Thanks to those who emailed us yesterday to tell us how happy they were because they missed my emails.
It is appreciated and motivating
Isn't that a coaching lesson on how to motivate athletes?
Ok let's talk decision-making at the plate for a second.
Decision-making and pitch selection is a tough thing to learn, practice and teach. A pitching machine or a tee doesn't really help you learn that. You can have the best swing in the world but without good decision-making skills - you will not experience success at the plate. Period.
Here is something you can do in practice to develop good decision making skills.
When doing live pitching or front toss or soft toss or whatever variations of live/toss, try NOT to throw the same type of pitch every time.
You see, a very interesting study was made a very years ago in baseball. Here what it was in a nutshell:
- 2 groups of baseball players
- 1 group trained by hitting all fastball, then all change-ups, then all curves, etc.. basically hitter new what was coming up.
- Other group trained but each pitch was mixed and they never knew what was coming up.
Results: First group that knew improves faster. They had more success at the plate in the early stages even in games. But after a couple of weeks, the second group that didn't know started to catch up and became much more successful at the plate than the first group.
Conclusion: The second group learned to adjust their swing and make better decisions at the plate because they had their mind involved and had to try to read cues as to what was coming up since they didn't know. They trained BOTH their swings and their decision-making skills while the first group only improved at hitting various but NOT recognizing them and making good decisions.
This follows the new coaching principle of training "cognitive skills" which are basically sports intelligence, decision-making skills, etc.
So, stop just working on reps, reps, reps, and throw some variations to learn how to make good decisions.
Marc Dagenais
"Your Softball Peak Performance Coach"
P.S. As I mentioned yesterday, I will be in the Nashville Area in early April for 6 days and would be available at night for private sessions, clinics or workshops if anybody would be interested. Just email or call me if interested.
For more tips, visit my website:
http://www.softballperformance.com
