Hey,

I want to tell you how I learned to hit. It's going to sound like the opposite of good instruction. Stay with me, because there's real science underneath it — and it changes how you should think about your son's development.

I grew up hitting rocks off the railroad tracks with a big red Wiffle ball bat.

I hit tennis balls with a broomstick.

I hit cans with a flat wooden board.

I knocked little nuggets off the tree in our yard and swung at those too.

No coach. No launch monitor. No "perfect swing" model. Just a kid, a bunch of different objects, and a bunch of different things to hit them with.

And here's the thing nobody told me at the time: that chaos was the best hitting training I ever got. Not despite the variety — because of it.

Let me explain why, because a researcher at Arizona State has spent his career proving it.

His name is Dr. Rob Gray. He's one of the world's leading voices in how athletes actually learn to move, and he built a baseball batting research lab that's been used in over 25 published studies. So when he talks about hitting, it's not opinion. It's data.

His central finding flips everything most youth hitting instruction is built on:

The goal is not to master one perfect swing. The goal is to build a swing that can adapt.

Gray calls it functional variability, and his line is simple: variability is a feature, not a bug. The best hitters in the world don't repeat one identical, memorized swing. They have a deep menu of swings and pull the right one for the pitch they get. A hitter with one perfect swing has one answer. The game asks a different question every pitch.

So how do you build a hitter who can adapt?

You don't drill one swing a thousand times. You expose him to variety — different balls, different bats, different pitches, different problems to solve — so his body learns to organize a solution instead of repeating a rep.

Which is exactly what a kid hitting rocks with a Wiffle bat is doing without knowing it.

Here's the science in plain language. Three ideas, and they all point the same direction.

1. The ecological approach. Skill doesn't live in a memorized movement — it lives in the relationship between the athlete and his environment. Change the environment (a tennis ball instead of a baseball, a broomstick instead of a bat) and the body is forced to find a new solution. Every new object teaches the eyes, hands, and body something a hundred identical reps never could.

2. Dynamic systems theory. The body is a self-organizing system. Give it a problem and it finds a way to solve it — you don't have to program the solution in with cues. A kid swinging a broomstick at a tennis ball isn't told how to adjust. His body just does it. That self-organized solution is deeper and more durable than any coached one.

3. The constraints-led approach. This is the practical tool. Instead of telling a hitter what to do, you change the constraint — the equipment, the target, the task — and let the correct movement emerge on its own. A lighter ball. A skinnier bat. A smaller target. The constraint does the coaching. Gray's whole message to coaches is to go "from following recipes to becoming a chef" — stop handing out one fixed recipe and start designing environments that let skill emerge.

A rock is a small, unpredictable target. A broomstick is a skinny bat with no room for error. A Wiffle ball moves in the air. Every one of those was a constraint forcing my body to solve a new problem. I just called it playing.

Now here's what this means for your son — and this is where it gets practical.

Most kids today train the exact opposite way. Same ball. Same bat. Same tee. Same spot. Over and over, chasing one perfect, repeatable swing. It looks productive. It builds a swing that works beautifully in the cage and falls apart the moment the game hands him something different.

The fix isn't more reps. It's more variety.

Let him hit tennis balls with a skinny bat. Wiffle balls that move. Small targets. Big targets. Balls off a tee at different heights. A broomstick in the backyard. Different objects, different tools, different problems. You are not making practice "less serious." You are building a hitter whose body can adapt to anything — which is the entire point of hitting.

This is exactly why we love training tools like the ones sent to us by Glomar Sports — trainer bats and varied balls that let you manipulate the constraints and force the body to organize better movement. The tool isn't a gimmick. It's a way to build variability on purpose.

And this is the exact thinking we built the Baseball Flows app on.

Every session in the app is designed as a movement challenge, not a rep to memorize. We don't hand your son one fixed pattern to copy — we give his body problems to solve. The flows are built on global developmental movement patterns, the same foundational patterns humans are wired to explore from infancy: rolling, crawling, rotating, balancing, transitioning. We layer variability into them on purpose, so the nervous system learns to organize itself instead of running one memorized script. That's movement exploration — the body discovering many ways to solve a task, building the deep menu of solutions Gray talks about. And because those patterns live underneath every baseball action, the athleticism transfers. A body that has explored and organized movement in a hundred different ways on the app shows up on the field able to adapt — to the swing, the throw, the play it's never seen before. Same science that made a kid hitting rocks a better hitter, built into a system your son can follow at home.

Train the mover, not the memorized swing. Give the body problems, not just reps.

Build the athlete first. The baseball player follows.

— Dr. Gallo Founder, Baseball Flows Former Pro Player · Doctor of Physical Therapy · Father

"Give the body a variety of problems, and it will build a variety of solutions."

P.S. Want to see how well your son's body actually adapts — not just whether he can repeat one swing? The free 5-Minute Movement Screen looks at how his body organizes and solves movement, the foundation underneath every swing he'll ever take. Five minutes, at home, no equipment. Reply with a video of your son and I'll break it down.

Research note for the curious: Dr. Rob Gray (Arizona State University), author of How We Learn to Move and How to Be an Ecological Coach, host of the Perception & Action podcast. His work on representative learning design and functional variability is the best modern science on how hitters actually develop.

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