This Is My Edge

Too many kids have been programmed to pitch, or even hit, like a robot. As they mature, they develop absolutely no body awareness and no ability to adjust.

We may help them overcome some terrible habits, and they look amazing in warmups, but during the game they struggle to put exciting new techniques into their performance. They are trying to memorize specific steps instead of feeling the power generated by the move.
When champions learn something new and exciting, they think “This is my edge. It allows me to reach a new level.” Average players get caught up in avoidance thinking. Instead of focusing on feeling exciting movements, they are occupied with “I gotta stop doing this thing in this way”. They are adopting a losing mentality.
If a kid has been taught robotic moves, instead of developing body awareness, she is more prone to becoming methodical and unnatural. We always begin the first lesson by asking a kid how her hips should feel, giving her the choices of tight, loose, powerful or neutral. Yes, there is one right answer. If we can get that one simple thought, an obsession with having powerful hips in everything she does, she will eliminate most of the other problems that occur. It is very much like hitting in this way. If she is totally consumed with feeling the hips generating power, a lot of the other issues will go away.
Sometimes the instructor struggles to understand the process. Men tend to think in the way their own bodies work. We rely far too much on the upper body and don’t realize that many of the ways that we naturally operate will be opposite for a female. When we are training men we spend a lot of teaching time in this area.
When we train women who were pitchers, we spend a lot more time on the way things feel. If an instructor was taught in robotic, step-by-step fashion, she may never have developed good body awareness. She might want to fix a problem in a certain way because that is the way she was taught. I will often ask, “If you do that, how will that make the hips feel, or where will it cause tension in another part of the body that will hurt performance?” She starts getting it pretty quickly.
Feel is so important to us that, as we make new discoveries, the first thing we do is have the former female pitchers among our Instructors study them, try them, and make sure they are natural to the female athlete. If it does not feel right, we examine it more carefully.
Another huge part of our training is to help them understand the difference between tight and powerful. Many kids are so tight and jerky that they cannot deliver speed. Yet, they feel like they are giving maximum effort. As an example, we ask them to clench their fists and tighten all of the muscles in their arm and they try to make a fast arm circle. It is impossible to be fast in that way and the rest of the body is completely neutralized. The arm must be loose in order to be fast. And, when they loosen the arm, suddenly the rest of the core can be engaged in the pitch, creating power.
The ability to feel the movements and to realize when barriers are preventing her from maximizing performance is one of the most important qualities a pitcher, hitter, or fielder can have. The number of new kids who come to us simply because they “sense something is not right” is astounding. Those are the kids who rely on feel. Those are the kids we can turn into champions.