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Baseball Practice Should Be for Baseball

I’ve been noticing something.

And more importantly, coaches have been telling us the same thing.

Players are showing up to practice lacking basic athletic and movement skills.

They struggle to coordinate their bodies.

They don’t move well in different directions.

They have difficulty rotating, transitioning, reacting and adjusting.

So what happens?

Coaches have to spend valuable practice time developing athleticism.

I don’t blame the coaches.

In many cases, they’re trying to fill a gap that already exists.

But here’s the problem:

Baseball practice should be for BASEBALL.

Hitting.

Throwing.

Fielding.

Baserunning.

Reads.

Decision-making.

Baseball IQ.

Coaches only get so much time with their players.

If a significant portion of that time has to be spent teaching kids how to move, that’s time they can’t spend teaching them how to play the game.

Somewhere along the way, we skipped a step.

Youth baseball has become incredibly specialized.

Private hitting lessons.

Pitching lessons.

Fielding lessons.

Travel tournaments.

Cage work.

More games.

More reps.

And yet coaches are telling us that many kids are becoming less athletic.

That shouldn't surprise us.

Because more baseball doesn't automatically create a better athlete.

A kid can take hundreds of swings without learning how to explore movement.

He can throw hundreds of pitches without developing movement variability.

He can play 70 games and still lack the ability to efficiently run, rotate, decelerate, transition or react.

Repetition builds familiarity with a skill.

But athleticism requires something else:

Movement experiences.

Flip the model.

Instead of trying to squeeze athletic development into baseball practice, what if we developed those qualities outside of practice?

At home.

20 minutes.

Four times per week.

Give young athletes opportunities to:

Run. Jump. Rotate. Crawl. React. Transition. Balance. Coordinate. Explore.

Then let baseball practice do what baseball practice does best:

Teach baseball.

That was one of the reasons we created Baseball Flows.

Not to replace coaches.

Not to replace baseball practice.

And definitely not to replace skill development.

We built it to support all of them.

Our goal is to help fill the movement gap before the player gets to practice.

Build the athlete at home. Develop the baseball player at practice.

Imagine a coach getting a group of kids who already possess a broad foundation of movement options.

Now the coach can spend more time teaching them to read a ground ball.

Recognize a pitch.

Take an extra base.

Make a throw on the run.

Adjust to something they haven't seen before.

That’s where athleticism and baseball skill finally meet.

The athlete brings the movement capacity.

The coach teaches him how to use it to solve the problems the game presents.

That's player development.

And it starts long before we worry about perfect mechanics.

Build the athlete first.
The baseball player follows.

— Dr. Gallo

Want to start building your player's athletic foundation at home?

Learn more about the Baseball Flows App at www.baseballflows.com

Move Better. Play Better.

REPLY “FLOW” to this email and I’ll send you our FREE Baseball Flows Starter Kit.

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