excuse not to be there.
So it's going to be it's always fun.
I was like this year, you know, we're becoming pros at it.
So I'm like stressed that I'm not stressed about it, but I'm
not stressed about it. It's going to be great.
(00:45):
So join us, talk about return topitch in game data,
individualizing pitchers, which is going to be part of our topic
today. What else we got that we're
talking about incorporating datafor the first time for Staffs,
strength and conditioning for pitchers.
Yeah, got a lot of good topics. So be there or don't.
(01:08):
You'll miss out, but that's being there.
All right, So today's topic, we were talking about some of our
college athletes and sort of their transition back into
campus. And this concept that has come
up in a variety of ways, sort oflike first sparked our brain
from our college athletes. But it's come up in some of the
(01:29):
conversations we've had with college coaches as we're going
into the year of helping supportcollege Staffs.
It comes up with teams and it also comes up with athletes who
reach out to us and want to kindof understand our training and,
and our training model, which isreally this topic of
individualization. So obviously one of our things
(01:49):
is that all of our programs for our athletes are individualized.
We feel pretty strongly that there should be some level of
individualization, but I think often that concept is
misinterpreted and feels really out of reach.
Sometimes when you're a college coach, for instance, and you're
trying to work with 20 hitters, or you're a team coach and
(02:10):
you're trying to work with a, you know, a team or you're an
instructor and you're trying to figure out like this one-on-one
verse group model and what makessense.
And so I think, you know, a lot of the expectations around
individualization sometimes makeit try to be synonymous with
one-on-one training or that, youknow, me and Ashley are going to
(02:36):
be in a cage next to each other hitting and every single thing
we do is going to be different. And so and that level of
individualization is required. And that's really not what
individualization for us looks like.
And so when people feel like it's out of reach in Group
settings, I often just think like it.
(02:56):
That's just because you're maybekind of misunderstanding what it
might look like for athletes. It doesn't need to feel so out
of reach. And really, it should make some
of your job easier. So you would, you know, attack
the hitters or pitchers issues more and also a little bit more
hands off on like you don't needto be in every sort of like
(03:16):
station with them for them to get something out of it.
So we just going to want to likedive through a few examples of
that. Maybe I'll just first layout
kind of how we do programming onan individualized basis and
Ashley can add from the pitchingside and then we can get into
some like specific areas. This comes up in college really
is the big one. But we, you know, all of our
(03:39):
athletes that start with us are going to have some level of
information that they start withus.
So that could be at the most minimal just what they give us.
So playing level, you know, age,we'll have an idea of puberty,
past injuries, what pitches theythrow up their pitcher, just
like general goals. That would be the absolute most
(04:01):
basic information that we would have on an athlete.
Obviously, the level of individualization that can be
done on that athlete is not as great, but we can take into
consideration their age, their training age, their time of
year. You know, there's some level and
really most of that would be like a periodization concept for
that athlete and not as much individualized to their sort of
(04:21):
mechanics of performance. Most of our athletes on top of
that have some sort of performance data.
So ball flight, we have an idea of exit velocity that speed some
general, you know, what pitches do they do, you know, hit well
launch angle for pitching, we have an idea of how they just
break sort of like a pitch profile.
And so that would feed us another level of information of
(04:43):
based on what we see here, theseare the types of things we would
want to attack in training. And then obviously the most
detailed version of what we would receive is that someone
starts with our bio mechanics assessment.
So we get the full story of, yes, this is your performance,
and then also this is how you move inside the skill.
And you know, here's the kind ofareas that we want to attack.
So once we have that information, that gives us
(05:05):
different levels of individualization.
What that doesn't mean is that Sally that only has an intake
form, you know, starts with a template and Susie with a
biomechanics assessment, we go line by line and change it.
That's not true. The the bio mechanics assessment
gives us some buckets, some general buckets of some of the
(05:25):
patterns of the things that we see.
You know, we see loss of posturein the swing.
We see a lack of rotation. We see, you know, different
things that come up. That's and we have some general
systems in place for how we attack those things given those
and we give an idea of what datawe're watching and that's the
concept. Sally that struggles with
(05:46):
posture. This program might look similar
to Susie who you know lacks somerotation at contact that we
might attack some of those things in the same way.
But what I think is important going into that is that the
athlete is very educated and what they are trying to attack
and that they can kind of control that process on their
own as well. So that's how we do programming.
(06:07):
So if someone's coming into our facility to do that, they are
coming in with other athletes, but they are all following their
own individual programs and theyare working through that in a
group setting. So I will have a sense of if
Susie's working on loss of posture and she has hook em in
her program, the types of thingsthat we might want to watch for
(06:27):
that for her. And we would just give some
limited feedback and cues on that and she would work through
that. So that's how we think of
individualization. I think sometimes there's this
idea that, like I said, every line item needs to be different
or I need to be standing on top of that kid for it to be
individualized. Or obviously there's the other
extreme and we can get into thison the hitting side where we're
(06:50):
like, I have 20 kids so there can't be any individualization.
We literally just go through stations together and we do all
the same things. There's kind of those extremes
of understanding it, but I thinkjust getting this idea of what
does it mean to be individualized?
I think it's important for athletes to understand this too,
because I think sometimes when athletes don't feel like someone
is right on top of them or they see that they're doing a similar
job to another athlete, they're like, I didn't even get any
(07:13):
individual work. It's like that also is probably
a little bit of an extreme view of that.
So it's this like balance of understanding that.
Did I miss anything with that concept?
I don't think so. I've got a lot of shit to say,
just wrote. Down.
Yeah, Go ahead, go ahead. Shocking, shocking.
No one. OK.
One of the things I that came tomy brain as you were talking is
(07:35):
I think individualization just generally, I don't think people
coaches always get it right, ButI think generally it's
understood that individualization, some level of
it is necessary, at least in thecollege level in pitching,
because they're everyone has different pitches, right?
Like there is literally an individual nature to what
(07:56):
pitchers do. She has a great change up.
This pitcher struggles with change up.
She's an up ball pitcher, she's a down ball pitcher.
So like we just kind of get thatconcept.
So I'm going to revisit that. But I do think it's interesting
that I think generally hitting really gets the short end of the
stick. I feel like that's no pun
intended, maybe pun intended, but yeah, it was.
(08:16):
But I think hitting really gets the short end of the stick in
that because it's like, oh, it'sswing, it's your swing, it's
posture, it's rotation. And it can become these really
simple buckets. Not to say that you don't start
with these buckets. It's the same in pitching.
It's like your challenge is and there's there's more specific of
like, oh, why isn't that athleterotating?
(08:37):
Well, where does it start? How do we target it?
So it does always start at the like mechanics level for sure.
And there's a bucket and then there's a more individualized
like component to why that athlete even fits in that
bucket. The reason why I think Hayden
gets the short end of the stick is because there's so many
athletes, they don't have individual ball flight.
(08:57):
And so we see coaches kind of goafter these very generalized
buckets. Maybe it is just she does, she's
working on rotation and she's working on foster.
I don't know. I'm, I'm kind of making shit up
here. But like you were just putting
those two buckets And sometimes it's as simple as like we've
seen like motor preference. I see where that where people
want to lean into something likethat.
She's aerial terrestrial. Now there's a whole nother
discussion on whether or not youcan even buck it like that and
(09:20):
training adaptations, whatever. But that's not what we're here
to talk about. What we're here to talk about is
when you just take here's one bucket and that's where 50% of
my hitters go. And here's another bucket and
that's where 50% of my hitters go.
You are it's it's completely missing the mark because in
pitching, take away the pitch types, What you are still
working on is OK, she's this general bucket.
(09:42):
Where in her patterns, where andwhy is that happening?
Where is it like starting and and unraveling in her patterns?
And then what impact is that having on her arm?
So then what implements we've we've talked about this before
of like training implements, overload, underload, all of
these things. What is that doing to her arm?
That same athlete who is struggling with rotation A, this
(10:02):
is a pitcher, Athlete B also struggles with rotation, but
athlete A, what it does, it's turn into excessive elbow
flexion for her or a reduction, meaning her arms outside of her
trunk. And the other athlete it ends up
in being in like a really stiff arm action.
So you have to, what our assessment process is about is,
yes, it starts as a bucket, but the individual nature of why you
(10:23):
have to be able to attack at theroots versus symptoms and then
the arm is what matters. And it's the same in hitting.
It's why we have these discussions.
You can't just say, oh, it's this bucket and that bucket, but
what if then the results of thatis that this athlete's barrel
pack goes here versus here. This is now the individual layer
of like she needs a short bat with a, you know, this whatever,
(10:45):
you know, whatever environments you're designing with, she's
going angle in, angle out. She's being we're throwing her
balls that look like this at this level, at this speed with
this bat. This is where all this comes in.
So in my mind, yes, of course there's individualization and
extra layer of that for pitchers, because now there's a
whole nother. It's why programming takes
forever for pitchers because we start with that which is
(11:07):
identical to hitters, that's an identical process of
individualization. And then there's this extra
layer of like, OK, literally what are our goals for her drop
ball? What are the goals for that
curveball, right? So there's this next layer of
pitch by pitch individualization, which makes
just programming for pitchers more.
It takes more. So do I think that it takes as
much to program to individualizeprogramming for hitters?
(11:30):
I don't, but there's also more of them right and on a team.
And so I think when we're talking to college level, you
could talk about the youth level.
I still think the lesson model pitchers show up and they don't
individualize shit. They just all are doing the same
drills or whatever. So of course there are worlds
that exists like that and that'sjust like, I don't need to be
condescending, but like we don'treally have time to talk about
(11:51):
that. That's just bad, you know?
And so I think when we're reallytalking about the college level,
I do think coaches, they may notgo about individualization in a
way that maybe we think is best,but they are individualizing
because of the nature of the of the beast.
And I just think hitting, we miss it, man.
We go with one blanket, you go and well, I.
Think I think with a. Bucket of whites like that is so
(12:12):
I. Think what takes a lot of, I
think what does take a lot of time for hitting is the the
tracking of the data on the backend.
It's why so the visualizations we're trying to create are
helpful. But yeah, when you have 20 kids
and you're trying to watch trends, it's why their education
on it is important. It's why narrowing down what
you're watching. So I have an athlete who just
(12:33):
assessed and she has her athletemeeting today.
I mean, I was going through her information.
This is the type of things we would see from an assessment and
hit her. She has she like loses posture
in her swing. That's a kind of common things.
Or during her move she loses posture.
She has very high exit velocity.This kid that's already
committed to Division One, she'sgot good power, but in her ball
(12:54):
flight, so we see in her bio mechanics, she loses posture.
She gets under rotated because of it.
It's not actually impacting exitvelocity that much.
So that's interesting for her, which means she probably even
has a higher elite exit velocityon the table, but she doesn't
get to low pitches. So for her specifically, because
of how she loses her posture andthe body position she gets in
(13:16):
when she rotates, she can't get her barrel to that low pitch.
And so as an example, that kid. So she loses her sort of
backside early. Her, you know, the weight she
has on her back leg comes up early and it kind of pulls her
out of posture. So that is something we see in
many hitters. That is a bucket.
I would say that we would have of like she needs to be able to
(13:38):
kind of stabilize through the back leg longer as she's going
through, you know, the start of rotation.
And so we might do something forthat athlete like a hookum start
type, like a sort of pivot starttype is another one we might do
where we're really trying to like have her sit, it's not a
great term, but sit in that backleg longer and hold posture.
(13:59):
And that might look very similarto Susie right next to her that
also struggles with posture. And that's what happens.
Now, similar to what you're saying, what we see is that
those two hitters though likely have different results of that.
So Susie might lose posture and what that causes her to do is
she hyperextends the rotation and she actually can't get the
(14:20):
up pitch. And so those what we attack for,
those things are what you're saying.
That's what determines the different angles we're going
after. It determines the different bats
often that they're swinging outside of just like normal
overload training. And then and sort of most
importantly, it informs how I talk to those two people about
(14:40):
what our goals are in training, what they should expect.
Listen, you your mis hits when you are struggling with this
look like XA low pitch is going to go straight to the ground for
you. Up pitch is going to go like,
you know, I there's a college hitter we have right now that
does that. She gets a kind of a weird funky
bat path. And so she has Max been in her
program. And when she's not making
(15:01):
adjustments, the balls go, they're singing misses or they
go straight up in the air. And she knows that we're working
through posture. It's giving her feedback.
It's specific to her. It's telling her what we're
going for. And then the data that we are
tracking to see whether the program is working.
It's not just like, yes, we postall the time on social media
when exit velocity goes up and things like that.
That's sort of like just like pitch below.
(15:23):
I mean, it's a great, but what we're looking at is you struggle
with low and in. If we are fixing posture, we
should see that start to change.We should see that we can still
hold the outside pitch, but we can also start getting to the
inside pitch better. And so it gives us an idea of
what we're measuring. And so these are the
conversations I'm having with a lot of our college athletes who
have been training this summer is don't go back.
(15:46):
Your expectation should not be to go back into your college
program and someone's going to stand right across from you and
give you a one-on-one lesson andan individualized program.
What your individualized program, like, you know, kind of
what we talked about line by line, what your experience this
summer should have given you is the knowledge to understand who
you are as a hitter and sort of understand when X happens, that
(16:09):
means Y. And this is sort of what I need
to tap into to fix that. That's what the loop is and
that's what individualization and hitting means.
So you could very easily we, we have a whole sort of part of our
hitting training where we talk about team training.
You could very easily, I think as a college be in stations.
Like I don't think this is you need this small group setting
(16:30):
where you only have three hitters.
You could be in stations. It's just going to require some
front end work of whatever levelof access you have to some sort
of assessment, whether that's just ball flight, whether that's
video, I guess, but be careful whether that's, you know, a full
bio mechanics assessment of those hitters.
It's this initial download of information.
(16:50):
It's having a conversation with that hitter of this is what we
see, this is what's going to hold you back, This is what we
see. Like this is what we're going
for. And then really giving them that
front load education of when we're doing this drill.
This is the types of things you're going to see.
And this is the type that might be very different than the
person standing next to you and what they're going to see.
It's going through that you're going to then get to a place at
(17:12):
the end of fall very similar to pitching.
When we get to a place in pitching where we're like,
whatever you have, you have we're not still chasing spin
hitters get to the same place. You're not going to fill every
bucket as a hitter. So yeah, I always think of like
Altuve is like my favorite spraychart because he is a Major
League, one of the best hitters that has existed and has a heat
(17:33):
map that's like one pitch. And somehow he still just
murders it because he's he knowsthat so well about himself and
people, even at the highest level of the game, make mistakes
and he matches it. So you also then get to this
place in the fall, which goes toindividualization to where it's
January and now I sit down with my hitters and be like, OK, we
worked really hard on that and we got to the place where middle
(17:55):
N is covered, but middle, you know, low N is still a tough
pitch for you. And so that's probably not
something we're going to go attack first pitch.
You know, that's not a pitch that you can get to great
because we don't think the outcomes are going to be great.
So that's another level of individualization is educating
them on what are the pitches I am attacking.
If I do see a down pitcher and she knows to really come in on
me inside, well, there's some adjustments I should make.
(18:17):
Should I move in the box like attacking that way?
So that to me is what individualization looks like and
it's very similar it in the way that in hitting your or in
pitching impacts your arm and hitting it usually, you know,
impacts your backpack and that'skind of what you're
individualizing. Yeah, and those the next two
(18:37):
bullets that I wrote from earlier are right on point with
that. It's like what it requires is
prep and planning this front endwork, right.
The reason why coaches think that they need to have a
one-on-one is if that communication is happening on
the spot. If you still if you are a type
of coach where you are going to be educating your athlete on the
spot in the in that training session, yeah, I bet you're
(19:00):
going to take a one-on-one. But it's not.
It's actually like it should be happening like at a table and
chairs, you know, like we shouldbe in the office Now.
You said like, oh, be careful with video.
It doesn't mean your individual plan is needs to be good.
I mean, we'd hope it would be. We think the plans we write are
good because we collect a ton ofdata and objective data and then
we get the data to keep giving us feedback.
(19:22):
But just say someone doesn't have any of that.
You're still going to create goals.
Think about what you think is happening.
Create a plan. It might at the end of the day,
not be a good plan if we were toactually have the data, but at
least it's a plan. That's how to individualize, you
know, so it it requires the like, here's what we think
you're good at, here's what we think we think or we know
because of the data. I don't know.
(19:42):
It just depends on your resources, I guess.
But here's what we think, here'swhat we know that you're good
at. Here's what you're struggling
with, here's why, here's how we're going to attack it.
Let's go through the plan. And so I think it's that front
end. I think the other thing is like,
this is also a very like lesson model.
It's not just the one-on-one. It's thinking that it needs to
get something needs to get fixedat the end of a session.
When you think, then you think you have to have coach oversight
(20:06):
because if your athletes are notcomfortable finishing a training
session and it still wasn't great.
It's like when we build plans, we build multiple days a week
over 4 weeks and it doesn't change and you just keep going.
You keep going. Now in season, we wouldn't be
doing something like that at thecollege level.
We're we're trying to go like what was the issue last weekend?
What are we going to do this week to fix it for next weekend,
(20:27):
weekend? But I'm assume you're in some
sort of like offseason, you know, you're not in, you know,
January through, through May. And so I think basically you
have to know if your athlete is educated, you got to let her
fly. You got to let her to start to
navigate those things on your own.
And then if there's 8 pictures in the bullpen in one day, I
mean, you're probably four and four, six at a time, who knows?
(20:48):
You're kind of walking through, Hey, tell me what's going on.
Hey, I I just feel like I'm still struggling with X because
the ball is still doing this. Look for that information from
them that you spent that front end time, you know, giving them
and then like, OK, what have youdone?
I've done this. I said, OK, let's try this.
You might. Obviously there's the art of
coaching. Give them some feedback, see if
that helps. And then you walk away from
them. You've got to let them get the
(21:10):
education, explore it on their own, go for it.
Make sure they can verbalize it back to you and then keep
flowing with your athletes. I mean it's literally the OJX in
person training setup. Well, I was going to say, and I
think Laura, this would be interesting for you to kind of
touch on, but I think that like I had a conversation with a
college hitter. So she's remote.
And so we we do go through, we do weekly calls and often we go
(21:33):
through video. And I think what has been great
about the transition as the summer goes on is that it starts
as like, and she had an assessment.
We went through exactly what we're going for.
We did talk about the data. We don't have access to regular
data right now, but like the types of fall path that, you
know, off the bat, we would see if we're making some progress in
(21:53):
the things that we want to see. But she went from just like
waiting for me to tell her things each week to this week.
She was like, can you pull up this drill and this drill?
And then we did and I pulled it up and she was like, OK, on the
first one of this, I remember I rolled over it.
On the second one, I kind of flared it to right field.
(22:14):
Can you can we look through likewhat the difference us and what
we got to is like there is no difference.
Those actually are the same result for you.
It's just literally like the pitch location was slightly
different, but they're the same bad result for you.
So the feel that you're trying to correct is similar on those
two. And we talked through it.
We talked through what drill shefeels best on posture that might
translate to that of like, let'sclose that loop for you when you
(22:36):
roll over 1, you know, backspin with something she felt like
helped her posture go back to the feel of what you felt like
you are correcting on back spin on that next one and see how it
feels. So we talked through what would
your process be when you're seeing these results?
I had a similar conversation with another college athlete who
trains in person with us where her feedback was like, I'm
feeling very consistent in my swing.
(22:58):
Like my swing feels more consistent.
Like it's not varying, but the results feel a little
inconsistent still. And then I don't always know.
I feel like I don't always know what change to make based on a
bad result. And So what we talked about is
what she's been doing these lasttwo weeks is now a coach has
been standing behind her, not tocoach, but to slow her down.
(23:18):
And so basically she swings, She's got the viewpoint on hit
tracks where the video is looping for her.
If it's a missed result just, and this is just, we would not
do this forever. She's doing it for two weeks as
practice. She turns around and says, I'm
going to think X, I'm going to try to stay on top of this next
one. Then she does it.
She watches the video and we're just practicing teaching her
(23:39):
that loop. What her and I talked about, and
this is what I think would be interesting to hear you talk
about, Laura, is that like you might say on this next one, I'm
going to drive my hands to the ball.
And I might think that is a weird thing to think about
because we don't drive our handsto the ball.
But as long as I think, you know, that hitter is educated
(24:00):
enough in her swing and the goalshe is going for, she can think
whatever she wants. It does the is the next result
better and is the loop getting shortened for her?
And So what I said to this hitter was that's why you go on
MLB Network and you hear a rod say I drove my nod to the ball
and you're like, no, you didn't.But at some point in his
(24:22):
process, he thought that and it gave him a good result and it
worked. Now what is dangerous and this
is kind of not dangerous is probably aggressive.
And this is what I think would be interesting is when you are
trying to individualize things like that.
It's why one-on-one training is not usually good and actually is
not individualized. It's like individualized by the
coach kind of what you're saying, Ashley, if I'm trying to
(24:44):
control the outcome is what? What is worse is when I go up to
that hitter, she has a bad result and I say drive your
hands to the ball. So she's like got it, drives her
hands to the ball. Hat does do that that has a
better outcome or something thattime and then is like now I'm
supposed to drive my hands to the ball and start sort of like
(25:04):
extrapolating that in a way the.External field, I just thought
of like a, what are they called?Like the marionettes, like the
yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that's what I think of.
That's my visual. Place of like, that hitter
doesn't understand why you said that cue.
You just said a random cue. And then they try to adopt it
very like concretely. They might actually adopt it
(25:25):
very concretely, but then they don't understand why they adopt
it. So now they have a bad result
two months from now and they're like, Oh yeah, I got to go down
to the ball and like, that's notwhat they should be, I would say
in that moment. Probably most athletes rarely
need an A1 on one for a physicalreason.
It's usually a mental, emotional, like I need to
connect. You know what I'm saying?
Laura, go ahead. You were going to chime in about
queuing, I think. Yeah, this, this competition is
(25:46):
so cool. As you guys have been talking
the way I've been, I've been kind of visualizing it in my
brain is like it's, it's settingup a quality experiment, right.
If you're doing that front end work as a coach and you have
your buckets, you have maybe a starting point.
So we, we would call them protocols, right?
That from our volume of assessments that we've had, we
are, we are can quickly now bucket athletes initially and,
(26:11):
and all you're doing there, you're not saying that's where
you're stuck forever. So I think that is the, that to
me is a little of the danger of saying you're 50% or this way
and 50% of this way and you don't change.
I think that's, that's the danger of that is that you're
taking a, a presumed bucket based on your knowledge as a
coach, your, your, your understanding of the outcomes
(26:32):
and the things that they need todo as a hitter or pitcher.
And you're saying this is what Ithink the experiment needs to be
for them. I'm going to set up a plan.
I'm going to write a hypothesis.I'm going to literally put in a
scientific method. I'm going to write a hypothesis.
I'm going to say this is what I think your plan should be.
We are going to do this for a period of time, right?
So again, I'm, I keep going backto like it.
It just completely sort of debunks the lesson model of
(26:55):
controlling the outcome. If I am setting up a good
experiment for an athlete to explore movement to, you know,
Krista, what you said about, youknow, miss hits and
understanding where things went wrong or what your timing was or
maybe an intent piece is amazing.
Like those are the results of the experiment.
They're not things to control and manipulate and and make sure
(27:15):
that the end result is the same every single time.
The experiment is the athlete's application of that program and
your job so that you don't necessarily influence or bias or
try to manipulate. And you know, puppeteer as I
like that word to puppeteer the outcome as you have to let it
ride for a little bit, you know,and the time period is very
(27:37):
relevant to time of year. You know, Christy, you mentioned
we're only doing that for two weeks, but I'm going to guess
that after that two weeks, that hitter now can now more quickly
say, all right, I, I see what I did there.
I felt this. And they can connect those two
things. And it's, it's not just an
internal feel. There needs to be external
information as well to sort of validate that, right?
(27:59):
And so the conversation of, well, actually for you, this,
you know, this challenge in yourswing just resulted in something
different because the pitch was different.
That's external to you internally.
You did the same thing. And so it's, it's the merging of
those two things where you really get to test your
experiment. And so the value of data and
video and you know, all these external pieces obviously gives
(28:21):
that sort of quality of the experiment.
And then to me that that art of coaching is then how are you
helping the athlete to execute your experiment?
How are you helping them to tap into the things that you've
planned for that? We do that for a period of time.
For us, that's four weeks and then we go, did it work or not,
right? I mean, that is just the most
basic application of just setting up an experiment, having
(28:43):
a guess at what you're going to do, see what happens in that
process. And again, time of year, if
we're in season, you know, we don't have time to let it ride
for four weeks. So those approaches are a little
different. But from a development
standpoint, and if you want hitters in season and pitchers
in season to be able to and massive air quotes make
adjustments, they need to know what mistakes feel like to know
(29:06):
how when to make that adjustmentand what mistakes mean what
adjustments. Otherwise they're just flying
blind. They're like, Oh, well, pitcher
beat me that day. And it's like, no, actually,
maybe you beat yourself that day.
And I think like, you know, thatart of coaching, it doesn't
replace the coach. Your job is to guide and
navigate to help, you know, see them through that experiment.
(29:27):
And sure, there are plenty of times, especially very early on
in our work. I think about all the times we
like, you know, change plyo programs sort of like week to
week. You're you are experimenting.
And so it can take some iteration, it can take some
pattern recognition. Our advantage is the volume of
that we see in assessments. And we also see that translate
(29:48):
in training. I think at A at a college coach
level, it's, it's not impossible.
It does not mean, like you said,a one-on-one, but it does mean
setting up your experiments, having some appreciation for all
right, what do I think this hitter is going to need right
now? And even if you're wrong, you're
wrong. It's OK.
It's an experiment. The results of an experiment can
be it didn't work. It's then the art of coaching to
(30:10):
say that's not working for her, that's a bad intent or that's
not a great intent for her, or that you know that short bad or
that plyo weight didn't do it. We got to switch that.
And so that's the art of coaching.
It's recognizing the like response of the athlete to your
experiment. And I I just said you guys were
talking. I kept thinking like, man, you
know, this one-on-one lesson model doesn't do any of that.
(30:31):
It's sort of the opposite. It's influencing the outcome of
the, you know, 30 minute to one hour experiment for a
manipulated end result sometimes.
And, well, it's like. It's there's no longevity there.
The Hallmark? There's no longevity there.
Good one, Larson. It's like the hallmark of
individualization and it's like the worst version of
(30:52):
individualization. So people are like, I want to be
on this. I want to have a coach standing
right behind me. And we're like, that is it's the
worst example of individualization because that's
it's the furthest removed from the reality of how you're going
to be able to make change and adjustments and sort of like the
learning that has to happen. I was just thinking that that
hitter example I gave where she loses her posture and struggles
(31:14):
with low. And then what I also didn't give
is that so we she had the privilege of going through the
force plate measurement, which is what we're starting to work
on with driveline. And so there's some like nuance,
strength and power stuff we got.And so that same athlete was
also came to light from that. And she's very high strength kid
and low, not low, I shouldn't say low.
(31:36):
She's a Division One athlete. So not low 80%.
It's like over 100% and just pure strength and in the 80
percentile mark across all of the sort of power measurements.
And so it's interesting from that standpoint too, is like we
have a athlete who struggles with variability and
adjustability, which often poweris required for that.
(31:59):
This ability to kind of like time, how you're getting your
power off. She has high exit velocity
because she has good strength. So she's able to get this sort
of like force. And so that's another way that
you would individualize that athlete is 1, Her strength
condition should be targeting that.
We shouldn't be just like, let'sjust keep going up and wait and
(32:19):
wait and wait. This is an athlete who already
has the strength required to do things that needs to move faster
and understand it. So that the work we're doing on
the hitting side is matching like, yeah, we're trying to get
variability for this athlete on the hitting side.
And so her her assessment needs to match that.
She also lacked rotation in her assessment.
So it's like these things that we're seeing in there, like
(32:41):
those are also playing into the individualization.
And you're not going to solve all of that on the hitting side.
So there's a level of individualization in where am I
attacking this thing? I'm attacking posture just by
mechanics and sort of the the pattern programming I'm doing
probably some version of that, but am I also attacking that and
the strength and conditioning I'm doing and what does that
(33:02):
need to look like And sort of matching all those buckets, It's
just another level of individualization which should
pull some of it off of your plate as the coach because not
everything can be solved from you.
I remember like years ago, I washaving a conversation with a
college coach, Pitter Penny coach, and then she was like,
we've been doing, you know, I can't remember what she did.
Like she showed like a, you know, thoracic rotation type of
(33:23):
we've been doing this to really work on thoracic rotation.
And I said that's not your job. And she was like, what?
Like getting your hitter's thoracic rotation is not your
job. If that like first of all,
there's no way every single one of your hitter struggles with
thoracic rotation. So the idea that like every
single one of them is doing a thoracic rotation exercise, I
mean, fine, maybe it's part of the warm up or something, but
(33:45):
like just know why you're doing it.
Is it like an activation thing? Like is there a purpose?
But doing that to chase thoracicrotation is not the hitting
coach's job. So I think sometimes
individualization gets very overwhelming when we start also
pulling in things into individualization that is not
actually in my job description. So getting a hitter thoracic
(34:07):
rotation might be something I need to know as a hitting coach,
but it's certainly not somethingI should be responsible for
because that's just not my job. That's the strength coach's job.
You know, getting whatever, knowing that my hitters have bad
hit mobility is probably part ofmy a TS job.
So I think it's just really understanding that too is like
you're not chasing all of those things as as a coach.
(34:31):
And I think that takes a way of like, they should have more
individualization because they should have individualization
across all of these buckets, butless of it should be on your
plate. Then maybe sometimes we take on
as coaches, and we did that a lot when we first started doing
movement assessments were like, OK, got it.
My job now is to make sure this kid can stabilize and have
rotation and separate and do allthese things we're doing, all
(34:52):
these movement preps. And it was like, that's not my
job. So it's like, go see James for
that part and then come back over to me for the hitting part.
And then we'll make sure that those are talking together and
you understand them. So I think that's another piece
of it. And they're warmed up and and
prepped for the task of hitting right.
They're warmed up. Specifically they are there's
(35:12):
there's a dynamic component, we call it movement prep, but there
is a preparation as an extensionor maybe a narrowing of the
skill pitching or hitting. That's an extension of strength
and conditioning. You as the, as the pitching
coach and the hitting coach, when they step in the circle or
the box, that's what you get right in that moment.
You, you're, they're coming in with their mental state, their
(35:35):
physical state, whatever mobility and strength they have
for that moment, that day, that week.
And so your job again is then toapply your program and see
what's not working. And so if if something's not
working and you can identify that is a mobility challenge,
then it's it's got to go back sort of under the coat.
That way so they. Need to hand you an athlete and
(35:56):
that you need to know what theircapacity is.
That capacity can grow, it can change.
We know fatigue is a massive factor not just in pitching, but
in hitting. And it that's what you've got to
understand out of in the moment of that athlete is what are they
bringing into the circle or the box with them.
And it's not necessarily your job to fix that, but you have to
identify the impact that it is having on the their pitching
(36:18):
patterns or their swing. You have to identify.
The, I think, I think a huge part of this, I think a huge
part of this is it's why we don't really use mechanics.
Like I know we're using that a little bit here, but we use
patterns a lot. And I think we kind of did it
unintentionally. I think we just started
switching to that because of what mechanics is tied to.
So often when a parent calls like, you know, I had a parent
(36:40):
call and they're like, she's gotgood mechanics, but we're stuck
in velocity and I am just like, now, you know, whatever that
means. I think there's this idea of
mechanics. It's like getting to the
definition of what is mechanics and they're the idea of
individualization. So your point, Ashley, is like,
it's a bunch of coaches and athletes who think their job is
(37:04):
to chase perfect mechanics and that's not what we're going for
here. I laughed because we had a post
that went out K our our hitting lead put it out.
It was like an athlete saying I don't use T in pregame because T
doesn't really help me prep for the game.
And someone wrote commented, which I hid because I don't like
angry people like get a life, but especially when a kid is
(37:27):
talking in the video. I'm like, OK, but he was like,
this is stupid or something likeGod when you're working on
mechanics. And Kay wrote back to her
credit, her response was like not before a game.
And he was like, well, you can'thit if you don't have good
mechanics. And she really, that's why we
trade. But I was like that that is the
(37:48):
thing, right, Is that literally this person thinks the job of
pregame T warm up is for a coachto like make sure the mechanics
are good, whatever that means, make sure the mechanics are
good. And so I think some of this
overwhelm with individualizationor chasing individualization as
parents and athletes comes from a really big misunderstanding of
(38:12):
like what are mechanics? We, I say this before we go
through every file mic report isthat you're going to see these
shaded norm ranges, right? You're going to see where are
the norms of what most athletes kind of fall into.
And for the most part, we will touch on when you are outside of
those normative ranges or when you don't quite follow the like
timing or shape of those normative ranges, even if maybe
(38:34):
you stay inside, but the the shape is different.
But that doesn't mean every single time we see that we're
like bad, bad, bad. We got the goal is never going
to be to take that athlete and just shove her into the
normative ranges because what you're trying to understand is
when you lose posture, as the kids were saying, what is the
results of that? OK, The result of that for you
is as you lose posture and you fall out of the normative ranges
(38:57):
that we see for posture, it makes you not rotate as much.
It makes you not be able to get to that low and inside pitch.
So we are going to want some correction for the posture, but
like we're not just chasing perfect matching mechanics and
stories to everyone. That's nothing tough so.
No, when you actually have measurement of it.
Yeah, when you actually measure capable of it.
Right. We're just trying to, I think
(39:18):
it's I got three more bold points that I wrote down and
they're. All.
It's not really my vibe usually,you know, but I was just
thinking of like, what people think, making changes, you know,
Like we get really stuck in thisculture, definitely in pitching,
like. The will the.
Want to do it the trying harder?It's like that's just someone
not educated on training adaptations.
Like a pitcher can want to correct her ball path all she
(39:41):
wants, stop having her neutral ball path sliced to her arm
side, and be super committed in her training session.
But literally, we don't know theroot of what's going on and why
her arm action is being put there.
And it's not ever going to get fixed on a single day.
I don't care how good of an athlete she is and I don't care
how how on fire her soul is. And so we have to shed this
(40:04):
concept of like that making a change is about working harder.
That's just like ridiculous. It's about training adaptations.
And training adaptations take time, which is why you don't
just stand over someone and makesure it's better in the session.
You give it time. This is kind of what I was
thinking. Thinking about in that
experimental, you know, like when you were talking about it
being an experiment in experiment law, I thought that
was a really great concept. And when you said like there's
(40:25):
no longevity, that's what it means if you are actually going
to make a change, it requires training adaptations that takes
longevity in the training approach in order for there to
be longevity in the results. The other thing I was thinking
you guys got me talking at 1.5 speed now because first I said I
got. 2 minutes. I'm happy to do, but the
listeners I don't understand. The other thing is.
(40:47):
Not to pull us aside here, but Igot distracted because we've got
an alert that when reality bought Yakritek and when reality
just also bought Blast. So anyways, that's really
interesting and a totally different.
Topic. But another topic and another
topic I do think we should bringon is strength and conditioning.
Strength and conditioning is horrible at the collegiate level
across the board. Not to say every single strength
(41:09):
coach though. The lack of individualization,
we still have athletes doing like the inappropriate exercises
that don't even match what's required in the motion.
A lack of individualization for the similar reasons.
Coaches are overwhelmed, they don't know how to do it.
We've had a couple athletes in the summer program where their
Velo was like APR during the assessment and we've seen since
(41:30):
then that it's just like going down and we've had to, I asked
them about their dynamic warmupsand they don't even like have
dynamic warmups. So we started putting in like
our dynamic warmups to activate to be able to like that's a
click key indicator when you show up in an assessment, you do
how we're like activation seriesthrough our, you know, our
movement assessment and that's when you move the best like
(41:52):
clear indicator, huge hole worthus kind of bringing back in.
This is why oh, and it's just brutal out there.
And I think it's just we bringing James in a pitch stop
to start to like open up this conversation a little bit more.
And also I just kept thinking like, I just, you guys know, I
feel about this and this is a little bit like maybe a little
bit aggressive on my part, but I'm just thinking about, you
(42:15):
know, the hitting coaches and like these waves, it started
with like loose mover, tight mover, like it.
And then like a couple years later we're like, that ain't it?
And now it's aerial terrestrial.We're like, dude, you don't know
this yet, but that ain't it either.
And so I think it's like hittingcoaches in my mind,
overwhelmingly this is aggressive.
They're bad and they don't know it.
(42:37):
And you guys know, I keep sayingthis, but what they think
identifying patterns is, what they think categorizing and
training is, is so it is missingthe mark so badly.
And so you guys know, and I bring it up like every session
because I'm like, I can't wait for HQ to get out there into
more hitting coaches. And we we pushed it more through
(42:57):
the pitching world because when you start to actually see the
visualization and the data, she does not get to that pitch any
better than she did in September.
She is not hitting the ball any harder now.
I think that wave has to start coming.
And I think it's interesting conversation, Chris, that you
brought up like, does hitting have to get better?
As long as the field, the fencesare 200 feet and whatever and
(43:18):
positive conversation there, I get it.
But I think in my experience in working with and with pitching
coaches at the collegiate level,knowing the insurance and outs
of what the hitters are doing, the overwhelming majority of
cases that I have seen, the hitting coaches, they think they
are doing a much better job thanthey are.
They take these very simple, this bucket versus this bucket.
(43:41):
And now we they think, you know,someone's a genius.
And I, I think of like, it's gotto get exposed because I come at
it more of a like, you guys know, like the hitting world,
like always fires me off, pissesme off, you know, because I'm
like, you know, I just think that, yes, the task of hitting
is very, is very difficult. But we just, I just don't think
we are holding it to the same level of like accountability
(44:04):
that we do in pitching. And I think our HQ data
management system is going to start to get that out there.
So anyway, that was all pretty negative.
I'm like, no one understands training adaptations.
Hitting coaches are bad and strength and conditioning is
shit. Yeah, but for my pitching coach.
Pitching coaching, that was. That was spot on.
OK, so I really, you know, that's not really my vibe to be
so negative, but I really do think each of these is an
(44:26):
interesting conversation. And if we're going to push
things forward across the board,you got to expose this stuff.
I mean, this is like how we got in to this world at OGX with
pitching. We exposed even our own shit
like this is not good enough. We are not actually changing
pitchers, right? So I just think it's more of a
call and a demand to start looking at the other components,
which is the other side of the ball and honestly what fuels the
(44:50):
fire to start, which is the basic level of human movement in
trending conditioning. All right, Mic drop, I'm done
saying all. Right, well end anyways because
we're out of time. So hopefully on that note, we'll
see a pitch talk and the next week will be recorded live from
pitch talk with our staff. So see you then, TuneIn, we need
you to like and subscribe and review the podcast so that we
(45:12):
can keep making it every week for you and maybe even drop what
topic you'd like us to talk about or rant about or whatever
we do every week.
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