***Please be warned that I will be stepping onto my soap box here for a few moments.
I can’t stand some coaches.
Not all coaches, just a select group of coaches that don’t get it.
You see, a lot of baseball coaches call me a “strength coach” and that’s cool because I do teach their ballplayers how to get stronger. Some coaches call me a “strength & conditioning coach” because I help their ballplayers get stronger & more conditioned.
But no matter what they call me, they all have the same goal in mind – enhance the performance of their ballplayers as it relates to the game of baseball. Agreed?
Here’s a typical conversation that I have a few times each year when I first meet with my coaches.
Me – Hey Coach, what exactly are we looking to accomplish with your guys?
Coach – Well, we want to turn them into better ballplayers. You’re the expert so I’ll pretty much leave that up to you.
Me – Ok, but let me explain that I don’t make ballplayers. I make athletes and it’s your job to turn those athletes into baseball players.
Coach – That’s fine, I’ll worry about the hitting, pitching, & fielding. And you can just “Crush em!”
And that’s where I need to take a deep breath and count to 10… or 100.
If all you want is someone to blow a whistle and make your ballplayers run until they puke there are a lot of poor college kids that could use a few extra bucks in their pockets and would be more than happy to do that for you.
But if you want your ballplayers to become better athletes you’ve got to teach them how to move as efficiently as possible.
So, what does this have to do with a Ferrari and a Flat Tire?
Well, if we were going to have a car race and you had a Ferrari and I had a school bus, who would win? Of course your Ferrari is going to blow my school bus away, right?
Oops. I forgot to mention, your Ferrari has a flat tire while my school bus just had a complete tune up and is running in tip-top shape.
All of a sudden it’s a completely different race, huh? Instead of you leaving me in your dust, now you’ll have to work really hard just to keep up.
Unfortunately most coaches take their skilled athletes (Ferrari’s) and give them flat tires by running them into the ground and not teaching them how to move with the most efficient & effective mechanics.
However, with proper movement training you can take a skilled baseball player and make him into a great athlete by teaching him how to move his body around the field as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Now, if we take those skilled baseball players who are already skilled athletes and teach them how to move with even greater efficiency we will have stand out all-star baseball players!
So it really gets on my last nerve when I finish a great session of teaching young ballplayers how to properly accelerate or change direction on the field and a coach walks over to me and says, “Is that it? They don’t really look like you did much with them.” When in reality we trained their neuro-muscular system to fire in the right sequence in order to produce as much force as possible as quickly as possible in the proper directions to either accelerate or decelerate their bodies as the situation demands… but we didn’t do much with them, huh?
For more info on how we train our young athletes to move as efficiently and effectively as possible check out:
http://www.workoutsforbaseball.com/youth
Tags: baseball coaches, baseball players, baseball training, baseball workouts, bus, coach, rdquo, soap box, strength, strength coach, tire, training for baseball, typical conversation, workouts for baseball
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