"A Goal Without a Plan is Just a Wish"

Welcome to another edition. This is Cross functionality. The show connecting coaching, baseball and softball, male and female hosted by former college baseball and softball players. Thanks for listening and subscribing to course on Apple Google, Spotify or wherever. You get your podcasts and watching the show on the softball strength academy. You two page our main topic today, planning your lessons as a coach. Got a lot to

get into. So let me bring in friend, co-host, softball national champion at the University of Alabama and current day renowned coach. Cassie Riley Bocher soon to be a television star as well. But we won't go there unless you want to. That's all right. Thanks Jim. What he's referencing is what school is there is a documentary being filmed currently about the 2012 Alabama softball team. And the

reason why that one was significant is it was the first from the southeastern conference. So it has been very cool these last couple weeks to relive kind of 10 years ago. And what made that your so special? But yeah, it's it's going to be a while before it airs. But once it does, we'll be sure to let everyone know. And Cassie's coach that year in 2012

Pat Murphy. Big announcement. We'll just do it now. He will be on the show in a couple of weeks filling in for my lovely co host Cassie Riley Bocher CRB as it were. He will be on the show joining us for episode 17. That'll be in a couple of weeks. He is a pleasure. So enjoy. We're going to be here. We were texting back and forth

him and I actually we were having a three way text this week. And he said, roll Jim. I'm guessing that means roll tide, but just roll Jim. He's with an explanation point. So I'm assuming it was roll tide. Roll Jim. Yes. I never got into that saying. I never really understood it to be honest with you. It's yeah, I think it's it's it's not something that

everyone technically understands. It is the where Alabama got that I guess phrase of like a crimson tidal wave is they were playing in all light on a clay field against Auburn. And it was pouring rain. And by the end of it, they were covered in crimson. And like it was some newspaper said, you know, the crimson tide crimson had a tidal wave over Auburn, something along

those lines. And so it became this like the tide is rolling. The tide is rolling in, you know, type saying and then it turned into real tight. And then it stretched across all sports. I'm guessing. Yeah, I mean shoot a lot of people I think you use that that phrase. But there was an old ESPN commercial where someone gets pulled over. For a ticket, cop goes

in the ticket says roll tide guys says roll tide back. We're going in and out of a store. It's it's like a high by and almost like a post amen phrase. And it's true. That is true through and through. It is. You see someone else with an Alabama shirt on. It's it's roll tide. You know. Yes. I 100% agree. I've seen a couple recently in the

last couple of years. Some roll tide shirts here in Tampa for whatever reason, which this is not a big football town. Now if you go two hours away in Orlando, that's a big college football town. Tampa's a big NFL town. But I've seen a couple of roll tide shirts for whatever reason, a couple of all of our shirts to younger people. I'm guessing that they just

underscore Cassie are be talking about planning your lessons as a coach. And it's vitally important, but there's a lot of elements to that. And the first one we're just going to get right into the topic here. The first one, it's kind of deals with mechanics. Correct. It's kind of understanding what that hitter is in their progression. And where they need to go mechanically to get to

the next step. Yeah. And you know, I think I think to like probably something that is not said, but hopefully understood is that you get to know the person first, right? Okay. What's that learner as this is? Is this hitter? And if they are, for instance, if they're like a little extra anxious and you could tell like their parents have been on them about dropping their

shoulder, whatever it is, they definitely have a mechanical thing that they need to work on, but the way in which we work on it probably needs to be adjusted. So that that is less of a planning for less and more of a just overall coaching thing. But right. So, you know, they're here for hitting and we want to look at, okay, is if they're suffering from

a mechanical issue, honestly, really, I ask them, if you had to pick two out of three, if we had mechanics and timing, and then we had our mental performance, if you had to pick two out of three, what is the most important that we need to dress today? And it's very interesting because usually, if someone says, well, I need to work on my mechanics, my mental,

it's they have this like, they're like stuck on this one mechanical issue, they have a mechanic out of their head and they're suffering with that. And so those kind of go hand in hand, if they think it's mental and timing, there's usually some anxiety there. That is causing them to feel really sped up in a game or almost freeze in a game where their timing feels

really off come game time because of what's going on in their head. And then if we have timing and mechanics, almost like 90% of the time with my hitters, I've seen that is typically a mechanical issue that has the hitter lunging too far forward or sitting too far back, something that's adjusting where their eyeballs are at. That is affecting their timing. So it's been this like

really neat litmus test for me to be like, okay, where am I starting with this hitter? And then now I can progress and plan what the next three weeks, one month, six months looks like depending on how long I have that hitter. So you're so basically what you're doing, you're creating a base for not only the hitter, but yourself and trying to help them progress. Where

does that base come from? I hope I'm being clear with that question. Where does that base come from? Is it coming from an evaluation of when you watch them and then determine, okay, this person needs more bad speed. This person needs to get into their legs more. This person's timing is off. This person is ahead mechanically. So every hitter that comes in our building is going

to do some form of an evaluation or any hitter I work with. So it's interesting because if they are coming in for just hitting with me, that's usually in a form of some type of zoom conversation. And very much more conversational base will take a look at the swing. And I'll explain. First thing I do is I point out all the things they're doing really well.

Because I don't think many coaches do that. I think they're like, okay, here's X-Mindsy that you're doing incorrectly. But I want a hitter to be able to look at their swing and not look for the bad first. And so we'll review that and we'll really try to take a look at exactly what you just said. Okay, this individual is 13 years old. Where should we be

seeing them at a mechanical base? A base strength, whatever it may be. What is their perception of what they look like? Like how are they doing mentally? But if they're coming into our building, and this is honestly the best case scenario, and they're deciding to do strength training or throwing or something else in addition, they're going to be in person. And we're doing a full profile.

They're on our force plates. They're getting their hip internal action or action. I was really worried about the formation measured and now I can like really take a deep dive. This is not just someone coming in for a couple of sessions to prep for a camp. This is someone who's taking a six month commitment, let's say, to us. And what we can start to see is

that, well, some of these mechanical flaws that we're seeing are not due to an understanding issue, not due to the fact that they need to swing more. They're due to a limitation at the front hip. They're due to a strength deficit at the low back, whatever that may be. And then we can really train the athlete from all sides. So that's... If I had to really

go after that, that's typically where we're at. But even a hitter who's just coming in, let's say I've had that evaluation, they go to their camp, they come back a couple of weeks later, all my hitters fill out a form. And in that form, I'm asking questions like, hey, why don't you do some self evaluation? How did you feel? What do you think you need to

work on? And what makes you feel like the most prepared, what makes you feel overconfident leaving a lesson? Because half the time, that's typically where we need to be at. With a hitter. Instead of just like, okay, well, this is what I think you need to work on. And this is what we're going to go after. Instead of maybe trying to explain to that hitter and

trying to meet that hitter halfway. Okay. So I think a lot of people listening and watching maybe... I think that they probably either own academies or they have coaches at their academies or their coach themselves. And they're starting to get into more biomechanics as it pertains to pitching and hitting on both baseball and softball. And I think other sports as well. But in terms of baseball

and softball, do you feel that you should do that biomechanical assessment after you figure out what the players needs are getting again, going back to getting that base? Or do you go right for the biomechanic evaluation? Or this is the third option. Do you look at a hitter and say, okay, they're this far ahead. Now we can get more into the biomechanics. Yeah. That's a great

question. And I really... I really like getting to know the hitter first because I've had hitters come from far away and we try to get kind of everything in all at once because I'm not going to see them in person for a little bit. And it's... We might not be using that biomechanical advantage or to me biomechanical evaluation necessarily in the first four weeks of their

training. But at least I have an idea of what it looks like. I also might get a hitter that's like in this panic mode that they just need to work on timing. And they more so probably need to feel good leaving that lesson before they go play. Then they need any type of biomechanical adjustments. So we do... It is a business. It's unrealistic to say that

every single one of your hitters is going to be bought in for the long term and able to come see you or train on their own multiple times a week. So there really is sometimes a hitter that is just in such a bad place emotionally, mentally, their confidence is so low. And they need something that is going to make them feel like they can hit the

bat on the sweet spot again. So you don't need your biomechanical evaluation then. So again, so that's why I'm going to say, figuring out the hitters needs is first. But I don't love leaning on one thing too much more than another. But like I said, if I'm not going to see him for a long time, sometimes it's good to just take a look at that and

make sure we're not missing anything that's causing some issues with their swing. Yeah, we're going to get into the hitting progression pyramid here in just a couple of minutes. But you mentioned confidence in there with a hitter on a scale of one to 10. And trying to evaluate that, how do you go about evaluating that confidence, those kind of like being a scout in that moment?

Sure. So funny enough, I we do a lot of something called type form. And if anyone is listening, you've probably filled a type form at some point in your life and didn't realize it. But it's just a very simple form. They fill out they have to pick their confidence on a scale of one to 10 without picking a seven. And I can't remember where I first

heard that, but I thought it was brilliant because seven is such a safe option. It's kind of high, but not too low. And it's the number of times a hitter looked at me and been like, well, what do you mean I can't pick a seven? And they're so uncomfortable picking eight or six. And but I learned so much more about where the hitter is actually at

based on what number they pick on that side of seven. Now, great. I get hitters who are like four or five and they feel like they're in the tank. I also get other hitters who are like, why wouldn't I be at a 10? You know, so it's the learning, not only are you getting a glimpse of their confidence level right now, you're getting a glimpse of

how they perceive confidence. I have some hitters who don't think they've ever been at a 10. Even though I say, no, no, this is the best you've ever seen. You've ever felt and they're like, no, no, no, like confidence of a 10, like that's not me. So I'm getting to know that hitter. The other thing that's interesting is I took, I had gosh, I had over

a thousand entries at some point. And I did just this, you know, trying to do some data analysis on just confidence and age. And if an athlete was 13 years and below, their confidence was consistently at an eight, nine or 10. The second we hit 14, 15, 16, it tanked to that an average of like 5.5. And, you know, we're late to moving to the bigger

fields. You know, in softball, you don't really get, you don't get a so that that big adjustment, but you do get a shift in how the way the games play, right. So I think it's a couple of things. It is. Yes, the speed of the pitch is getting faster. Girls are getting bigger. They're throwing harder. Now you have more failure. It's a lot harder to be

confident when you have that additional failure, right. Right. Additionally, in general, like if you took this and said this has nothing to do with softball and you just looked at typical data that happens with females when they hit puberty. Their confidence typically plummets. It's like a very uncomfortable time for them, whatever it may be. So it is interesting like that it goes hand in hand with

right around that. Pre-Pubescent age that their confidence starts to dip. So it's just again, as a coach, it's good to have an awareness of that. Keep an eye on it. And, you know, teach really teaching athletes like listen, your performance is going to waver. You're going to have some really great days, some really low days. But our goal is to how do we remain our most

confidence self even when we're having those. Yes, low performance days. Right. Okay. So moving on to some of the elements of the swing and asking those type of questions that can further help that student and help you with your lesson planning. What lesson number do you usually ask types of questions like, Hey, pitch selection timing. Let's talk. Let's talk about hitting now. Let's not just go

into mechanics. Let's not just actually do the physical movement. But let's talk about this and see if we can progress that way. Sure. It honestly depends on where the hitter is at. So I might get an 18 year old who has gone to plenty of hitting lessons and is really well versed in their swing. And I can have that conversation with them almost immediately. I'll have

other hitters that I'll work with, you know, I've worked with some hitters from the point that they were 12 to 22. That becomes very, you know, that that conversation is like, Hey, do we sprinkle it in a little bit right around 1314? Do we get a lot? And then also then the conversation starts to get dominated by that by the time. And then we're in high

school and upper level travel ball. And I really do think there's probably some graph that exists where we can say, Okay, here's a hitter. What are we working on mechanics or like really mechanical like physical progressions or mental progressions. And what we need to look at is as the athlete gets older, we're probably going less and less on mechanics and more and more on mental like

mental performances really taking up so much of that. And when I say mental, that's like, you're, Hey, what picture are you looking for? How do you evaluate? A picture? How are you evaluating the strike zone? Like, you know, all those things that really give that hitter that extra one to 2% improvement? Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned evaluating the strike zone, knowing the strike zone. I've talked

about that on my other podcast, the lap, Epstein hitting podcasts on subscribe if you haven't done so already. But evaluating the strike zone, what does that come to play? What's lesson? Do you usually dive into what lesson number to when you start talking about what the strike zone may be? Depending on, of course, who the umpire is and depending on, of course, depending on what the

strike zone may be in different games on different days. Sure. So if I have an athlete that's in season, they're in their high school season, middle school season, that usually comes up pretty soon. If I have a hitter who is in the offseason, we're in October, November, December, they're not seeing live pitching for a while. We probably won't have that conversation until closer to season. So

it's less of a lesson number and more of a timing of the year. But we do talk, you know, I do a very, I explain very distinctly, there's a difference between the hit zone and the strike zone. Your hit zone is going to probably remain fairly consistent. You know pitches that you like to hit when you're in a hitter's count. So that's, I think that's another

conversation that doesn't always get to happen with an athlete. Like, what are your favorite pitches to hit? And who cares if the umpire is calling this strike really high? That's not your favorite pitch. We're not worried about that until you have two strikes on us. So we do have to delineate between what's in our control and what's out of our control. The strike zone is going

to vary on par to umpire. But in that same breath, we can learn to make adjustments off of, you know, hey, I'm on defense. I'm noticing that par is calling a low strike. You have it in the back of your head for when you're, you know, developing your two strike approach. And, you know, it's hard because I don't get to be on a field with an

athlete. But to be able to bring up those types of conversations, I think sometimes make a bigger impact on, you know, teaching them, hey, you need to be palm up at contacts, you know, that sometimes that hit zone strikes on distinction is huge for them. Are there lessons that match the age of players or should be the age of players that you teach? For example, is

there kind of a certain template for 13 year olds, a certain template for 18 year olds or some college players that you may see? Sure. So um, and by the way, that's important to not be rigid, right? That's where that, where being very flexible as a coach comes into play. For sure. So I mean, to go off that rigidity, um, we have programs or templates designed

for all of our athletes in the building, right? That goes strength and conditioning, throwing, catching, hitting. But the idea is that they're not doing this on their own. There's a reason there's a coach there. So we do want to be able to provide flexibility. We do want to be able to say, hey, listen, like, um, if this one isn't working, we're adjusting it on the fly

because of, of how you look today, how you feel today, the athlete might have stayed up all night studying for something and we came in and we have this big plan to do a high intense bat speed progression. And they're just not ready for it today. And that's fine. You scrap it. You move on. You adjust. So, and I think that is important as far as

the, you know, let's, let's go like 12, you 14, you 16, you 18, you type, type set up college athlete. Um, in the off season, 12 you, uh, to, I'd say like their off season probably is going to last longer until like April, May, June. So when we progress mechanics, we can progress a lot slower, which makes sense. And I'll have a specific progression in mind

of what we would typically, how, like, let's say, perfect world, how we would want to progress. Now we have some, um, athletes who are going to progress a little faster, some that maybe go a little slower. 14, you and 16, you, uh, depending on if they are playing high school ball or not, their off season is shorter. Their progression is faster. So their progressions, let's say,

start around November for mechanics. Um, I'm trying to get their mechanics pretty much solidified in a place they need to be come January, so that February and March, we're really focusing on their timing. Um, and making sure that's ready for life, pitching come April. So again, it does depend on the time of year. College then, I don't, I don't see a college athlete, except during the

summer and maybe a couple of weeks of winter. So that is, uh, I mean, we are trying to find two or three drills that get their, their swing to the place it needs to be. We're trying, and they are basically doing those warm up drills on their own. And the entire lesson is focused on like, okay, outside pitch, high, high outside pitch, low outside pitch focus,

how are we like, you know, really gaining confidence in different areas of the zone, different types of spin, different types of pitch movement. Um, the lessons really should be almost like strength training for athletes as well, right? Like off-season training, you start to build up that strength. You want to be your strongest. Your peak should be right at the beginning of the year. And you want

to try to maintain that throughout the year. It's kind of the same thing with hitting lessons and even pitching lessons as well. Yes. You know, you're trying to like create this neural groove, right? We're trying to get our body to move very consistently. And the more times you get, you know, it might take 40 minutes sometimes to get a hitter to be swinging their best swing.

And we want to move that to like 10 minutes so that we can spend like 30 minutes of that lesson with really their best swing, like really getting solidified. Um, the biggest difference is that, um, we don't have the same, uh, intensity that a weight training program might be. So I'm not putting weight on someone's back. I'm not forcing them to be the high effort for

very long periods of time. So where unless I have someone on a very specific bat speed program, there's typically, something called oscillation with a strength training program where you hit your highs and then you have a recovery day and then a higher, you know, and you're trying to not just blast them every single day type thing, right? Unless I have someone who's committing five, six days

a week with me and I can, I can really program that. Um, that would be the only thing that is potentially different from a strength training workout versus a hitting program. Yeah. Speaking, by the way, um, so drills, you mentioned that a couple of minutes ago. There's so many drills now on social media and everybody's doing these wacky drills. Maybe it's not wacky to them. So

I'm sorry, but they're doing all these drills and it just seems like drill drill drill, you know, do this, use this device, et cetera. How do you determine? Let's just figure this out now. How do you determine what drills to do with a hitter and which ones will actually be work and be necessary for that here to progress? Sure. So I will say I have, I

guess what I should ask. What are your baseline of drills? Sure. Okay. So I have, uh, I've five. I've got 100 drills and they're all filmed. They're all labeled. However, they're all categorized. So I have my level one drills that pertain to an athlete needing to really work on positional understanding. And then and really at the end of the day, they kind of turn into movements.

So there might be five to 10 drills that I'm really focusing on with one athlete, even though I have like a library of over 500, right? So I think that's the delineating factor is like we can have our crazy wacky drill. But they probably want to apply for every single hitter. There's going to be a specific set of drills for our specific level athlete based on

exactly what they need to work on. And I think that's probably the biggest miss is. We see something on social media and think, oh, either I got to try it or like, oh, that's ridiculous. Well, it might not be ridiculous for this athlete who. You know, is a writing thrower lefty hitter can't get into a little bit of a layback position lacks side bend. So they

need to adjust, you know, who knows maybe there's a lot of thought and maybe there's not maybe. Maybe you find some social media drills, but there's not a lot of thought, but I always try to give some of the benefit of the doubt that there's more thought than we think to a drill, but. Um, we know they're like even when they're like standing. I don't know,

I'm just I'm going to cut you off, but. Even when they're like they've got this thing on their back and they're just kind of like rotating around like not really doing much. Hard to give that the benefit of the doubt. Maybe maybe they are coming back from a lower back injury. And this is the initial phases of return to swing. What's that part of rehab though?

Maybe. I always try to read the comment. I always try to look at the hitter, but. Yeah, I'm open. You know, because it's similar to a queue, right? Like the queue that I say to a hitter is an interpersonal relationship between myself and the hitter. It's not really what's actually happening, but it's what's getting the hitter to actually help feel what's happening. Right. So we see

that. Like we'll see majorly baseball players be like, yeah, I feel like I'm swinging down on the ball. And then I'll all of a sudden you watch their swing and they're getting like on plane early, right? But in their, you know, and you can crucify a coach all you want for saying swing down, swing up, do whatever, but they're trying to get the hitter to feel

something, right? If I have a girl is popping up a high and outside pitch and we're in the middle of season, I'm going to tell her to try to hit a ground ball to the opposite field. And people are like, oh, that's not how you supposed to both, you know, that turns into a line drive for her. And that's. So again, it's where as a queue

is an interpersonal relationship, I think so is drill sometimes where that can be an relationship between the coach and the athlete, trying to figure out what are the, what are your five to 10 drills that go in your toolbox that are going to help you for the current phase you're in. And then we can, every single one of those drills has a progression and we can

start to reevaluate the side. Okay. Do we need to progress? Do we need to reagress? Do we need to move to a different phase based on, hey, your season's coming up. We have a dream, a camp coming up, whatever it may be. And well, okay, you made a great point there and this is where metrics really comes into play and is very, very helpful. Sometimes I

think if you look at like the blast motion, for example, and somebody has a certain attack angle and you want to, and now you can read their swing and understand where their swing is progressed to. And if you want that attack angle to be lower or higher, you can give them a certain cue that might actually fix that attack angle. And in essence, really just fix

their swing where they need to get to 100% and you'll start to notice with certain athletes, especially, listen, I work with a lot of middle school to high school age athletes. I do have college and pro and I do have maybe one or two that are younger, but that age group is so interesting because they're learning how they learn just as the coaches are learning how

they learn, right? They don't know exactly how they learn just yet. And if you tell them to make an adjustment, it might take weeks. It might take weeks for them to really have that brain body connection depending on their overall fleticism. So it's almost like the scavenger hunt, like, okay, we're going to try this cue. Nope, that didn't work. Okay, let's try this drill. Nope, that

didn't work. Let's try this movement pattern, you know, in your job, where does this work? Where can I poke and prod the nervous system and find that basically the most advantageous adept patient for them? Yeah, I can't tell you how many times, episitted on the lab of steam hitting podcasts and glad you brought it up about using certain cues and not being confused with what you're

teaching or what method that you may be trying to teach and what your beliefs are. It's just a certain cue that could actually help that hitter get better and progress to where they need to be. Like for example, using the metrics and hey, your attack angle is this. We got to swing just swing, try to swing straight down. And oftentimes they're not actually going to swing

straight down. It's just a cue in their head. You know, sometimes they hit or say, well, I'm just using my hands. When a video, they're not just using their hands, but it's a cue for them. 100%. I, you know, I like to do this. I like to, um, coaches, I huddle. I actually think I think they're getting rid of coaches. I send that company's closing, but

being able to showcase a swing side by side. And I'll set the camera up and we'll do some front toss. And the hitter is doing front toss. And she, she's like, man, I really came forward and leaned and rolled over there. And I said, okay, wave at the camera. So we know, you know, that's it. Usually have I make sure I can find the swing again.

Right. I'm like, okay. And then she hits a shot. And I said, okay, wave at the camera. One more time. We finish up our front toss round. And then we go and we compare those two. Two swings where she's waving, right. This way you're not wasting time sifting through 20 swings. We compare those two swings. And I should, we go frame by frame by frame. And

they are shocked at how similar it looks. It really is very difficult to like have your swing look completely different unless you were completely fooled on timing. Um, so it is, it's just bringing awareness to the hitter at how high end of a focus they have on how they feel. Like they thought they were rolling over and they're like that barely looks like I'm rolling over.

And meanwhile, they thought they were looking like completely forward and chop them off to the ground. There is such tiny micro adjustments and tweaks that really need to happen in those older athletes. And they don't need to be massive adjustments. I think that's my biggest beef when an athlete goes to college and the college coach is trying to revamp everyone's swing. If we know anything about

motor learning, it's too late. You know, there's so many, it's, you can make tweaks, but these massive adjustments are not going to be able to get solidified in an athlete. That is 17, 18, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19,

19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, Yeah. Email us your question, by the way, too, Jimbo podcast 21 at gmail.com. Again, Jimbo podcast with a J, at Jimbo podcast 21 at gmail.com. If you do have any questions, you can leave comments, reviews on Apple Google Spotify and the YouTube page, self-hosting, the Academy, Files and Social Media

as well. I'm Jim Tara and Cassie is at coach underscore Cassie R.B. on Instagram at coach Cassie R.B. on Twitter. Well done. Thank you. Yes. All right. Let's get into the main event of today's show. It's a great graphic that I'm looking at here to my right and people can see it. They will see it on the YouTube side, the video side, reviewing the hitters progression

pyramid. Let's go through this a little bit. We can almost create a whole episode around this. But the first one, the first square I'm looking at followed by a bunch of triangle, we're triangles, yeah, triangles cylinders. No. Trapezoids. Trapezoids. Yeah. I did get a B plus in the geometry for the record. Well, it's three trapezoids followed by a triangle. Right. That's. Oh, you're right. Yes. Yes.

Okay. Okay. So there's three. Yes. Three trapezoids. One, one, three D triangle. And then at the bottom is the square, which is mental performance. That's the biggest one. Touched on that a little bit earlier in the show. That's the first one. Mental performance. Yeah. So I mean, I'll take you through like the over the groupings essentially. So you have. So I'm going to go through two

sides of this pyramid. One is swing mechanics. And it's just explaining there's a specific progression to it. And I like showing this to my hitters because I don't want them to think I'm just closing my eyes, putting my hand in a hat and picking out drills. So if we develop our swing mechanics, that's great. That's how we become a really great swinger. But we want to

become a great hitter. And so that, well, that's why the other side of the pyramid is our timing progression. And why hitting is so difficult is you have the development of the swing, but then also how do you actually develop your ability to time up a pitch. And then the idea is like, great, now we're a great hitter, but now we need to be a great

hitter consistently in pressure situations. As, you know, when we after we fail, after we succeed, whatever that may be. And that's where mental performance comes in. And it almost looks like this pyramid sitting in a pool of mental performance. And when I draw on the board, I draw the square. But then I say this square could really be a pool that goes infinitely deep. There's not

going to be a limit to how much we can develop or really tweak and continue to work on our mental performance because that will be, that's going to be something that holds us back throughout our entire life. We can, we can work on our swing to our balloon the face. We can work on our timing till or below in the face. But if we don't take

care of our mental performance, we're always going to, that's going to be our foundation that everything else will crumble. So, you know, again, what's what's tough is like this has no age associated with it, right? So five and eight year old, I'm not going to be like, hey, we have to develop mental performance before we do anything else as a coach. I just need to have

it in the back. I have my head that I have an eye on, I keep an eye on it. And I'm doing age appropriate mental performance things, right? Talking about confidence, talking about enjoying the game, talking about having fun. At 18 years old, that mental performance conversation becomes very different, right? So there is a, there is a progression as it does as it goes to ages.

But anyway, as we look at swing mechanics, the very first barrier to entry to looking at swing mechanics is does the athlete actually understand what position their body needs to be. And at each phase of the swing. So positional awareness is key. That's not to say that there might be multiple reasons why they lack it or are really good at it. But what's their awareness of

the positions their body should be in. And if once we're like pretty confident, they understand, okay, this is what I need to look at a position A position B position C. Can they move really well from position A position B? Do they have any hitches? Do they have certain barriers? Is it, you know, and you can ask yourself questions there where it's like, says, okay, well,

they're not moving into the contact position very well at all. Do they have a low back issue? Is there a rotational issue? Right? Like, well, how come that movement is flawed? Once we check off those two boxes, we can then add speed and power onto our swing. If we flip the triangle upside down and we try to attack speed and power first, we're going to probably

swing really hard with poor movement patterns. We want to have our move patterns in place, at least 90% of the way in order for us to develop that speed and power. Or else, like I said, we're going to just have to suffer with some consistency issues. If anyone's ever played the game, they know the best type of swing feeling is like where you effortlessly felt like

you saw the bat and the ball flew off of it. So the top of this triangle is called efficiency and whip. And that's really your kinematic sequencing. Are we getting our body to sequence in the correct order as we continue to add speed and power? What we don't want when someone starts to swing hard is to see their hands going first, to see their torso going

first. We still want to have that same sequencing of hips, torso, upper body and bat to follow last. So that is the mechanical progression for it. Hopefully not to be too much of a mouthful. Do you want to pause for a second before we move on? Yes. You applauded for while you can't. You went, woo or whatever you said. So I'll give you a pass. That

was very good. Now here's my question for a visual learner, like myself. All you visual learners out there, I salute you. And that's not always easy. Mental performance, that's the base. That's the first one. It's an infinite pool, as you mentioned, great wording there. Now I'm wondering about the colors, right? Again, visual learner. So we've got at the bottom of the pyramid. We've got the Philly's

road gray then followed by that's the second biggest, biggest, whatever shape. And then you've got the Yankees Navy blue and then you've got the Alabama red. And then you have wild Kentucky wildcat baby blue at the top. Okay. So luckily there's no orange. I could have said Tennessee. So you've got each one of those shapes, those four shapes. One is as they get taller in the

pyramid. It's smaller. The shapes are smaller. So the color, the way it's color coded. How does that play into learning about a hitters? Sure. So I mean, honestly, when I was picking it, I really picked out speed and power first. I was like, that's like, that's the red one where I feel like everyone's eyes usually go to it. Right? We usually try to find that one

on the more towards the bottom. It was more that I. No, that's that wasn't it was more that that's the exciting part. Power is the exciting part and sure like the duller colors on the bottom are not as exciting. But to me, that's like, that's my sweet spot. Dull monotonous consistency is where I thrive. And we have to go through that in order to get to

what we want most. The tip of the iceberg or the tip of the pyramid being like a little bit more just being smaller. I think that's just important that that is that is such the finite part of developing a hitter. And there's not that that's going to be these infinite drills of progressing efficiency and whip and everything else like this is okay, we figured out exactly

what this hitter needs. And now we are laser focused on us at the top. So you get to once you get to the top, you've kind of figured out and graduated through everything else, right? Well, right, at least through maybe a mod right because you could do this off of a T or maybe like you can say, okay, off of a T does someone forget possess

position awareness, moving proficiency speed and power efficiency. Great. What about inside pitches? What about outside high low? What about on lower pitching faster pitching? What about live pitching? You could go through this and say, what point does something start to break down? And then that's where you find your sweet spot and you're like, okay, we really struggle off outside pitch front toss, getting ourself into the

right positions. We're going to live there for a little bit. We know what drills work best for you because we already progressed this. We know what drills work best. And we're going to get there until you start to feel that nice and smooth whip your body starts to fall into place for that outside pitch off of front toss, let's say. Obviously, then you continue to perk.

Progress we found our sticking point we move on from there. Again, this is a, it's a way to like try to got it be a nice template, but nothing is ever perfect. And so there's always going to be some adjustments. There's always going to be outliers that maybe fall outside this. But this is, I think, a probably of my hope at least when I first developed

it, I presented this at the World's softball convention was to give this to coaches so that they could have this and figure out, okay, like where do how does this, how does my system fit into this? How did it like, you know, here's what I'm going to do. How can I then figure out how my hitters can work through this and and progress through this and

provide a deeper understanding for them? I'm glad you brought this up today. And I'm glad we've talked about the hitting progression pyramid again, authored by you. Because on this past week's episode of the lab, I talked about the four I came up with this like I think last weekend when I was jogging the four top four pillars of hitting. That was our topic. Cool. Now, I

had confidence as the, it was an item or I didn't put them in order like I should have. So fail on me for not prepping for the show properly. But I had confidence. I guess slash mental performance as one of the top ones. Now I, one of the number three for me was thinking along approach, preparing and thinking along with a picture. Where does that sort

of fit into all that? So I've that has been in mental performance. So I, I do actually think there's probably a third side to this pyramid. There's definitely a third side to this pyramid. And that is probably where that falls. What I, the reason I've hesitated to actually build it out. Because I'm like, you know what? There's probably even another pyramid that says, well, this is

what the pyramid looks like. If you have a technology like a blast motion, let's say, and how different that per or how much more finite our progressions might look. But any type of approach has gone under mental performance. Because I've gone through the idea that mental clarity is going to lead to visual acuity. And so when we have our mental clarity in place of like, okay,

I'm looking for this particular pitch. This, yes, this girl might throw a rise ball out of the zone, but I'm focusing on the low outside pitch that she's hitting the zone with. And that confidence that you get from just having that plan all of a sudden you start to see the ball better. And your, your vision didn't get better from that to a bat, right? You

didn't all of a sudden gain the sharpness of vision, but you're seeing the ball better. And how does that happen? It happens from our, our mentality, being, being clear, being, you know, being talked about, being reviewed. And honestly trained. A lot of people think like, oh, mental performance, you have it or you don't, it takes a long time to develop the ability to maintain confidence, to

have visualization, to handle failure. That, that takes a while. And I think we have to commit to that process. Even though I know I don't think that's your favorite word, but commit to the process of developing mental performance instead of just thinking like, oh, some people have it. And I just don't. Well, okay. I'm going to clarify. When coaches say, okay, fine, I can, I'm okay

with that. But when teams and organizations use that moniker, I get a little annoyed. Fair. Like the University of Alabama football team. They never did they use that is their thing. It's like the process. The process who's saying it though, the coaches, Nick Sivan. Yeah. Okay, then that's okay. But if a GM is saying that in professional sports. And by the way, they can say that

because all he do is win. If you're a team or an organization that never wins, you say, oh, well, it's a process. You know, this is, it's a process. No, go fuck yourself. You would process. That's what I say. We do it. Our show, by the way, skews younger, our younger audience. So I apologize. But you know what? They see a lot worse than what's on

TikTok nowadays. So I think I can drop the F4 F. All right. Complacency. It invites complacency. I go. What do you mean? Process invites complacency. I want to hear the Yankees. If they say it, like it's like really, you know, anyway. You don't hear the Philly saying that. Do you? No. You're in the world. You don't hear the Astros saying that. Okay. Next week. You don't

hear the giants saying that either they're six or the Eagles for that matter. There you go. I was going to say, you know, while Nick Ziriani does talk about plants, so that's kind of weird in and of itself. Episode 16 next week. Purpose of evaluations. When to do the evaluations. When it's a proper time. I think we're going to talk more about the hitting progression pyramid

to start the show next week as well. But the purpose of evaluations. That's our topic next week. Do we have any preview for that? I'm looking forward to that. We touched on it a little bit today as well. Sure. Well, similar to your pillars. I think the biggest idea is going to say, okay, what exactly are we evaluating and ask yourself why are you having an

evaluation in the first place? And honestly, if we do, you know, definitely email us, but if we do have people out there who are in the private sector, one of the biggest things for me is, do I charge for an evaluation? Do I give it a free evaluation to try to get people to come hit with me? How? Or do I just make an evaluation part

of a first lesson? You know, so I think we can talk about that too, because that's always confusing and I think can be a point of conversation as well. Yeah, free consultation. As you're saying, come to us and we'll give you a free consultation and charge you a lot of money to manage your money. Okay. Next week, that is episode 16. Thanks for listening, watching today.

Everybody and we will talk to you then.