Shaping Practice Habits
Getting away from data in today’s post. I want to focus on creating better practice habits for our hitters. Got some good information about where hitters swing and miss at Sliders vs. Where they are hit over 90 MPH the differences are stark.
I made the gif on the side here to show the differences in these two plots. This got me thinking about how we can help guide players toward making the correct swing decisions. Let us say that we have followed through on a plan and we can tell that our hitters have making similar mistakes in terms of their own swing decisions. Great. The next logical question is what do we do about it?
This is important question to ask because we want to try to help them improve this skill. So what ideas can us we use to help players during our practices?
The idea here should be to make hitters as flexible in their decisions as possible. We need to make them master improvisers and allow them to naturally make decisions during the game. How do we go about this in this situation? We can go many different routes with this but let us dive into a few.
Deciding What Habits We Want
What do we want players to be doing? How do we want them to go about their day? What do we value as coaches? The list can be long but we need to think of how we want players to go about their day. Deciding what we want will give us purpose as we start to think about how we want to shape players decisions for practice but also how we want them to act. If a player knows that the first thing he has to do each day once he enters the cage is to watch video then players are cued into a routine each day. Setting up these habits will take time. But it doesn’t need to a really big process. The main idea of this first step is to decide what we want players to do then think about how we can start to shape those decisions.
Shaping Player Decisions
By making player make decisions we now need to encourage them to make the decisions to do we want them to do as coaches. So for example if you know that a player uses the tee a lot and you are trying to encourage them take a more “active” approach to their preparation you might move the tee to the back of the cage or set up some type of barrier to them using the item.
I like James Clear’s Model for Habit formation.
Good Habit Formation Vs. Bad Habit Breaking
Make the Cue Obvious Vs. Make it Invisible
Make it Attractive Vs. Make it unattractive
Make it easy Vs. Make it difficult
Make it satisfying Vs. Make it unsatisfying
You can then go about changing how you present the environment for the players. If they are always cued into using the tee because they always have it in the cage when they show up. Moving the tee to a different area will shape decisions to what is appealing to them. We could also have the pitching machine set up in the cage already to a particular release point for a pitcher, or have a custom pitch set up for them to face. The choices can be endless here again. But we need to realize that players will be cued by something in the environment from the second they walk in to the second they leave. Shaping a players decisions can be as easy as shifting something in the room or even the music we play. Every decision or non decision that we make will shape a player decisions for that day.
Naming Different Activities
Everyone knows or at least is on the same page when it comes to batting practice in this day and age. We need to make it competitive or at the very least make it so that players are making decisions while in the cage. Making them go through the motions and not having them make real decisions should be the opposite from what we want. The purpose of these types of batting practice sessions needs to move from a place where we make players feel good to a space that is forcing them to make decisions each and every swing.
So does that mean that we don’t allow for a space for a player to t-off on a ball. Absolutely not. Seeing and feeling the ball come off of the bat is an important aspect of hitting. No one want to get dominated 99% of the time during practice then move to the game which is even harder. But my feeling here is that we have no yet tipped the scale to the point that we are at that delicate balance between confidence and actual player improvement.
Changing how we take batting practice probably means that we need to change the way that players view the activity and it might mean a name change as well to help player categorize the type of situation we will be in. You can pick your own names for this but you might keep “Batting Practice” with its traditional name knowing that players will view this as a passive activity. While incorporating some form of “Live BP” or pick your term to notify players of a change in preparation for today’s game. I think as simple as giving a name to the change in activity makes it so that players are aware and know what is happening for that day. The point of setting these names is to set the expectations for a give day of practice. Players know what is going to happen, and coaches have explained it to players during the day.
How you go about creating this “Live BP’ is completely up to you. Get creative. Do we you incorporate counts? Gamify it in some form? Do you move toward a similar set up to “BP” but incorporate breaking balls. Do you change pitchers handedness in the middle of it. You can really shine in making this as challenging or passive as you might want.
Changing what a player does or how he creates his habits does not need to be something that includes massive changes. Small tweaks here and there and players will naturally gravitate toward the decisions that coaches want them to make.
