Top-10 Youth Batting Gloves: Where They Are And How To Get Them…
Where to find the best youth batting gloves for baseball and softball in 2022, Amazon! T-ball batting gloves…gloves made by Nike, Marucci, Franklin, and Under Amour. You’ll find cool batting glove colors like red and smaller sizes like XS.
(Please note: clicking any images above will connect to Amazon.com. These ARE affiliate links. If you don’t want to click on the links, then that’s okay. Just copy glove titles and paste into Amazon directly)
Swing Study reveals how tens of thousands of hitters are adding 40-feet to batted ball distance by using one simple strategy.
Click the button below to access the FREE video that's been downloaded over 30K times!!
Learn how to get more baseball or softball swing power using a lower body stride and weight distribution for the legs in this beginner case study.
How To Get More Power In The Lower Half (A Case Study)
…We discuss the #1 way to hitting for consistent power by analyzing one of my younger hitters Braden:
Before and after swing,
The Un-Weighting Principal, and
What baseball hitting drill to work on next.
Before & After Swing
It’s so fun to see young men – like Braden – begin to build in human movement principals like Un-Weighting and notice an instant jolt in force at contact. I ask all my students, if you wanted to live, would you rather get hit by a train going thirty miles-per-hour, or a motorcycle going sixty?
Of course the motorcycle! You see, the motorcycle swing is very handsy, fast like a bike but no weight. The train swing uses heavy mass and the slower rotational speed of the torso to pack a wallop at impact. Forward movement and Un-Weighting are only the beginning…
SCIENCE-BASED TRAINING:
Improve your hitting strategy dramatically by applying human movement principles.
Learn not only how and what to train but also the science behind the methods.
I’m working with Braden on throwing his body mass at the ball. Much like a projectile missile. This helps to make the bat feel lighter to the hitter. And be able to turn harder with less muscle involvement. The swing is a transfer of energy. We’re taking the potential energy contained in the hitter’s body, and getting it moving to transfer into the barrel. Then effectively shift this moving energy into the incoming baseball.
This video I put together demonstrates the power of the Un-Weighting Principal:
What Baseball Hitting Drill to Work on Next?
Braden is coming along nicely with his footwork – with the exception of making sure his lower half is mostly open at the Fight Position (landing). We’ll be getting him to tap into the natural springy effect of his torso. I call it the Catapult Loading System. How the swing is loaded is a difficult concept for most to understand because their focus is on the wrong things:
Not every great MLB hitter walks away from their hands.
And not every great MLB hitter is swinging as effectively as they can.
We tend to study the wrong hitters.
And the camera view matters.
If you have any questions on this, then please post them below…
Grab This FREE 'Timing Master Class' Video
Struggling to get your hitters ON-TIME in games? Discover HOW TO build effective laser-focused timing, so your hitters can be ON-TIME more often. These principles are validated by REAL science.
Click the button below to access the FREE video that has been downloaded over 6K times!
https://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/baseball-hitting-drill-1-way-to-consistent-power-hitting-performance-lab.jpg360480Joey Myershttps://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/hitting-performance-labs_c90c0362088ef1d3d528f3078f4f8ac1-300x75.pngJoey Myers2022-01-04 09:15:482023-01-04 20:48:10Get More Baseball Swing Power Using Lower Body Stride & Beginner Weight Distribution For Legs
“Committed: The Guide to Developing College Ready Recruits from Middle School Through High School” Committing to College Baseball Book by Bryan Eisenberg & Walter Beede
Here’s what Bryan Eisenberg, Walter Beede, and I discuss in the above committing to college baseball interview:
What are the top-3 kid raising pitfalls parents fall into in middle school and high school in before college and professional ball?
The DANGERS lurking in self-comparison from ages 14-18 years old
“Getting repetition because through repetition, we’re going to gain our retention….”
“They won a college world series. It was a great moment. But suddenly, everything’s winding down. I suddenly realize that journey had concluded…”
“I use the term and I’ve used 40 years where I tell parents the whole objective [of committing to college baseball] is to trade athletic ability for academic excellence.”
“What’s the difference of success levels between your son who just played through college and the one who went pro in the way you treated them and brought them up?”
Walter Beede:“I would say the first lesson that I learned is if we have to push, then we’re probably not going to get the results that we’re hoping.
Mental standpoint, meaning if your son is pulling you, instead of you pushing your son, much more advantageous position to be in, especially for the student athlete. I think it’s about structure routine and accountability. Meaning my oldest son was really scattered, not so much from, as a multi-sport athlete, but just, really didn’t have that defined schedule of, okay, I’m going to lift here, work out here.
I’m going to do this routine here with regards to throwing or hitting or what, whereas my youngest son was driven. A lot of that had to do with him being around the college routine and watching how student athletes conducted themselves in a non-team environment, meaning off to the sidelines, how they will bring up [committing to college baseball], et cetera.
I would say the red line in the sand, between the young man that ultimately gets to the college level and the young man that kind of gives up the game at the high school level, truly is about the passion component. My oldest son loves the game but wasn’t passionate about the game.”
CLICK HERE to download the committing to college baseball interview transcription in PDF format. And if you’re interested in learning more about getting “committed” and want to support Bryan and Walter’s fantastic cause, then CLICK HERE to grab the book on Amazon. And by the way, all the student athlete life hack tips and tricks that Bryan and Walter reveal in the book apply to fastpitch softball as well.
ENJOY!
BREAKING NEWS:
Grab two chapters of our NEW Amazon book FREE...
"Swing Smarter: Science Based Hitting Training Built To Understand How, Why, & Reasoning Behind It"
https://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/committing-to-college-baseball.png423800Joey Myershttps://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/hitting-performance-labs_c90c0362088ef1d3d528f3078f4f8ac1-300x75.pngJoey Myers2021-12-06 22:08:532021-12-06 22:31:40Committing To College Baseball: A How-To VIDEO
Private Baseball Lessons Near Me: “I saw 6000 guys; I didn’t see anybody who could hit a curveball. It’s like, how are we not hitting a curveball?”
If you’re searching for “private baseball lessons near me” in central Pennsylvania, then please reach out to Coach Bill Masullo.
In this private baseball lessons near me video, we interview a good friend of mine Coach Bill Masullo out of Pennsylvania. His company is of the Ultimate Edge at GoodSports. In this private baseball lessons near me interview we chat about:
Give me your sales pitch on you guys’ Academy, what you guys do, where you’re located, etc.
How long has it been since you started following me Bill?
Do you guys do different experiments and stuff like that? Do you show those kids a part of your learning process?
What’s your advice on the biggest mistake you see some of these hitting academies making in the beginning?
How are you guys applying Perry Husband’s stuff?
What hitting strategies are you talking about to your guys? And how are you practicing them?
Why ‘keep hands inside’ the curveball is a myth…
Bill and Joey on the state of youth baseball and softball: ‘free play’
Where can people find you Bill?
Very interesting sit down with Coach Bill, to give you a little taste, here’s a quote from him about his research this past summer…
“I saw 450 teams play, and of those 6000 players, 50 are phenomenal, and I didn’t see a bad player. I’m being honest, I didn’t see a bad player. But I saw like 5950 guys, that all looked alike…I saw 6000 guys; I didn’t see anybody who could hit a curveball. It’s like, how are we not hitting a curveball?”
CLICK HERE for the full pdf transcript of the above private baseball lessons near me video, or continue on to read below…
ENJOY!
BREAKING NEWS:
Grab two chapters of our NEW Amazon book FREE...
"Swing Smarter: Science Based Hitting Training Built To Understand How, Why, & Reasoning Behind It"
Hello, and welcome to the swing smarter monthly newsletter. This is your host Joey Myers from hittingperformancelab.com and I have the honor to have a guest on, who I’ve been on his stuff quite a bit, Mr. Coach Bill Masullo.
Joey Myers 00:20
Welcome to the show first, Bill.
Bill Masullo 00:22
Oh, thank you, Joey. Thank you for having me here. I love it.
Joey Myers 00:27
One of the big reasons why I want Coach Bill on is Bill runs an academy, a decent size Academy, it’s been around for a while, I’m going to have him go into that just give you the little details, in case you’re in his general area over there in the Pennsylvania’s.
Joey Myers 00:42
I wanted to have Bill on because I wanted to go in, and I know I have some Academy owners that follow me. I know there’s some out there may be just starting or wanting to start their own hitting Academy or baseball softball Academy.
Joey Myers 00:54
I think Bill’s private baseball lessons near me knowledge of this, and his school of hard knocks knowledge will be invaluable in this. So first, I want to start off, Bill, I want you to just give me your sales pitch on you guys’ Academy, what you guys do, where you guys are located, and kind of go from there.
Give me your sales pitch on you guys’ Academy, what you guys do, where you’re located, etc. for those looking for private baseball lessons near me?
Bill Masullo 01:11
Sure, I run a facility. It’s known as Good Sports and we are located in Central Pennsylvania. If you can picture Pennsylvania as a somewhat of a square looking type of state, little rectangular and you stick your finger right in the middle of that, that’s where you would find us and we’re just a little bit north of Penn State University. Most people have heard of that.
Bill Masullo 01:38
I began in a very roundabout way. I’m a little bit of an outsider when it comes to this whole baseball thing. I coached hockey for 25 years-26 years in all honesty. I was too small of a guy to play baseball, so nobody wants a light hitting second baseman.
Bill Masullo 02:05
What I noticed along the way was, I’m very much a contrarian by nature, so I noticed a lot of information that I didn’t think was good information or correct information and then when it was acted upon by the player, the player sort of got a little bit of grief.
Bill Masullo 02:27
I just always sort of thought, hey, I can do that a little bit better with a little bit of a different outcome. We’ve been successful in that regards. Everything we do is either small group, or one on one. I don’t promote travel teams or such. We just train, that is what we do. It’s a little bit different in that regard.
Joey Myers 02:53
I love that. How long has it been since you started following me or any of the other ones that we’ll talk about in this call?
How long has it been since you started following me Bill?
Bill Masullo 03:01
Joey, I’m trying to even figure out how I got there. Well, I’m going to say it’s been at least 10 years. I’m going right back to the very first book that you put out. I think what attracted me to you and I get attracted to these types.
Bill Masullo 03:28
Guys that are out there saying, speaking, what no one else was talking about. You’ve always heard me say, with you, it was always well, let me prove it. Let me go grab some baseballs and let’s set something up formally, and let’s look at it. Let’s see if that’s true or not.
Bill Masullo 03:50
I thought, wow, if a guy is going to get that deep into it, that’s the guy that I want to understand, and you went to movement. I just thought, you know what, that’s a piece of the puzzle that everyone wants to neglect and not knowingly, but it’s just sort of like, Oh, so and that’s it. I know that’s how I got to you. I don’t know when that was.
Joey Myers 04:16
I think that’s interesting and that was when I first did it. When it comes to private baseball lessons near me, I didn’t want to come from a background where I wanted to push my Fresno State background. If you go on my about page I do mention that but I don’t say listen to me because I went to Fresno State, because I know there’s going to be somebody else saying, well, I played for the Blue Jays for 10 years.
Joey Myers 04:38
I trump your four years playing division one college baseball and then for that person, well, I made three All Star game appearances. It’s this shouting match that whoever can shout the loudest whoever got to the top, in that sense, we should be all listening to Bonds and Aaron.
Joey Myers 04:59
Although I do agree with a lot of what they say I think it gets misconstrued, but this idea of going out and prove it. I think what you’re saying is that a lot of the instructors out there, gurus, whatever you want to call them, the guys at the top of the food chain, I guess, and the gals, that it is a dogma, they’ve created a system that is so much of a dogma that they can’t save face and go opposite of what they said.
Joey Myers 05:27
I think early on, when I did the swing experiments, I said, hey, I’m stumbling on this new stuff. Let’s challenge it and let’s do a little swing experiment and say, okay, let’s see what happens if we do this, and then the opposite of this, and then see how the numbers roll out. And I think people who search “private baseball lessons near me” can appreciate that approach.
Joey Myers 05:43
Like you said, I always tell people find out do it on your own. Don’t take my word for it. I don’t want to be the bottleneck. Go do it on your own. Do you guys do different experiments and stuff like that? Do you show those kids like a part of your learning process?
Do you guys do different experiments and stuff like that? Do you show those kids a part of your learning process when doing private baseball lessons near me?
Bill Masullo 05:57
Absolutely. Obviously, sprinkled with a lot of self-deprecating humor.
Joey Myers 06:04
Yeah. That’s what I like about you.
Bill Masullo 06:08
I don’t ever want to take myself seriously. I jokingly tell my kids this all the time, you certainly don’t want to hit the way I hit. Let’s try to get to the information. I want my kids to experiment quite a bit.
Bill Masullo 06:29
I would say probably the biggest fight I have, is just knocking the kids over the head, a little bit gently, but the idea of logging, doing experiments on our own. We’re always trying to that idea of being comfortable with being uncomfortable. I would say I have learned far more from those kids than they have ever learned from me.
Joey Myers 07:01
I love that, and speaking from an academy owners’ point of view, and I know, like you said, you’re not really into the travel ball teams, it’s more of the development side, which I love.
Joey Myers 07:10
I think that is must be a private baseball lessons near me staple in any kind of hitting Academy, it can’t be just about taking the parents money, not saying they all do this, but taking the parents money just to have a travel team to go out and play and things like that there must be a foundation to that.
Joey Myers 07:24
If I’m paying as a parent $200 a month or $300 a month or 400 or whatever. I mean, I’ve heard some crazy amounts, my kids better be getting something other than just exposure, right? There are a lot of travel teams out there.
Joey Myers 07:38
What would be your advice for other hitting academies, it could be a one just getting off the ground or thinking about getting off the ground? Or maybe one that’s been going for maybe a year or two? What’s your biggest advice for marketing to the private baseball lessons near me crowd?
Joey Myers 07:51
Or how about this? What’s your advice on the biggest mistake you see some of these hitting academies making in the beginning, like top two or one biggest mistake?
What’s your advice on the biggest mistake you see some of these hitting academies making in the beginning?
In the summer, “I saw 450 teams play, and of those 6000 players, 50 are phenomenal, and I didn’t see a bad player. I’m being honest, I didn’t see a bad player. But I saw like 5950 guys, that all looked alike… I saw 6000 guys; I didn’t see anybody could hit a curveball. It’s like, how are we not hitting a curveball?”
Bill Masullo 08:05
At the end of the day, I want to create a relationship with my player. I want them to understand that I’m invested, and with what they want to do, to help them improve.
Bill Masullo 08:23
For me, logging, just everything is a little bit slower. Some days that is, does that mean then that we can just go do a classroom day where we want to discuss a little bit more before we go put it into operation? Yeah, we do that. But I want them to see the breadcrumbs that they’ve laid down as they continue to improve to develop their skill.
Bill Masullo 08:50
For us, I just look and go, we need to understand how to play baseball. What does that mean? To be prepared to do these travel things, that is a huge undertaking. I have done that this summer, I have traveled extensively to watch some high caliber players.
Bill Masullo 09:12
At the end of the day, I am going to say if I saw 450 teams play, and of those 6000 players, 50 are phenomenal, and I didn’t see a bad player. I’m being honest, I didn’t see a bad player. But I saw like 5950 guys, that all looked alike.
Bill Masullo 09:37
I tell my guys every day be uncommon, and I want them to be aggressive, to stay away from passive attitudes. I want them to be aggressive, make mistakes and being earnest, learn from them. That’s why I’m there to help guide them to say hey, it’s okay that we fell here today. Just keep at it.
Joey Myers 09:57
I love that, especially if 2020 has taught us anything, almost the biggest skills that we can instill in our baseball and softball players are two things. They both start with the same letter. I know you love this; you appreciate that is courage and critical thinking.
Joey Myers 10:14
It sounds like that’s what you’re saying courage and critical thinking.
Bill Masullo 10:19
Yes, every day, because one of my weaknesses, I don’t know how to think well, and I’m being honest. I see it but then because I am aware of that weakness, that’s why I seek guys like you out.
Bill Masullo 10:39
Okay, you got to do the lifting, because I’m not smart enough to understand that. But it’s funny when that begins to happen, because then I get like lightbulb moments on a regular basis. Okay, now I get it. Then the movement begins, and something else happens, and it’s right.
Bill Masullo 11:00
Right now, I took for granted that we’re discussing, as we get into the fall here. Again, I saw 6000 guys, I didn’t see anybody could hit a curveball. It’s like, how are we not hitting a curveball?
Bill Masullo 11:21
I took for granted that they did the things that I did. When we’re talking visual, visual data, just actual visual data collections, I find out that they’re into narrow a box, they have no idea of how the balls moving in space and time, the control of the space in front of them.
Bill Masullo 11:46
Now I must step back and that’s what we are doing right now, planning on in the next couple of weeks to undergo that as a major educational component, and that will be your visual planning.
Joey Myers 12:05
We have a very co-friend in Perry Husband, and you talk about seeking people out smarter than you. Talk a little bit about that, a lot of what you’re talking about is in that Perry sphere, right? How are you guys applying that when it comes to private baseball lessons near me?
How are you guys applying Perry Husband’s stuff?
Bill Masullo 12:22
I want to talk about like visual planning, I will say this and I’m pretty sure I got this from Perry and so Perry is effective velocity HittingIsAGuess.com for those of you, look him up.
Joey Myers 12:34
Dot com
Bill Masullo 12:35
Yep. He has some theories, I believe very valid theories, tested theories. It’s the hallmark of how I instruct, but when I began to use what I would call right now, I use the phrase “right now” his heart, whatever, it’s a pneumonic that Perry uses when stating, do only one thing, understand location, understand shape, understand the velocity of the pitch.
Bill Masullo 13:14
Now what I’m seeing is, when this gets combined with the idea of the visual, what is the shape that I’m looking for, you know, how should that look? What is it actually? Now it’s almost instantly guys are coming back with information.
Bill Masullo 13:32
I’ve had kids that have never given me one good sentence of good feedback. Now they go a little bit wider, and they’re saying, oh, well, I can see where that fastball is coming all the time. Plus, you tip off your curveball. I say tip off my curveball. They said yeah, you lean forward on your curve.
Bill Masullo 13:55
These are kids that are good hitters but have always had that trouble. That’s the thing that I’ve seen, and I deal a lot with 18-17-16, all the way down to 10-year-olds, that’s the bulk of who we’re working and yet they know curveballs come in, and yet, they still can’t hit it.
Bill Masullo 14:16
That’s what I saw a lot of and such, so now when I take those components, there’s visual components with their background that they have and what EV is, suddenly that’s like the brick and mortar.
Bill Masullo 14:31
There are no cracks right now, and I know that there are, I just don’t know what they are yet. Now we go back and now we test again, a la Joey Myers, a la hitting performance lab.
Joey Myers 14:44
That’s super interesting. It seems like every year there’s some sort of you talk about the aha moment and in our system, and it used to be in the mechanic side of things. There’s this aha moment and we start working on it with some new stuff and doing that swing experimentation. The private baseball lessons near me crowd will love this!
Joey Myers 15:00
We finally evolve it to a point where it’s like this is solid. It’s consistent with the success my hitters are getting. This last year, it was almost like it wasn’t the physical, mechanical aha moment, we call them hitting strategies.
Joey Myers 15:16
We have six of them, and what it is, is I teach my hitters that there’s three dimensions to hitting, there’s the vertical component, so the pitch can go up or down in the zone, there’s the horizontal component, which is the depth of the pitch, right inside, middle, and away.
Joey Myers 15:31
There’s the Perry Husband EV dimension, which is the timing or the speed of the pitcher, the shape like you’re talking about, and people out there don’t know what the shape, what Bill’s talking about is the shape of the pitch, the shape the pitch is taking, or we could argue the shape that it’s coming out of the hand, or where the arm slot is, and all that kind of stuff.
Joey Myers 15:51
There’s two out of I think we have about six, I just added a two-strike approach. It has nothing to do with physical adjustments, like we’re not choking up, we’re not going wide with our feet. The whole other things that coaches teach and I’ve taught to, but I don’t really do that.
Joey Myers 16:08
We always say that if you’re going to use a two-strike swing, if you’re going to make those physical adjustments that you must practice out in the cage, you can’t just practice your normal swing, and then in the game, oh two strike adjustment and then go straight to that because you’re not practicing it.
Joey Myers 16:20
The top two that we use that do strike is what we just added recently. But the first one is adjusting verticals, we call them verticals, not launch angles, because you know, coaches love that word launch angle, some of them, say, adjusting to like what Perry says hit it back, we call it hitting back through the two, but he says hitting it back through that little donut that he has that marker at 10 to 15 degrees.
Joey Myers 16:44
You’re making your adjustments above and below. If he had a ground ball, trying to hit a fly ball next time, if he had a fly ball trying to hit a ground ball next time, trying to get it to go right back through, right, so that’s number one.
Joey Myers 16:54
Number two is our middle away, middle up, or middle away, middle in, middle down approach where we’re adjusting our barrel path to middle away, middle down, which is very similar, but it’s different than middle and middle up.
Joey Myers 17:08
Those two alone, I tell my hitters, I said, I was a .250 career hitter in college. Those two alone have nothing to do with mechanics. But those two alone, those two hitting strategies, I would have hit 100 points higher, for sure, in my career, I would hit .350 at Fresno State. This helps to win over the private baseball lessons near me crowd.
Joey Myers 17:26
You’re talking about these hitting strategies? What are some things you guys do to practice that?
BREAKING NEWS:
Grab two chapters of our NEW Amazon book FREE...
"Swing Smarter: Science Based Hitting Training Built To Understand How, Why, & Reasoning Behind It"
What hitting strategies are you talking about to your guys? And how are you practicing them?
Bill Masullo 17:32
Number one, I look at younger kids a little bit different than I look at my 12-year-olds a little bit older, so there’s a different way that we would approach them. First thing I want them to do is just be able to hit it hard and hit it far.
Bill Masullo 17:52
I really don’t get locked into a whole lot of mechanical work. There’s always time towards that. The very first thing that we’ll do is we’ll set targets so that we can get feedback. It’s the one thing in baseball that I think is lacking, is the understanding of how I obtain feedback.
Bill Masullo 18:24
Every kid that has a bucket, coach has a bucket everywhere and the coach goes crazy at some point when everybody’s shooting basketball. One day I was watching that, and it sort of struck me as like, and yet here they are playing this random game, with their buddy as they’re trying to put balls back in the bucket, it was like, that’s the feedback that I want you to understand.
Bill Masullo 18:50
Now we have very distinct targets. So that if I were to ask them, what are you trying to do? What are you trying to hit? If you’re going to hit that target with the ball off the barrel of your bat? What does it look like?
Bill Masullo 19:05
Again, this goes back to Perry and I would say the use of imagination. Understanding what type of swing gives you that, it’s amazing what the brain will do, and it just brings them to that.
Bill Masullo 19:17
We’re always getting feedback based on what their intended goal was. When it’s used over and over, it’s easy to see when they’re using their pneumonic, when they’re using hit hard or right now, and when they’re not.
Bill Masullo 19:39
To me, the fallacy is the foul ball that’s straight back, and everybody says, oh, you’re right on it, and that is the furthest thing from the truth, and we’ll measure that out for that ball to go directly back.
Bill Masullo 19:54
That means I’m like probably on my back hip and maybe a little underneath it. I’m thinking that my hands were on hands show. I’m like, a foot 18 inches out in front of me.
Bill Masullo 20:08
Well, when I do that, and I show them that, and I just marked that with baseball, it’s anywhere from 33 to 36 inches off. That is a bundle of distance in speed. They’re not close.
Bill Masullo 20:23
What I need for them to understand is some of the stuff they’ve heard all along isn’t true. For baseball players, they want to make small incremental adjustments.
Bill Masullo 20:35
I always tell them when I was telling the story, when I was younger, my dad would come home from work, and I would beat him home 10 minutes from school, and I always had my eight-track cassette player on, so I don’t want to date myself.
Joey Myers 20:53
I had one, too.
Bill Masullo 20:55
I have it at eight, my dad would come back to the bedroom. He’d say, hey, can you turn that down? I take it to seven, and he’d come back about 10 minutes later and turn it down before and say I thought I asked you to turn that down?
Bill Masullo 21:08
I said, well, I did well, not enough. That’s what I think. Getting the kids to understand how big are the adjustments? We talked about this, you and I and Perry we talked about this, like when that barrel enters to when that barrel exits, it’s typically six miles an hour of velocity, that the barrel stays in the strike zone, and before it enters and out.
Bill Masullo 21:32
If that pitcher can beat that, plus or minus faster or slower from pitch to pitch 5-6-7 mile an hour, we’re going to struggle all day long at the plate. That’s what I think overall, that’s number one, especially with my older guys that I try to get them to understand.
Bill Masullo 21:50
Then and only then, because when I become efficient, if I change one thing, I change everything. Now the efficiency starts to work for me. That’s probably number one for us, it’s just getting on time.
Bill Masullo 21:55
What I would tell a beginning instructor or only a year in, get your kids a quick win. The biggest way I can tell you is off the fingertips, right? As they’re hitting it now, hit hard, hit now, whatever two positive strong words that they are to a target.
Joey Myers 22:33
When you say right now, for those that don’t know Perry stuff, what Bill saying is, like you said out of their fingertips, the hitter set starts to swing right and then now is that contact.
Joey Myers 22:44
They’re visual, or they’re mouthing, saying that word right now. They’ll set a measurement of that third dimension of the pitch.
Bill Masullo 22:56
Yes, and I want my guys to dance a lot. They joke about it, we laugh about it, yet at the end of the day, there’s rhythm, there’s tempo that occurs, and it’s part of what I want them to take in.
Bill Masullo 23:12
I think maybe currently, I think that’s been lost to a degree, not because it was intended, or it’s stupid idea or whatever. It’s just that I think the lack of free play is no longer there, where kids would get together for five-six hours every day, with no adults around and then being allowed to experiment and to try different things.
Bill Masullo 23:40
None of that happens, or at least it doesn’t happen to the degree it used to for a lot of societal reasons. I think, a little bit of what happens, everything’s organized and a lot of instruction is just maybe ill-advised words.
Joey Myers 23:59
Mechanized, internal, too machine-like. This can sometimes turn off the private baseball lessons near me searching crowd.
Bill Masullo 24:05
When the concept of hitting a curve, I’ll go back to that concept of hitting a curve is look for the rotation. Well, I think, though, all those answers were Oh, you know, I sort of noticed that, oh, yeah, let’s look for rotation.
Bill Masullo 24:24
Now we’re so focused in tight on trying to see what the ball is, we have no context of where the ball is in space and time. A whole bunch of things go on there but that’s just an idea of it for me.
Why ‘keep hands inside’ the curveball is a myth…
Joey Myers 24:38
You said that’s one of the cues that I remember getting thrown around for the curveball, hitting it and then the other thing was staying inside it and keep your hands inside the curveball and there were just things that once it dawned on me that there is a different barrel path middle in versus middle away.
Joey Myers 24:44
It dawned on me that staying inside it wasn’t very effective at the curveball that was coming say righty- righty that was coming out of the hitter and then breaking into the middle of the plate.
Joey Myers 25:03
Like if you stood in set that stayed inside that thing, if you hit it, it’s not going to be hit very hard. If you watch the trout and the guys that just smash these things, you’ll see that barrel instead of dumping in the zone early, you’ll see it carry high a little bit longer and we’ll dump in later.
Joey Myers 25:19
What they’re doing and Bonds was probably one of the best at this, many out there. Remember watching Bonds hitting bombs into the bay, at fastballs that were up almost seemed like it was going to hit his elbow guard, or his arm guard, big old giant, bionic thing he had on, and he was able to get to it at 95 up and in.
Joey Myers 25:38
Same thing with the curveballs, lefty curveballs coming at him, and he just spun right on him. It’s not so much the rotation of Bonds’ body as more of where his barrel path was to that curveball.
Joey Myers 25:50
Like you said, that’s one of our strategies too, that’s the third strategy we have, we have the adjusting verticals, adjusting horizontals, and then curveballs. We hunt specific curveballs and zones and like you said, the younger the player, a little different approach.
Joey Myers 26:04
You don’t want to get too detailed, and those pitchers aren’t as good with their command and things like that. But when they get into 12-year-old, that sixth grade year, those pitchers start getting pretty good. They have a pretty good handle of that 46-foot distance there, or 50 feet, whatever pony leaves and stuff like that.
Joey Myers 26:21
They start to get a little bit more command until that mound backs up a little bit, then you see like about a year or two where they struggle, but that curveball approach, I completely agree with you, because what’s funny is I have one of my hitters right now who it’s going to be so unfair because he’s got one more year at Little League.
Joey Myers 26:37
He’s somewhat of a big kid. He’s a taller kid, but he’s come a long way in a year, he’s worked his butt off. Now we got his mechanics, took about six to eight months during this 2020 year, got his mechanics to a good spot to where everything’s effective.
Joey Myers 26:55
We’re still working on stuff from time to time, but we really got to focus on the strategies.
Joey Myers 27:00
Ideally, in Little League what happens is pitchers will try and get you out with the fastball, and they might move in and out. Most of the time, it’s away and down and stuff like that. But the faster pitchers will come in, and if you can’t hit it, they keep throwing it.
Joey Myers 27:12
This hitter smashes it, and because we’ve equipped them with the curveball approach, the next logical step for these pitchers is to go curveball, right? Because they’re used to, like you said, 6000 players, 400-500 teams, you’re watching, and you’re seeing a struggle with the curveball, because all they got to do is throw it, it doesn’t matter where the curveball is at in the league.
Joey Myers 27:33
It’s effective because hitters that have never seen it before or they don’t have a good approach like you’re talking about, they swing and miss, swing, and miss.
Joey Myers 27:39
Well, what happens when that pitcher sees a hitter who has a curveball approach? Then you start smashing the curveball. It’s like, the coaches, the players, they don’t know what to do.
Bill Masullo 27:50
Yeah, it’s called intentional.
Joey Myers 27:56
They start throwing around the zone hoping he’s going to go outside the zone.
Bill Masullo 28:00
Yes, absolutely. That’s what I think that’s the aspect that’s been lost a little bit with the lack of free play. To reintroduce some of these concepts, and am I the guy for that? Not to demonstrate it.
Joey Myers 28:21
Unless you’re hitting a hockey puck.
Bill Masullo 28:22
Yes, that’s right.
Bill Masullo 28:26
Even then, I’m not the guy to demonstrate. But that’s just as important too, Joey, is that it’s modeled correctly. I just remember playing as a kid and you took your favorite team, and you knew how every kid on that team hit.
Bill Masullo 28:47
You hit left hand and you hit right hand and you look like Willie Stargell on this one and it was Roberto on that one, and Dave Cash on this one, and yet, it’s almost Oh, the Ripken boy.
Bill Masullo 29:04
I’m thinking Cal, thinking Edgar Martinez, they might have had 15 or 20 different stances in a year and yet, we’re telling guys, you know, oh, you can’t ever change. And it’s like, yeah, you need to change so there’s an evolving that has to happen.
Bill Masullo 29:27
When you begin to, and when you begin to know what the pitcher is going to do before he does, and it’s still not easy to hit, but boy, it becomes a little easier. That’s when you have guys that people are looking at going wow, that guy knows what he’s doing.
Joey Myers 29:45
We say hitting isn’t easy, but we can make it easier.
Bill Masullo 29:49
Yes, that’s true.
Bill and Joey on the state of youth baseball and softball: ‘free play’
Joey Myers 29:52
Before I let you go here because I’m respectful of your time. You say the free play and it’s funny you say that because we went a little independent with my son’s baseball team this year, we went away from the league because I felt they didn’t handle the whole 2020 thing very well.
Joey Myers 30:07
I took our team, we had about eight or nine that decided to stay with us. We added about four or five, so we had about 14-15 hitters.
Joey Myers 30:16
What we did when the season was done, and we got a few games, we played ourselves more than we played a little bit more sandlot than anything. But I told the parents it’s probably what was going to happen, just because you had teams still in leagues, and it was going to be hard to put games together and all that kind of stuff.
Joey Myers 30:30
To tell the truth, we weren’t ready for tournament play. We had some guys that are, they were rough around the edges, but what we elected to do is even when the season was done, we just ramped down how many practices we had during the week, we went from three, down to two and then down to one during the summer.
Joey Myers 30:45
What I did during the summer, was we switched our practices to the morning, so it was cooler because it gets super-hot here.
Joey Myers 30:51
What we did was we did some street wiffleball we just introduced, and we played games like we had, the other team would be fielding and we’d have to throw to the base like normal baseball, so we get to learn some rules there that we couldn’t accomplish in a smaller area, right, because we’re just playing between two gutters.
Joey Myers 31:08
On the other side, and then we got the plate on the sidewalk, and then we got our little painted bases out, orange bases out and stuff. We did some two-strike innings, we would do a normal inning where they had their 0-0.
Joey Myers 31:08
We had an 0-2 inning where they had to swing because I think they were getting a little bit too passive. We did two strike and then at the end, the last that we were supposed to have on this week, but I cancelled it because our school start next week.
Joey Myers 31:37
We started to Home Run Derby the last probably three or four weeks. We just had them out. We carved them into two teams, we set up our thing, just things that you and I did as kids growing up just in the streets playing ball, that free play. A great play for those private baseball lessons near me folks.
Bill Masullo 31:51
It’s so important because they’re good. For me, they’re getting so much feedback that’s not coming from an authoritative figurehead or however they’re perceiving it.
Bill Masullo 32:09
Joey, I’ll throw this out there as well. Typically, most of the issues that I really see with my kids, and the not through and through, but I’d say overwhelming majority come from kids who are trying to perform for their parents, they come from kids who they are trying their love for them into their success at the plate.
Joey Myers 32:40
That breaks my heart.
Bill Masullo 32:46
Sometimes that becomes a process where we’re just a lot of times, I’ll have to rip kids all the way back down the ground, we’ll go backwards before we go forward. Once we go forward, and they’ve got a good feeling and a good understanding, and they’re playing the game, because it’s their game in my game. They’re far better off for it.
Joey Myers 33:07
I love that. That’s great private baseball lessons near me advice. That’s great for coaches, instructors, Academy owners to look out for, and especially Academy owners, because they have so many kids in their system. That’s the thing, right?
Joey Myers 33:17
Coaches generally have a team or two that they’re coaching. They’re depending on what level they’re at. It could be 15 kids, could be 30 kids, right? But you got the academy owners that can have hundreds of kids.
Joey Myers 33:28
They’re in a position where they can affect a lot of kids and parents searching “private baseball lessons near me”, it’s good for them to know that. Thank you for sharing that. All right, Bill, where can people find you? If they want to get more information? Where can they find you?
Where can people find you Bill?
Bill Masullo 33:41
Oh, I would just say go over to the Facebook. If you have it, if you believe in it. It’s TUE good sports. I don’t know anything about the websites or anything like that. I don’t do that. But if you get over there to it stands for the ultimate edge, it’s TUE good sports.
Bill Masullo 34:00
There’s also better ballplayer. That’s where we typically do some of our virtual stuff.
Joey Myers 34:10
Any kind of private baseball lessons near me new things on the horizon for you that you’re putting together any kind of virtual summits?
Bill Masullo 34:16
I have one coming up here at the end of August, and it’s on crushing the curve. So that’s a good topic on the top of my head there.
Bill Masullo 34:28
That is foremost on what we’re doing. We’re prepping for the fall here as we get into it. That’s the biggest item on the list.
Joey Myers 34:40
Very cool. All right, Bill. Well, thanks for your time here today for all the private baseball lessons near me crowd, and we’ll have to do a take two at some point.
Bill Masullo 34:46
Absolutely. Oh, I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Hope I didn’t put too many people to sleep. God bless you. Thank you.
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https://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/private-baseball-lessons-near-me-e1629318546127.png281500Joey Myershttps://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/hitting-performance-labs_c90c0362088ef1d3d528f3078f4f8ac1-300x75.pngJoey Myers2021-08-18 20:30:352021-08-18 21:22:08Private Baseball Lessons Near Me Video Interview
Baseball Hitting Lessons Near Me: “I Don’t Use A Glove When I Throw BP, So I’ll hold Curveball Like This. I’ll Hold It. I Want to See If They’re Smart Enough to Look at My Hand”
In this baseball hitting lessons near me interview with Ray Camacho from Fat On Fat Academy, we go over… (about 34-minutes reading time – PRO TIP: use “gear” on YouTube video settings to “speed watch” to 2X, so you can watch in half the time!!)
Tell me a little bit about your baseball hitting lessons near me nonprofit, where you guys are and what it’s about,
Who are your top one or two follows for strength and conditioning?
“It’s ever evolving with me because one kid teaches me how to do something for another kid…”,
“It’s extremely tough as a parent to watch our kids struggle, fail, and be rejected. But if we don’t let them experience it, while they’re young, they’ll have no idea how to handle it when life shows up later down the road. Our job is to love them and teach them how to work through it.”
“I like to pride myself in not being just like a scratch a surface guy. I get deep.”
I think hitting a baseball and softball consistently hard is the hardest thing to do in any sport,
The toe tap to me is the most adjustable swing that I’ve ever had,
I don’t use a glove when I throw BP so I’ll hold curveball like this. I’ll hold it. I want to see if they’re smart enough to look at my hand,
Where can people find you, talk about the social media platforms…
Hello, and welcome to the Swing Smarter Monthly Newsletter. This is your host, Joey Myers and on the call here with me, I’m honored to have Mr. Ray Camacho. He is of a nonprofit called Fat on Fat, or fat off the bat on fat on the ball. And we had a nice, interesting baseball hitting lessons near me conversation recently and there’s some cool little nuggets here.
Joey Myers 00:29
First, I want to welcome you to the show, Ray.
Ray Camacho 00:32
Thanks for having me.
Joey Myers 00:35
We’re going to dig into some stuff, I think the 30 minutes goes quick. I’m sure there’s going to be plenty, plenty to talk about in future stuff. But first question I want to ask you, tell me a little bit about your baseball hitting lessons near me nonprofit, where you guys are and what it’s about.
Tell me a little bit about your baseball hitting lessons near me nonprofit, where you guys are and what it’s about…
Ray Camacho 00:51
I started off a Fat-on-Fat Baseball Academy. But then recently, I started doing softball, so I changed the name to Fat-on-Fat Academy. The name came about when I was growing up, my dad was trying to think of something nice and easy for me to remember and something that rhymed.
Ray Camacho 01:07
He was like, son, fat of the bat, fat of the ball. That concept is something I grew up chasing my whole life, because I was just trying to square the ball up with fat on fat and is just a catchy phrase that everybody would use.
Ray Camacho 01:21
My dad would just be quiet and simple with it, fat on fat, son, watch the ball fat on fat. I had that concept, and as I grew up, I thought it was kind of cheesy, honestly a little bit. I felt embarrassed a little bit to talk about it to some of the guys, and then I started coaching and they started really liking it, like the young guys started liking it and said, What’s fat on fat coach? They wanted more stuff.
Ray Camacho 01:44
I ended up needing an outlet for myself because I was coaching a baseball hitting lessons near me organization. I was working at another organization; I was doing things for everybody else. I needed my own passion in my own lane.
Ray Camacho 01:57
What ended up happening was, I created my own college team, and I needed a name. My dad was like, you got to go fat on fat. I was like, Dad, these college guys are going to laugh me, everybody’s going to talk mess, they’re going to clown me.
Ray Camacho 02:12
I still felt like I was a college guy as well as trying to coach and I just didn’t believe in it. I shared it with a partner. I shared it with a couple of people my idea. They kind of was like, dude, that’s awesome. I love that name. I shared it with the Commissioner of the CCBL League that was playing in the summer. He was like, that is the best name ever.
Ray Camacho 02:35
He coached me when I was in high school, in college. He was like, I love it. You need to go with the name. When I got that feedback, as cheesy as it may feel for me, because it’s something my dad gave me, and sometimes he says, Son, you think your dad’s cheesy or corny, but everybody loved my dad, everybody thought my dad was funny, but of course, as a son you think he’s lame.
Ray Camacho 02:58
I’m going to run with it. I wanted to turn a negative into a positive because fat is a negative word. We think it’s a negative word, I feel like I have enough energy to turn it into a positive word. I’m from San Antonio, Texas, my company is based out of San Antonio, Texas.
Ray Camacho 03:17
I’ve lived in San Antonio, Texas my whole life. I love San Antonio, everything I do is for the city. Everything I do is for the kids in the city. We have an obesity problem here, and so when I started doing fat on fat, I was 50 pounds heavier at the time. I had a lot of backlash, a lot of people talking, Oh, your company’s fat on fat, because you’re fat, bro.
Ray Camacho 03:40
I was going through a lot of personal things. They said some uglier stuff too. I always tell these guys, my biggest teaching to the kids is, if you’re going to be good, you’re going to have to be ready to accept what comes with being good. Because there’s going to be snakes in the grass, there’s going to be your own teammates trying to go against you, there’s going to be a whole bunch of negativity that being the dude in titles.
Ray Camacho 04:03
If you’re not ready to accept that, then you can’t be the dude because you’ll fall short, as a lot of mental stuff. I just really wanted to be a forefront in this for fitness, for obesity in San Antonio, I wanted to bring awareness.
Ray Camacho 04:20
Five years ago, when I started it, I really didn’t have a lane. I didn’t know what I was going to do until I really started doing my first video of showing my training.
Ray Camacho 04:29
Five years ago, I was nothing compared to who I am now. I look at those old videos and I look at myself like you’re a chump. How can you let that kid get away with that movement? How can you let him do that? It makes me angry in the sense at myself that I couldn’t figure out my philosophy and my lane faster because I could have helped so many more kids.
Ray Camacho 04:51
That passion drives me today to not let anybody have bad movements when they come into the RPO which stands for Real Players Only. I have fat on fat baseball hitting lessons near me Academy and it stands for real players only.
Ray Camacho 05:03
Real players know who real players are. Real recognizes real. You can’t fake being real. Because once you step on that line, between those lines, you know who you are. I just love everything that baseball and softball brings to the table. I always talk about it. I’m going to do this till the day I die.
Joey Myers 05:21
I love it. That’s what really came out and struck me in our initial baseball hitting lessons near me conversation was the fact that you’re training baseball and softball players. But it’s not to be baseball and softball players, it’s to be better in life, right?
Joey Myers 05:34
You’re teaching life through baseball and softball, and that’s what I really love. The other thing is, and we can get into that a little bit, but I really wanted to jump into the baseball hitting lessons near me training side of things. Strength conditioning, and I asked you a question. I said, who are your top two follows for strength conditioning? Who do you say, who was your first one?
Who are your top one or two follows for strength and conditioning?
Ray Camacho 05:53
Paul Chek.
Joey Myers 05:54
Those out there, Paul Chek is no joke, go out and check out the Chek Institute. What brought you to Paul Chek? How do you feel Paul Chek has helped your hitters, the baseball hitting lessons near me information that has helped your hitters?
Ray Camacho 06:09
I got introduced to Paul Chek. Just going down a worm hole of different trainers and instructors, I’m sure you went down the same path because we’re men and we’re baseball players.
Ray Camacho 06:21
Everybody’s trying to be the biggest, fastest, strongest, and it’s all about information. Well, how much information can you input in your head? How much can you process and how much can you actually apply?
Ray Camacho 06:30
I feel Paul Chek has indirectly mentoring me every day, I listen to his podcast, it feels like he’s speaking directly towards me. I got introduced to Elliott Hulse, a long time ago, and his stronger version of himself.
Ray Camacho 06:46
I’ve really followed his transformation. We all have our transformation as men. I was into the bodybuilding scene and all that stuff, try to be the biggest, strongest dude. That was a toxic mentality for a baseball player, because I ended up messing my body up senior year, I may say mess up, but I had the best year of my senior year ever, and I set records and stuff like that, but I’m saying, I always wanted to be the best.
Ray Camacho 07:12
I’m always going to critique myself if I mess up. I will always put myself down if I do mess up because I’m just honest. I messed up a lot of my mobility aspects by just bodybuilding and doing a lot of hypertrophy training, and not focusing on strength and speed.
Ray Camacho 07:28
I got two tenths of a second slower on my 60 time. I was running a six-eight and so I run a seven-one because I wanted to drop bombs. I didn’t realize I didn’t have a mentor. I didn’t have anyone in my ear saying, you got to stay fast. If you lose your speed, you are nothing.
Ray Camacho 07:44
They have big six foot three guys that mash. You’re not that guy. You must be a fast infielder like you’ve always been, and I lost sight of that. I lost my chance to get drafted when it came down to it because of the speed and I never got officially said that. But I know deep down in my heart that’s what it was, you know, because nothing else held me back.
Ray Camacho 08:02
I’m still a dude, I’m 36 I still can play, still hit bombs, hit a bomb Sunday, and that was the first time I ever did that. I can tell you the training works because I’m doing everything I teach and preach myself at 36. If my mobility helps me, it’s going to help a 10-year-old.
Ray Camacho 08:19
If my strength conditioning helps me it’s going to help a 13–14-year-old. I try to empower these guys to really do that. Elliott Hulse came from a strongman competition. He was big and swoll.
Ray Camacho 08:33
I used to love listening to his rants because he always spoke intelligent. I always wanted to be a meathead, but an intelligent meathead. A best of both worlds. I can go in and out of bodybuilding, powerlifting, I can go talk to a physics major, a teacher.
Ray Camacho 08:50
I can talk to anybody, I can walk in any circle, because I love that I have the social awareness to be to be flowing in those circles and talk to anybody because if anybody can teach me anything, like you’re worth something to me, because I love knowledge and wisdom.
Ray Camacho 09:05
It’s one of the biggest things that Paul Chek put me on in his book. It was maybe like six months ago, I wrote down my goal was to have knowledge and wisdom and to be able to apply it to my sport, and just keep learning every day and growing.
Ray Camacho 09:20
Honestly, that’s what’s really happening every day because I tell parents my baseball hitting lessons near me training may switch up from next week to the next week, because my training like we talked about, it’s ever evolving.
Baseball hitting lessons near me: “It’s ever evolving with me because one kid teaches me how to do something for another kid…”
Ray Camacho 09:30
It’s ever evolving with me because one kid teaches me how to do something for another kid. It’s all the same mechanics, if he has bad ankles, this guy has bad ankles. If I see it, we’re going to do ankle mobility stuff.
Ray Camacho 09:42
If he can’t go up on his tippy toes because his feet are weak, we’re going to work on feet for 20-30 minutes because that matters. Not getting in the cage, not warming up and just swinging, we must change the culture.
Ray Camacho 09:54
These kids just want to get in there and move and their bodies not primed up and not ready to rock and roll. They don’t understand the mechanics of a movement. I get kids as young as four and as old as 22. I’m teaching them all the same things.
Ray Camacho 10:07
I talk to them all the same way. I know those little kids, they’re going to be dudes when they grow up, and the girls are going to be studs, because the girls, they listen the best obviously.
Joey Myers 10:16
They do.
Ray Camacho 10:18
That’s been awesome with me. I never thought in a million years, I’d be doing softball, they’ve really accepted me, and local coaches have liked what I’ve done with hitters and I’ve had kids that shouldn’t hit home runs that are hitting home runs.
Ray Camacho 10:34
I don’t take any baseball hitting lessons near me credit for it because it’s hard work and they are doing all the work. I’m just showing them the way. The biggest thing is I want to give direction because if kids and parents don’t know direction, they don’t know where to go.
Ray Camacho 10:46
They think anything they do is good. No, the right stuff is good. The right way is good, the most functional, the strongest way to be a healthy individual is the right way.
Ray Camacho 10:57
Elliott Hulse is the one responsible for putting me on Paul Chek. Listen to Elliott Hulse in his podcast, I started finding my direction because Elliott Hulse is big into masculinity and building men up and keeping men strong.
Ray Camacho 11:12
I’ve been blessed with a facility like this, because a man took a chance on me and he believed in me, and he said, I wanted to give you the opportunity to pay it forward. I’ve been very blessed to have a gym and two cages and my own little place to call home in the RPO.
Ray Camacho 11:31
Now that I’m kind of getting a little baseball hitting lessons near me momentum and things are going well, now I’m giving back because everything I do is going back to the kids. I have a lane now. I keep creating new logos and new things. I have fat on fat and fit on fit.
Ray Camacho 11:45
Actually, two days ago, I’m working on another logo flat on flat, because I have flat feet. I have probably like 20-30 kids that have flat feet. The first time I heard I had flat feet, the doctor was like, he’s going to have hard time with the ankle, he started saying all these negative things.
Ray Camacho 12:01
I had two or three ways to think about it. I was like, you know what, I don’t feel anything he’s saying. My ankles hurt a little bit, but I warm them up, I’m good to go. All those exercises he prescribed, I did them every day. I did them every day because I’ve always wanted to be the best at everything.
Ray Camacho 12:17
I was a football player at the time, I was the quarterback, I knew my feet needed to eat. I just worked out hard to grow my legs and my whole life I’ve had huge legs.
Ray Camacho 12:27
People have always talked about my legs, and I’ve always had my pants tighten up, always been a leadoff batter, I’ve always showed that physical strength that people can just see looking at my legs, and could tell that he might be good, he might be able to run a little bit.
Ray Camacho 12:42
I’ve taken pride with that, but that was instilled by my dad instilling those morals and those ethics. He really put a lot of good groundwork in myself, it’s kind of hard to go against some of those things sometimes.
Ray Camacho 12:55
It’s one of the reasons why I have a big heart. I just love hearing people’s stories; I’ve always been a good listener. When I hear an intelligent man speak, you shut up. That was like the number one rule my dad always said, you’re going to hang out with adults, you’re going to hang around grown men, shut up until they ask and talk to you if you’re a little boy.
Ray Camacho 13:15
Or if you don’t know what you’re talking about, you just listen. Listening taught me a lot of things. It’s right there in front of you if you listen in and aware of stuff.
Joey Myers 13:23
I love that man. I learn more about you the more we talk and that listening part as an advice, you have to know when you’re a teacher, you got to know when your student, and sometimes you got two teachers talking to each other. But sometimes even in that conversation, one teacher might know more than the other teacher.
Joey Myers 13:43
The teacher that doesn’t have quite the knowledge needs to, like you said shut up and listen, and not try and fight the other guy when they don’t have all the baseball hitting lessons near me information. It’s this kind of liquid relationship that happens between student and pupil, or pupil and teacher.
Joey Myers 14:01
I got on your Facebook page, there’s a cool quote, I’m thinking retweet. We’re not on Twitter. Here’s the quote, “It’s extremely tough as a parent to watch our kids struggle fail and be rejected. But if we don’t let them experience it, while they’re young, they’ll have no idea how to handle it when life shows up later down the road. Our job is to love them and teach them how to work through it.” Talk about that a little bit.
“It’s extremely tough as a parent to watch our kids struggle, fail, and be rejected. But if we don’t let them experience it, while they’re young, they’ll have no idea how to handle it when life shows up later down the road. Our job is to love them and teach them how to work through it.”
Ray Camacho 14:35
I told you this a little bit about last time what I do in the sessions, it’s because a lot of times, parents are hovering over and watching you move and work and talk. They’re watching everything and I’m very analytical myself, I may not see it.
Ray Camacho 14:49
I wear sunglasses all the time because I don’t want people to know where my eyes are going. It’s a coaching thing as well, but I understand the physical appearance, as you’re a coach and you’re sitting there like this, you look like you’re doing something.
Ray Camacho 15:03
If you’re staring at a kid, and he knows he’s messing up, he’s going to feel that energy. I’ve always done that. When I first started out, I was nervous about what people thought about what I was saying, I’m like, they think I’m messing their kid up.
Ray Camacho 15:16
Or maybe they’re not emotionally woke like me, or maybe they don’t understand some of the things. I got nervous speaking, but then I started realizing the kid is only going to be as good as the parents.
Ray Camacho 15:31
What I started doing was I just start sharing stories. As I continue to talk to other kids, and opening and motivate them, I always share my baseball hitting lessons near me life stories, because my life stories teach me a lot about things. I know the way I am because of my dad.
Ray Camacho 15:45
One of the best things my dad ever did, he coached me till I was 12, but he always let me play. He never over coached me; I don’t think I ever heard my dad yell at me on the field. He never told me to go warm up, he never told me to do anything, as soon as we got on the car, he already knew.
Ray Camacho 16:01
We were talking about that stuff of what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do and how you’re going to show up, how you’re going to look, who you are. He laid the platform for me when I was a little kid. This is what I do now, I just took it 100 million times more, because I went farther than him.
Ray Camacho 16:19
At age 12, he was always telling me that you’re better than ever I was, and he was my hero, my idol. As I started realizing interaction with parents, that parents are sabotages, as well. My big thing is, I need to make them understand whether you need to peel back or whether you need to be involved more.
Ray Camacho 16:39
My thing that I tell every parent is, especially the dads, because sometimes the dads have egos. Sometimes the softball dads are the worse. That’s their little girl, and I’m teaching their little girl. They get all huffy puffy, sometimes, but I just show them love and break them down and show them what I’m trying to teach.
Ray Camacho 16:59
My thing is, I teach the parents. I always tell the parents; your kid is only going to be as good as you. If you reiterate what I’m saying, and you back me up, because I’m always going to back you up, I am never going to say, I’m never going to disrespect you, your kid, I’m going to only help your relationship out.
Ray Camacho 17:17
We are a team, and it’s all about your kid. Obviously, parents love their kids. They’re going to understand that yes, you’re right. We’re not working against each other. Because if we do, now, the kid doesn’t know what the heck to do.
Ray Camacho 17:29
Now he’s always going to follow the parents’ lead. If I can have the parent buy in to baseball hitting lessons near me, I know it’s only a matter of time that kid buys them because now the kids are accepting. I always tell the story when I was 12, my dad sat me down and said, look, I’ve taught you everything I know, you’re better than me, I don’t know how to get you to that next level anymore, you must be looking for something else now, and learn from other people.
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Baseball hitting lessons near me: “I like to pride myself in not being just like a scratch a surface guy. I get deep.”
Ray Camacho 17:54
I can honestly tell you, I didn’t learn from any other adults. No, all my coaches, maybe like one little rinky dink thing, but it was very generic. I like to pride myself in not being just like a scratch a surface guy. I get deep.
Ray Camacho 18:11
I always say breaking it down to the single digit. Like you got a million, I’m going to break it down all the way to the simplest form to get you to understand that if you don’t understand we’re going to keep doing it. I keep talking, I’m going to do some physical with you, because I need you to understand. I have simple goals when I get in the cage.
Ray Camacho 18:30
My dad released in me, and him being a big man and saying he can’t take me anymore, helped me take ownership on myself, because my dad had a bad back and he was in a bed for like a year. He was never supposed to ever walk again. He blew some disk and stuff like that.
Ray Camacho 18:48
I remember him being in a bed in the living room, just lying there all the time. And he showed me how to fold towels. He showed me how to do stuff. I was so literal, he would show me how to fold towels laying down in his bed, and I would lay down on the ground and fold towels.
Ray Camacho 19:05
I understood that kids mimic movements. I always prided myself in being healthy and in shape and showing kids and not just sitting on a bucket and getting up and working out and challenging the kids. I work out with the kids sometimes, I run with the kids sometimes.
Ray Camacho 19:21
I have a senior that’s coming to work out with me on Sundays, and I’m not charging them. It’s we’re working out together because I want to show them how it’s supposed to be done and how I work. I put my head down, I don’t see nothing, I just go to work. This is what I’m doing. I’m serious about it still because I want to be the best.
Ray Camacho 19:40
I’m playing in a World Series in Arizona for men’s and senior baseball league. I got stuff to prove. I haven’t played in a long time. I just want to give one last hurrah. I love learning so as I’m in this journey as well, I’m continuing to learn and I feel like if I’m learning, I’m growing and I’m going to pass it on to the kids. As I enhance my threshold in my knowledge, I’m bringing everybody with me.
Joey Myers 20:06
I love that. The idea that these kids nowadays, and I’ve heard this from multiple coaches, this isn’t just me, and I’ve not just heard it from you, but that players are soft. I think when you have these athletes in multiple sports, whether it’s soccer and football and whatnot, is people don’t realize when they get into baseball and softball, you and I could get into probably baseball hitting lessons near me arguments with other sports people about this, but I think hitting a baseball and softball consistently hard is the hardest thing to do in any sport.
I think hitting a baseball and softball consistently hard is the hardest thing to do in any sport
Joey Myers 20:42
I went into basketball for three years, and Michael Jordan was playing in the mid-90s, because I love Michael Jordan. I never played organized basketball, I did soccer, organize it in baseball, and I did martial arts for three years. But I did basketball just with some buddies on my street and did that. It was hard, but it took me I don’t know, six months, eight months, so I could finally figure out where I needed to shoot and things like that. They come into this sport and expect to hit .800 and .900.
Ray Camacho 21:13
It’s very disrespectful, honestly.
Joey Myers 21:17
It is and to have that kind of baseball hitting lessons near me mentality coming into our sport and thinking things are just going to be easy. I even have parents that it’s pitching versus hitting, what’s harder, and I always say that hitting is harder.
Joey Myers 21:30
I have a buddy that teaches pitching, he’s the guy I send my hitters to go learn pitching. Hitting is harder than pitching, I pitched all the way through my sophomore year in high school until I went full time outfield and hitting.
Joey Myers 21:46
The thing was, is I knew where I was going to throw the ball, what kind of pitch I was going to throw and in what location and speed. I knew all that beforehand, right? Whether it went there or not. Who knows? But hitting I don’t know any of that stuff and when they say well, there’s a mind game that the pitcher must play against a hitter. Well, doesn’t the hitter have to play mind game against a pitcher?
Ray Camacho 22:06
That’s what I teach, bro. That’s what I teach. I don’t film it because I don’t want to share it with people, but my feel work, my live at bats, that’s what the high school guys come for, because I did it better than anybody.
Ray Camacho 22:20
When I hit that homerun on Sunday, this guy was a nobody, and I’m not disrespecting him. But I know he was a nobody, he wasn’t throwing hard, just throwing like 70-75. I know who I am. Full count, he goes like this, to show me that curveball.
Ray Camacho 22:33
Right away, just to who I am. I never really paid attention to those things because I just saw the ball hit the ball at time. But I saw that, and I remember thinking curveball, and then as soon as it released, I saw that bad ass backspin and then I just crapped on it.
Ray Camacho 22:49
I was like you think you’re going to trick me with like JV tricks. Because for one you don’t throw hard, I’m not scared of you. Two, I know that if I sit back, you’re not going to blow anything by me.
Ray Camacho 23:01
I try to teach kids out because I do the same thing on the pitching. I wouldn’t call myself a pitcher, but I could pitch. I pitched a little bit in college, I pitched in high school, but they couldn’t take me out of shortstop because we didn’t have a shortstop.
Ray Camacho 23:12
When I pitch, they had the ball at shortstop. It’s frustrating because I used to be that guy making errors. Now somebody else is making errors for me. I call myself a competitor. I know how to play the game. I was never good paper guys.
Ray Camacho 23:27
One of the reasons why I feel like I didn’t get drafted. But you put me in a game I do all the right things I get on base; I steal the base. I read the ball. I see the pitcher.
Ray Camacho 23:36
I always liked hitting off big, big, tall pitchers because they always thought that they’re better than me because it’s physical. My dad was talking about it yesterday, and I can hear the anger in his voice how I got shortchanged from my size.
Ray Camacho 23:48
He goes I must tell everybody, I put you against anybody. I put you against anybody. I remember sophomore year in high school, we were placed in Austin Buoy, and they had three dudes and we played them three games, we had three dudes, they’re all six foot plus, doing upper 80s lower 90s.
Ray Camacho 24:05
The first game I went for five off that guy’s a leadoff guy. Because they didn’t respect me, you’re trying to drive till mid upper 80s fastball is by me, I’m a fastball hitting son of a gun. I’m jumping on that. I just beat you, beat you, beat you guess what, next at bat curveball I sit on it. You can’t throw it because you’re trying to throw it, you’re already spinning on the ground.
Ray Camacho 24:23
I had an elimination process at age 10. I tell people I manifested and prayed to God for all these things that I had each night not knowing that I was doing this stuff. I taught myself how to keep two hands on the bat, there’s no tricks or gimmicks. Simply every night, told myself you hit the ball very good every time but you’re breaking apart.
Ray Camacho 24:44
Let’s just swing with two hands, see what happens. I would tell myself every night until it started happening. Of course, I practice it and I try to apply it and put it in my head. My feel work was immaculate. Anytime I took a pitch, I always took it correctly. I was always on time. If I wasn’t, that’s a negative one in energy. So, I get out, I do two feel work.
Ray Camacho 25:05
I go one, two, or whatever I felt like I needed to do to get back in the box and get that back. I never understood it, but I was always going in the box plus one, or plus two, especially if I won that pitch. That means you didn’t buckle me; your curveball isn’t crap. I stare at it and I look back at you. I go yes, you got to throw me a fastball, let’s go.
Ray Camacho 25:24
I’m ready to rock and roll. I was always ready to hit. I got my batting stance from Chipper Jones; he was my favorite player. His dad was out of Stetson University and he created the toe tap.
The toe tap to me is the most adjustable swing that I’ve ever had
Ray Camacho 25:36
The toe tap to me is the most timing the most adjustable swing that I’ve ever had. I’ve dabbled in other things, I listened to other guys, and they’ve all ruined to me, and they took my time in a way my weight shift.
Ray Camacho 25:48
The biggest thing when it comes to pitching and hitting, they’re both rotational movements, you both must read energy. I literally move just like the pitcher when I hit. That’s why I’m superior in timing. I always tell pitchers this when you’re throwing, if you throw hard, or if you got gas, you’re trying to throw it down their throats every time most time unless you have a different mentality of maybe just don’t strike, you can’t throw strike.
Ray Camacho 26:14
When I got up there, I’m throwing my heart and soul every pitch because we’re competing. And I can do that, I always prided myself in being a 90% and 95, on everything I can do.
Ray Camacho 26:25
Now, I would never say 100, who can be 100 all the time. But I would say A plus student on the field. As far as I could, I could run as hard as I could because I had control. When I move to load back, that guy’s doing the same weight shift as I’m doing.
Ray Camacho 26:40
Of course, I have my strong legs and everything else they go with the timing, but I try to tell guys this because I show them right away from soft toss to the front toss to live, if you do not have a weight shift, you have no timing, and they don’t understand it. Someone along the way, told them not to move. My biggest thing is, this is how you tell if you have a good instructor a good coach or not.
Ray Camacho 27:02
If your coach limits your movement, if you’re Aaron Judge, you can limit movements. He’s Aaron judge, and he’s hella strong and badass. If you’re a JV guy that hasn’t gone on varsity yet, and if you’re weak, you limit movements, you’re not good, you’re not going do anything to the ball, because it’s strength and rhythm.
Ray Camacho 27:23
When a coach is telling you to get your foot down early, when coaches tell you to go to a two-strike approach, they’re taking your rhythm out, they’re taking your weight shift out, they’re not even teaching it properly. Or if they tell you to go oppo, and the guy throws you an inside pitch, you’re screwed.
Ray Camacho 27:38
Those are sabotage advice, and I talk about it openly. I don’t even care if the high school coaches hate me, because I care about the kid. If you tell him this, now he shut down and now he’s dumbed down. Now he cannot focus on practice and go as hard as he can.
Ray Camacho 27:57
I try to enhance everybody with balance and rhythm. That is it. It’s your balance and rhythm. It’s only a matter of time, and how do we know that? We watched your takes, because whether you like it or not, there’s a pitching coach who didn’t hit. I’m confident about this. A pitching coach who didn’t hit watching your feel work like a dumb pitcher, notice that like a pitcher.
Ray Camacho 28:20
I’m a hitter, a pitcher, a first baseman, a catcher, a right fielder, a third baseman, I’m everything. I’ve done everything. I think from those perspectives, but I think more like a pitcher and a catcher and a shortstop when I see hitters, and I’m like, am I scared of this guy? Or what am I seeing?
Ray Camacho 28:34
I can go to any high school game right now and call pitches and tell you exactly what’s going to happen? Because the coach is on level one, they’re on level one, until you start beating them or start sitting on pitches understanding that, then they’ll switch up, they’ll switch it up just like the game, right?
I don’t use a glove when I throw BP so I’ll hold curveball like this. I’ll hold it. I want to see if they’re smart enough to look at my hand
Ray Camacho 28:48
That’s what I do with the high school guys, because I don’t use a glove when I throw BP so I’ll hold curveball like this. I’ll hold it. I want to see if they’re smart enough to look at my hand. If not, then I just keep breaking them off. Keep breaking them off. Then when I start seeing sit on it. I’m like, hey, what are you doing? They’re like, Oh, I see it in your hand coach. Awesome.
Ray Camacho 29:08
Now I can manipulate you because now I hold it like that. Then I’ll throw a fastball because my fastball curveball. I know how to compete. If you’re guessing you’re not ever going to beat me. I can do 30 minutes of fastball and curveball round with guys, I’m talking about varsity guys, and just beat them because they’re trying to guess.
Ray Camacho 29:30
I say you don’t guess if you guess I will blow a fastball by you because I’m reading your energy. I’m reading your movements, just like any coach would right now. The younger kids, I tell the dads and the moms, whoever’s helping them, whether you like it or not the kid is competing against an adult.
Ray Camacho 29:47
There’s a coach watching what he does, if he steps out, he’s going like this to the pitcher. Now the pitcher throws strikes. Now your kid doesn’t have a chance because he’s not understanding how he’s moving. He’s not understanding what he’s presenting to the whole baseball community when he’s doing that.
Ray Camacho 30:02
I’m trying to really get the guys to do field work. That means I really must control my sessions. If a kid takes a bad swing, if he takes two in a row, I have to stop and tell him to get out of the box and do feel work. Then I watch his feel work.
Ray Camacho 30:17
If his feel work is bad, then I got to stand up and go back over there and talk to him about it. Because the feel work matters what you’re going to do in the box. Sometimes they’re too immature to understand it. I got to keep talking about it and keep talking about it. My biggest thing is making them aware. My big varsity guys like to dive in.
Ray Camacho 30:35
I have this big thing of reading that energy and going back and forth, stop angles of feet, hips and shoulders, we’re not manipulating those right now, especially if you don’t need to understand how to hit. The balanced approach is just staying square.
Ray Camacho 30:49
Now that’s outside, you close up, go to right center field, and it’s down the middle or if you want to pull it you go left centerfield. Shoulders and hips. That’s it. That’s how the elite hit with our back hip.
Ray Camacho 31:03
I literally show the guys and then I go in there. If they don’t believe me, I show them how to hit where you want me to hit it, boom, I hit their left center, we want to hit right side, and boom, this is how we do it.
Ray Camacho 31:11
I’ve always had back control, my dad just showed me off with a five-year-old. I would just mechanically sound. That’s it. I was connected, the term connected, right. I try to show those guys how to be properly connected with their core, their breathing their chin.
Ray Camacho 31:26
Your head doesn’t matter if your feet suck, because the little kids, if their back foot never rotates properly, you don’t exist. Because you cut off all the power, you cut off that right eye or your left eye whatever way you’re swinging, and you don’t rotate properly. That’s the biggest thing.
Ray Camacho 31:42
Now if the back foot sucks the front foot is usually the culprit because the front side leaves the backside more ground up. That’s something that I figured out, but I don’t know if it’s out there already, but I don’t try to worry about everybody else. I know what I’m doing here, and how I speak. I try to make them understand that your head doesn’t matter. Your hands don’t matter if your feet are bad.
Joey Myers 32:03
I love it. Well, hey, I want to be respectful of your time a lot. A lot of great advice there. I love that, Ray. Glad that we did this. I’m sure we can do some part twos. Before we go, where can people find you, talk about the social media platforms. I know you got a website, but it looks like it’s a little under construction right now.
Where can people find you, talk about the social media platforms…
I’m on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram all the big social media sites I have, fit on fit fitness, fat on fat baseball and my own personal page account. I just try to give information out to as many people as possible. I do a lot of free work because I feel like this stuff is so hard. That if you can do it, awesome. It’s no secret. There’s no secret. I’m an open book. I’ll tell anybody anything. People reach out to me all the time in DMs and messages and I love my job.
Joey Myers 33:16
I love it. What are the one or two that you’re on most?
Ray Camacho 33:21
I would say Facebook and Instagram. I’m actually on tik tok as well, Ray Camp4oe
Joey Myers 33:27
I was going to say that was in there.
Ray Camacho 33:31
I did a video. Like two days ago and I’ve gotten like 100 followers on tik tok recently. I’m really surprised because I see a lot of baseball coaches getting roasted on TikTok. These kids are unrelentless.
Ray Camacho 33:47
I was telling a friend; I’ve been ready for a little kid to come talk smack to me. I can just get them, but it hasn’t happened. The only thing I can think of is I’m doing it right. They understand what I’m saying. I had a kid reached out to me say Hey, where’s part two? Hey, it’s one fan, right? I posted two. I was like, Alright, here we go two and three, because I’m willing to teach anybody who wants to learn because we’re all learning.
Joey Myers 34:13
Cool, dude. Thank you so much for your time again. Like I said, we’ll be in touch. I’ll get you all your stuff. We’ll kind of go from there and maybe do a part two, part three in the future.
Ray Camacho 34:24
Awesome, man. Thanks.
Joey Myers 34:25
Thanks for your baseball hitting lessons near me time, brother. Keep up the good work there.
Ray Camacho 34:28
You too, man.
Joey Myers 34:29
Alright, see you.
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https://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/baseball-hitting-lessons-near-me-e1626127088872.png281500Joey Myershttps://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/hitting-performance-labs_c90c0362088ef1d3d528f3078f4f8ac1-300x75.pngJoey Myers2021-07-12 21:57:062021-07-13 05:35:14Baseball Hitting Lessons Near Me VIDEO
Softball Hitting Lessons: “When it Comes to Guys, the Performance Determines their Happiness. When it Comes to Girls, the Happiness Determines the Performance.”
In this softball hitting lessons interview with Amanda Smith of WhiteZoneCoaching.com, titled: “When It Comes to Guys, The Performance Determines Their Happiness. When It Comes to Girls, The Happiness Determines the Performance”, we go over:
Come to find out you are an Aerospace Engineer,
Where did you get White Zone Coaching from?
When it comes to guys, the performance determines their happiness. When it comes to girls, the happiness determines the performance…
… You can give them more and more and more as long as you know where their edges at,
“The Surfer’s Code” and what softball and baseball players can learn from it,
How do you coach your softball girls to deal with the 2020 challenges?
Hello and welcome to Swing Smarter Monthly Newsletter. This is your host Joey Myers of hittingperformancelab.com and I have the honor and privilege today, this is our second softball hitting lessons call or second meeting with Amanda Smith of White Zone Coaching.
Joey Myers 00:19
I have a lot of cool stuff that we’re going to talk about today, I’m going to ask her, but first, I want to welcome you to the show, Amanda.
Amanda Smith 00:25
Hey, Joey, thanks for having me. I am so excited to be here and to talk with you and share a little bit about what I’m doing in my softball world.
Joey Myers 00:35
Very cool, and many of my softball hitting lessons readers out there will understand that we like to apply human movement principles that are validated by science to hitting the ball.
Come to find out you are an Aerospace Engineer…
Joey Myers 00:45
We like to use physics and engineering and biomechanics and different things like that when we describe the swing, when we teach the swing, and we want to have a higher standard for our hitters, and they come to find out you are an aeronautical engineer.
Amanda Smith 01:01
Aerospace engineer. Yes.
Joey Myers 01:04
Let’s go in with the softball hitting lessons question, how has the engineering background helped you coach your pitchers? I’m sure you do all of them or just mostly hitters?
Amanda Smith 01:19
Pitchers, catchers, hitters, I also do throwing and fielding when people need it, want it. Generally, people aren’t going to be like, I need a throwing coach, or I need a fielding coach. They want hitting coaches and pitching coaches and catching coaches. I do all those things.
Amanda Smith 01:35
When it comes to my engineering background with physics, I love physics. I’m such a physics dork. I try to keep it as very simple as possible so that my nine-year-olds can understand what I’m saying to them.
Amanda Smith 01:53
When I bust out with 90 degree angles, they’re like, Huh? I have to bring myself back down to Okay, like the corner in your house, that’s a 90-degree angle. What they’re getting from me in lessons is usually a physics education, a math education, they’re getting some biology education, I’m talking about anatomy phys with them and kinesthetics. I’m a nerd like that, they just got a deal.
Joey Myers 02:23
I love that. I was working with one of my one on one hitters, who’s a sophomore in high school and we do three days a week one on one. We were talking the other day, and we talked about like what you said, we do the physics thing, engineering, but we also might talk a little politics and I talked a little of religion, we might talk all kinds.
Joey Myers 02:43
I said, hey, you’re getting an education in this one hour, then he just talks about this experience with school, this last 2020 has been absolutely horrendous, he hasn’t learned anything.
Joey Myers 02:53
He’s one of those 4.0-3.6 type students, and he just said it was really rough. Not hard but just rough like it’s too easy, almost. I said, hey, maybe I should get you a degree at the end of this thing instead of going into your junior year in high school. We go over a lot.
Amanda Smith 03:13
Yes, ultimately, we’re teaching them life lessons, right? We’re helping them discover who they want to be and maybe even what career they want to go into. I know a lot of the parents that send their kids to me, they’re engineers, so their kids are already exposed to that softball hitting lessons environment.
Amanda Smith 03:32
It’s crazy to notice that most of the people that come to me have that kind of background. I love it, but the same time, I find it really interesting from a business perspective, Oh, I’m targeting engineers.
Joey Myers 03:46
It’s almost a blessing and a curse because from the start, I’ve always had that in my business to target the science side of things. You do attract the engineers, you attract the MDs, you attract the PTs, the physical therapists, you attract these, and it’s a great crowd, and they get it, right?
Joey Myers 04:04
It’s a small grouping of the overall market. The blessing is, it’s a great crowd and they are very educated, they understand the whole how everything works, but it’s a curse, because it is such a small area.
Joey Myers 04:20
Like you said, taking the 90-degree angle and saying the corner of your house that’s 90 degrees, being able to take it down so that the nine year old can understand but also the parents can understand it.
Amanda Smith 04:30
Yes, and the parents, they’re sitting in the background, just nodding their heads, like I love what she’s teaching my kid. As parents, they generally can’t reach their kid on the level that a private coach can reach their kid and they want to, they desperately want to, I’m a parent, I get it.
Amanda Smith 04:52
To have the kid hear it from more than one avenue now. That’s what the parents absolutely love. I have something I like to bring to the table for the parents and be like, you know, I bet your parents have said this to you before.
Joey Myers 05:11
I always say that you could be Babe Ruth, or you could be Sierra Romero, but they’re not going to listen to you and when I’m talking to parents, it don’t matter who you are in the stratosphere of high level softball hitting lessons, but there’s just your dad or your mom.
Amanda Smith 05:30
From the kids’ perspective, you got to listen to them about everything. When it comes to softball or baseball, do you want to listen to them about that too? Your parents pick your battles.
Joey Myers 05:41
Exactly. Delegate when you need to
Amanda Smith 05:43
Yes, exactly.
Where did you get White Zone Coaching softball hitting lessons from?
Joey Myers 05:44
I had a question for white zone coaching, where did you get white zone coaching from? When did you come up with that?
Amanda Smith 05:51
The white zone is that ultimate level that athletes want to get to. If you’ve seen the movie For Love of The Game, with Kevin Costner, where he clears the mechanism, everything around him goes white, except for the umpire, the catcher, and the hitter, and that home plate, that’s the white zone.
Amanda Smith 06:13
That’s ultimately what I want to take all my athletes to, is that level of understanding of getting into that flow state so that their physical talents can just take over and go on autopilot and they can think about all of the mental things that the game has. That’s why I’m a white zone coach.
Joey Myers 06:30
Very cool. Going into that a little bit on the mental side of the softball hitting lessons game, what do you find the top two issues that players are dealing with in today’s game that have to do with the mental side?
Amanda Smith 06:43
Perfectionism, number one. I’ve got so many kids coming to me that are like, Okay, I must do everything perfect. I got to get 10 out of 10. How overwhelming is that for anybody? Let’s take the pressure cap off that kid.
Amanda Smith 06:59
The other one is confidence. They come in, and they’re like, well, I don’t have it. No, you do have it, you just have to remind yourself that you have it and letting them know, here’s where the confidence lies, and here’s how to get back to it yourself.
Amanda Smith 07:15
I can pump you up all I want but if you don’t know how to pump yourself up, you’re just going to have to keep coming back to me and that’s a do loop I don’t want to be in.
Joey Myers 07:25
Right. On the perfection side, I’ve had recently a few or a couple hitters who are in that mode and one I’m thinking about is an eight-year-old, dad works for NASA. The son has a black belt already at eight years old in taekwondo.
Joey Myers 07:47
I thought this was going to be slam dunk case. Physically, the kids obviously proven. He’s very disciplined in what he’s doing, but this is another sport, hitting is a completely different monster. How do you deal with perfection? He’s a perfectionist, I haven’t dealt with too many of those, but they come along, and I have one right now. So how do you deal with it?
Amanda Smith 08:11
I have a lot of them. It was a thing that I had to work on. Girls are perfectionist. I see it constantly because it was the thing that I had to work on. The way that I help them is I teach them, and I have a video on this, if you sign up for my email list, you get this video.
Amanda Smith 08:34
It’s called seven out of 10. In practice, we put everything into buckets of 10 and then seven is the baseline. If they get seven out of 10, in that group of 10, that’s when they get to analyze it, they don’t get to analyze it every single movement, or every single at bat or every single hit.
Amanda Smith 08:54
They only get to analyze it after the 10 and if they got seven, they did good. If they did better than seven, they did great. If they did less than seven, then they have something to learn. That language right there at the end where we’re learning instead of, I’m bad, that’s the switch that they need to make and that helps with confidence too.
Amanda Smith 09:15
Those two kinds go hand in hand. But giving them that baseline and helping them understand this is your baseline seven out of 10, they take the pressure off themselves automatically.
Amanda Smith 09:27
Now all I have to do with my kids, seven out of 10 if they start to nitpick every single pitch or every single hit, and they go oh yeah, that’s right. Then bam, I get them into that mode of I’m going to analyze the group instead of every single movement. Once I get to that point, I’m not analyzing it was bad. I’m analyzing Okay, what can I do better? What can I learn from this?
Joey Myers 09:52
I love that. Of course, at the end, all those softball hitting lessons links and all that stuff we’ll put that out there because I want to help just like you want to help. Another example, the same hitter I was talking about, the sophomore in high school, we always go over these kinds of scenarios and things like that.
Joey Myers 10:18
This is a different hitter, lefty. He’s one of my seniors in high school and he kind of had a little bit of a rough day yesterday. Usually we do well, but he was having a hard time with controlling his top hand.
Joey Myers 10:35
He was just like; I don’t know what the heck’s going on and he was visibly frustrated. He’s usually the surfer kid, I call him shades because he walks in and he has the Aviator shades on.
Amanda Smith 10:49
Aviators
Joey Myers 10:50
I call him shades. He’s usually the kickback kid, surfer dude, and whatnot. He was a little out of his element it seemed like and we did something a little tougher. We call it chaos rounds, where what we do is we do a six-swing round, and he’ll take two swings at one plate, we have two plates, set about five feet apart, or three to five feet apart.
Joey Myers 11:12
He’ll switch plates every swing and at each plate he’s doing something different. It’s a different strategy. It could be we’re going to control, we call verticals or launch angles, we don’t call them launch angles, because a lot of coaches don’t like that term.
Joey Myers 11:25
One plate, maybe he’s controlling his verticals and another plate, we’re doing middle in, middle away type stuff. So, he’s working middle in, middle way. Another one, we might be just doing straight up curveballs. He switches in what he’s doing.
Joey Myers 11:38
We mix and rearrange. It’s not all the same the whole time. It’s very mentally draining. It put some pressure on him. I think he blew a gasket but what I said was get back to the mental side. At least for him a gasket.
Amanda Smith 11:57
Was it pressure relief, or was it like pressure explosion? Like if I think of a pressure cooker?
Joey Myers 12:04
I think it was a pressure explosion. He knew what he needed to do to fix it. He just wasn’t doing it. When we were talking about it, at the end, I was telling him about frustration, I said, frustration is good. It’s a good thing. As long as it doesn’t make you depressed, right? Know what you need to do to fix it and then you do what you need to do to do that.
Joey Myers 12:27
He goes, this is how I operate. He goes, I get super frustrated. And then the next day I go out and I think it’s fixed. It sounds like he goes like mentally he goes through it and then can work it out. Is that something?
Amanda Smith 12:42
Girls don’t do that
Joey Myers 12:45
What’s the girls do in that scenario?
When it comes to guys, the performance determines their happiness. When it comes to girls, the happiness determines the performance…
Amanda Smith 12:49
This is where boys and girls differ a lot, I feel like. When it comes to guys, the performance determines their happiness. When it comes to girls, the happiness determines the performance.
Joey Myers 13:03
Okay, I got it.
Amanda Smith 13:07
If girls are off when they walk through the door, and I can see it right away, like, okay, we got another session, we got to switch up that attitude quick are the whole session it goes to pot.
Amanda Smith 13:24
This is where girls are different. The more pressure you put on a girl the worse their attitude gets, and the worse their performance becomes. Whereas guys, they like the pressure to kick them out of it. I find that so fascinating, right?
Amanda Smith 13:40
This is why I coach girls. For the girls, it really goes back to that perfectionism pressure bottle. If we go into a chaos scenario, like you’re explaining, and I’ve never used that technique on a girl, I want to try it and see what happens honestly.
Joey Myers 14:01
They must be in the right softball hitting lessons mindset before they come into it.
Amanda Smith 14:04
They have to, they absolutely have to and that’s number one for me has put them in the right mental frame so that they can have success and then carry that success into the next success and then it snowballs.
Amanda Smith 14:16
Parents love that because they’ll come back to me and they’ll be like, what did you do because she went into the next game and she did phenomenal and like I just gave her a little confidence boost and gave her some tools to boost herself to
Amanda Smith 14:34
I feel like if I were to lay the pressure on a girl she’d crumble, she’d start to cry.
Amanda Smith 14:45
I welcome that at my sessions because you’re not allowed to get emotional in a game, right? You can get emotional after a big win or you can get emotional after a great strikeout that ended a really tough inning.
Amanda Smith 14:59
There are certain times when you can get emotional, but like getting emotional at private lessons happens a lot. I welcome it because we must have the ability to express those emotions no matter what. Again, this is where girls and boys kind of differ.
Joey Myers 15:15
That’s cool. Mine is about 95% guys, I have a few softball hitting lessons girls, I have a few that are in college that I’ve worked with. I’ve noticed the girls, when I give them something to work on mechanically, they’re good, I can probably lay on three or four of them, three or four different mechanics, and they’ll get the first one, they’ll get the second one, I might give you another one.
Joey Myers 15:43
I keep going up until that point, you start to see that flip of Okay, now this is a little bit too much. But the girls, for whatever reason, I feel like most of the girls I’ve worked with, they’re able to handle more of those things versus the guys, we tend to stay in the two to three things range, and they don’t get frustrated, you don’t see their eyes. I’ve had a few guys that you see the tears start to well up. I have a couple of them who are emotional.
Amanda Smith 16:14
Let it rip, Coach. Let it rip.
Joey Myers 16:15
Yeah, then they start getting sloppy. I must pull back because they’re getting sloppy. I mean, they don’t care emotionally that they’re getting sloppy, like the girls would care emotionally that they are sloppy, and they take offense to it, like you said, the perfection side.
Joey Myers 16:29
But the guys they get sloppy, and so I can’t allow him to get sloppy. So, I must scale it back to girls. The girls they handle it. Like they can handle 2-3-4 different things in one session.
Joey Myers 16:41
It’s almost like I played this game of see how far I can go with the girl. Then once I start seeing the emotion, I start dialing it back with the guys, I pretty much know how much they can handle and it’s not an emotional thing, it’s a sloppy thing.
… You can give them more and more and more as long as you know where their edges at”
Amanda Smith 16:54
It’s a practice, honestly, I feel like I must be able to turn that dial up to. You can do it with guys, you can give them more and more and more as long as you know where their edges at.
Amanda Smith 17:09
With girls, they’re more latent to let you know where their edges at. Keep that in mind, we know how to bottle things up. It’s crazy how much we do that.
Amanda Smith 17:25
With girls, it goes back to the whole multitasking brain. I feel like moms are masters at multitasking and dads are like I can only do one thing. Some dads are amazing at multitasking, don’t get me wrong, you hand that down to your kids, they innately become great at having multiple things thrown at them and then being able to handle it.
Amanda Smith 17:55
I love pushing that edge. Because with my kids with my girls, what I notice is I can give them three things. Then the next session, I’m going to like to take those three things and add one more thing on top of it and maybe a third. Well, a fifth thing, technically, but a second thing on top of that and see how far I can carry it.
Amanda Smith 18:18
Some of these girls, I can give them 10 different. What do we call these tasks on 10 different things to work on in a session and they can handle it. And it’s like, Okay, I got to scale you back now.
Joey Myers 18:35
It’s crazy because you could cover the whole softball hitting lessons gamut. There’s always something to work on. But I mean at some point, we kind of must start circling back to some of the other things.
Joey Myers 18:47
I always tell my hitters it’s like, at the circus in the old days, they had to put the sword down and they get the plate and they start spinning on it, then they set up another sword and start spinning the plate, and then they have to copy the first plate and keep it spinning, it’s like keeping these plates spinning and I feel like the girls do a better job of that than the guys do.
Amanda Smith 19:06
Multitaskers. Look at their parents. That’s really the indicator.
Joey Myers 19:11
Yes. I saw a video of you doing a mental Monday talk which is really cool. I saw one on your Facebook, Mindset Mondays yes, and we can discuss the book. What was that book?
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“The Surfer’s Code” and what softball and baseball players can learn from it – softball hitting lessons
Amanda Smith 19:26
The Surfer’s Code. I love that book.
Joey Myers 19:29
Yeah. You’ll pick a chapter and then you’ll use that as the content of the video. That one that I watched it was the one where you get smashed by a wave and it’s a question of Okay, I can hang it up and be done and not go through that again, or I can go back out.
Joey Myers 19:47
Talk a little bit about that and how that applies to like your softball hitting lessons girls, how you can apply that in school.
Amanda Smith 19:54
I live in Denver. Let’s preface there. I’m in a landlocked state. Everywhere I go I like to surf if there’s surfable water. I also surf but I’m a snow surfer. That means snowboarders for those of you who don’t know.
Amanda Smith 20:09
What I love in the surfing world, there’s rules that they live by as surfers. This surfer has been in the game for a long time. He wrote the book and shared it with the rest of the world.
Amanda Smith 20:27
Not every surfer was thrilled about that. That’s kind of their inner code. That’s why this book is called the Surfer’s Code.
Amanda Smith 20:39
I love their principles, and this principle that you’re talking about, I will go back out, if I have a bad game, if I have a bad surf, if I have a bad wave, I’m still going to go out again.
Amanda Smith 20:56
For softball, for baseball, the way that applies is, hey, you had a bad at bat, you get another opportunity, you get another try. That’s that whole taking the pressure off thing to, you had a bad game, you still get another try, you’re going to have another game, right?
Amanda Smith 21:13
When your career ends, that mentality starts to shift, right? Like your seniors in high school, or your seniors in college, their mentality is slightly different when it comes to their next wave, or their next opportunity to go out because it might not happen.
Amanda Smith 21:29
I can remember my last college game, every second of that last college game. The number of tears that flowed out of my face after that game, because I knew I didn’t have another wave, there wasn’t another opportunity, and then there was, and that was the thing.
Amanda Smith 21:48
After college ended, I had the opportunity to play NPF, I had the opportunity to play international ball. I got an offer to work at NASA on the Orion program, so I didn’t take it, but there could have been another wave to take.
Amanda Smith 22:08
Just remember, you’ve always got another opportunity, another try coming up no matter what. Yeah, even if you think it’s your last game for you seniors, you still have another opportunity, there’s going to be another wave to get out there and ride.
Joey Myers 22:26
I love that and especially with the 2020 COVID stuff and how hard it’s been for athletes. I’ve had some athletes that I work with, we work through things, we have to be very critical thinking about how you’re not able to play, how can we get you out there? How can we work on getting you in front of your seniors in high school or college coaches?
Joey Myers 22:52
Like you said, got to get back out there. It might be in a different way, it may not be in the same direction, but it’s going to be somewhat unconventional from what you’ve thought.
Joey Myers 23:03
One of the softball hitting lessons things, as an example, that I talked to a few of my seniors that graduated, they graduated I think in 2020 spring and then you have the seniors coming through now, 2021.
Amanda Smith 23:16
They’re experiencing it, too.
Joey Myers 23:17
Yes. One of the things we talked about was how do you contact a coach, college coach and if you’re going to send a video, how do you send a video, and one of the coolest things I read, it was in negotiating book, negotiate as if your life depended on it.
Joey Myers 23:36
I think it was it was Chris Voss. I don’t know if you’ve read that one before, good, reads well. He has great stories. Negotiating as If Your Life Depended On It, I think is what it’s called.
Joey Myers 23:51
He talked about with his own son who was playing football and back in the day, trying to contact coaches, and one of the things was instead of shooting video, and just trying to hit all the points, all the checklist, and send it out to all these coaches, why not go to the coaches first and ask them what do you use?
Joey Myers 24:12
What kind of evaluation do you use when you recruit players? Because it’s going to be different, some coaches in baseball, like college coaches love the launch angle game, they love that terminology, another one will not like the launch angle game.
Joey Myers 24:28
If you send a video of you hitting the all these doubles and dingers all over the yard, those coaches that don’t like that launch angle game and they’re more of the batter sacrifice, they’re more of the what the low level and drive, hit hard on the ground, and you want to go to that college, either it’s not going to be a fit for you or you need to make a different video.
How do you coach your softball girls to deal with the 2020 challenges?
Joey Myers 24:47
I thought that was great advice, you’re going to have to go back out, but it might look in a different direction. Any kind of experience you’ve had with that with your players?
Amanda Smith 25:00
Yes, with the 2020 and the 2021 kids, it’s not just the seniors. That’s the other thing that I keep reminding myself, to watch the level of depression that happened with these players, because their life is school and sport.
Amanda Smith 25:22
When one of those was taken away, and the other one, they’re like, I like it, but I kind of have to do it. Whereas the other one I get to do it. It was tough to watch them mentally crumble. If you’ve played a sport, and that sport ended for you, you’ve experienced that so you can totally relate.
Amanda Smith 25:51
Helping my 2022s, my 2021s figure out how to do this, the new way, how to get in front of coaches. I just had one who, for spring break, she went out and checked out a bunch of schools, and I told her, you’ve got to email the coaches and let them know that you’re coming, send them your skills, video, do all the things.
Amanda Smith 26:19
She got out there to watch them play and one of the coaches, the head coach of the school that she was really interested in, came over to her and her parents and said, what are you doing here?
Joey Myers 26:31
What?
Amanda Smith 26:32
I came to watch the game. They’re like, we don’t have an audience for our games. We don’t have fans watching our games, you need to leave. Automatically this kid’s like, well, this isn’t the school for me, obviously.
Amanda Smith 26:48
It’s an isolated incident. The coaches are getting used to this scenario, too. They just started playing games. This is something that’s out of their comfort zone as well. A head coach coming out to fans and telling them that they got to go, that’s unheard of.
Amanda Smith 27:04
The head coach doesn’t do that, but in this scenario, that’s what happened. I was like, this is one of those softball hitting lessons opportunities to think from a different angle. Think of how uncomfortable that had to have been for that coach. Think of how uncomfortable it must be to tell all the kids’ parents, you can’t come and watch your kid play. You can watch her on YouTube.
Amanda Smith 27:27
To play without a crowd. That’s a first for a bunch of college kids. There are so many weird scenarios that we’re dealing with right now, and you just roll with it. But keep your mind open and don’t get single minded on Oh, that coach was mean, I don’t like that coach at all.
Amanda Smith 27:44
Don’t cross them off your list, have another conversation with that coach and be like, hey, you were the one who said to me, we had to go, and you weren’t very nice about it. Is there any reason why you had to be so mean?
Amanda Smith 28:01
It’s another opportunity to talk to the coach at least. You might find in that second conversation, that that’s not the coach for you, but you brought up culture, when it came to those coaches who don’t like the language that you use, or they want hitters that hit a certain way versus another way.
Amanda Smith 28:20
Players need to really dig into the schools and understand the culture of the team, the culture of the coaches. I didn’t do it right and I learned the hard way. I literally just had a Facebook post in my Facebook group about this, where there was a player who got her nursing degree from Minnesota, and she got it in four years.
Amanda Smith 28:48
She was one of those kids who graduated last year and got the option to come back and play a fifth year because of COVID and she did, she opted to not dive into her nursing career and instead play her senior year or her second senior year, because she knew that that season was fleeting, that season of her life was fleeting, the sport is fleeting.
Amanda Smith 29:12
She’s not planning on going on NPF or the Olympics or any higher level, what is it athletics unlimited? When I was in school, I was trying to pull off that mechanical and aerospace engineering degree which is a tough degree by itself, but now add sports on top of it.
Amanda Smith 29:32
I learned right away like D1 top 25 school; you’re spending 52 hours a week doing softball. I ended up going D2 after two and a half years at D1 for many reasons, but one of the reasons was because I was struggling badly to pull off both and the coaches were giving me a hard time about it.
Amanda Smith 29:56
They were picking on me because I had to go and do work with my classmates that interfered with some of my practices, and they hated that. That goes back to the culture.
Amanda Smith 30:10
Parents who are in the thick of it, it’s hard to see the teams, it’s hard to talk to the coaches right now. Do your best to figure out what the culture is, talk to the players, you can as athletes talk to the players, you can’t necessarily talk to the coaches. That’ll give you a really good idea of what that program is about and how the coaches support the athlete as well as the student.
Joey Myers 30:39
I’d love to just end on this and ask you where softball hitting lessons people can find you, but before we get there, it’s advice I think that the young ones don’t quite grasp. You and I have been through it, or telling them to do your homework basically, to talk to the players in the teams that you want to go play for in college.
Joey Myers 31:02
They will just answer whatever, I know there’s enough pros, it’ll be fine if whatever. What we’re trying to tell you out there to do your homework, spend the time. I know that for the guys, it’s the testosterone brain that tends to make us lazy. It’s a strong hormone, but it’s also a lazy hormone.
Joey Myers 31:23
I know the girls are a little bit more on top of it but go out and definitely do your homework because you don’t want to land in a place and have to keep switching. It’s just like moving. The best part of moving is when it’s over. Moving your house and all that kind of stuff, it’s the same thing.
Joey Myers 31:39
You don’t want to be jumping schools all over the place because oh, I screwed up. I pick the wrong line, let me go to this one, and you didn’t do the same process, repeat the same process, and you make another mistake. Anyway, great advice.
Joey Myers 31:51
Amanda, where can people find you? I know you mentioned an opt in page to get that video, so go ahead and mention that.
Amanda, where can people find you?
Amanda Smith 32:03
Whitezonecoaching.com is my softball hitting lessons website, you can get the freebie at the bottom of the homepage. That’s the seven out of 10-perfectionism busting video. It explains how to implement it as an athlete or how to implement it as a coach.
I’ve got a lot of baseball people showing up in the group now, too. That’s where you can find me on the interwebs. I also have a YouTube channel, that’s white zone coaching.
Joey Myers 32:50
Yes, Instagram, TikTok
Amanda Smith 32:53
No TikTok. I am not a TikTok-er. I have Pinterest.
Joey Myers 33:02
Are you on Pinterest?
Amanda Smith 33:02
Of course, I am on Pinterest, I’m a pinning queen. I have an Amazon list for softball parent and players. I mean, I’m on the internet.
Joey Myers 33:16
Very cool. Well, thank you, Miss Amanda Smith, I appreciate the call. What we’ll do is we’ll probably have multiple part two and stuff, I’d love to come back and go a little bit deeper into some other things.
Joey Myers 33:30
Your story is very interesting, and I love the origin stories because it explains where you’re at now. It gives a little bit more flavor to the type of coaching that you teach and the purpose behind why you teach what you teach. So keep up the good work out there.
Amanda Smith 33:47
The whole white zone thing. That’s why I teach what I teach.
Joey Myers 33:51
Exactly. Thank you so much and I’ll get you all the goods. Oh, we’ll do like a little Dropbox thing and I’ll send all that stuff to you, and you can do with it however you want. We’ll keep connected.
Amanda Smith 34:05
Awesome. I am excited to keep connected. We’ve got a lot in common, sir.
Joey Myers 34:10
Very much so. Well, have a good weekend.
Amanda Smith 34:14
You, too
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How To Apply The “Precision” Golfing Principles To Baseball Hitting Fundamentals
In this baseball hitting fundamentals gold interview with Golf Pro Instructor Lee Comeaux, we go over:
“You’re going to ruin low backs if you teach that!”
“Golf is about accuracy. If you ain’t accurate, you’re not gonna play a good score”…
“All of a sudden, I realized, turn your rib cage, and then boom…”
“You got to understand how the fascia and these trains all play because there’s layers upon layers in the body”…
Hitting for targets and areas on the barrel, and…
How to apply the “precision” golfing principle to hitting.
CLICK HERE to download the baseball hitting fundamentals video transcription pdf. The following is the transcription in its entirety. And by the way, this is one of 24 expert interview in our brand NEW baseball hitting fundamentals book on Amazon: Swing Smarter … Enjoy!
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"Swing Smarter: Science Based Hitting Training Built To Understand How, Why, & Reasoning Behind It"
Hello and welcome to the Swing Smarter Monthly Newsletter. This is your host Joey Myers from Hitting Performance Lab dot com and with me today is a good friend of mine and I didn’t really get to say his last name correctly. It threw me for a loop until David Shanklin, mutual friend of ours, it’s Comeaux, right? The last name?
Lee Comeaux 00:18
Yes, Comeaux.
Joey Myers 00:19
So, Lee Comeaux. For those of you who’ve read catapult loading system, which became an Amazon bestseller in the baseball hitting fundamentals niche in 2018, you will know Lee because Lee was in the book. He’s had a mentorship in my program namely the hollow position, we call that and the finger pressure. I was working on finger pressure, but I was a little bit off base and he really helped with that. So, welcome first, Lee, to the show.
Lee Comeaux 00:47
Thanks for having me. I hadn’t talked to you in a while.
Joey Myers 00:51
It’s been a while. It’s fitting that it’s right before Christmas.
Lee Comeaux 00:55
It is.
Joey Myers 00:57
First question, Lee. When we first met, you were really disgruntled with my system, you said “hey, you know you’re going to be hurting lower backs” and all this kind of stuff. I loved it and I’m one of those guys that if you can show me a better way, and then I’m all ears, and I was with you. Lee, for those of you who don’t know who he is, he is in the golfing world.
Joey Myers 01:20
He works with golfers internationally, he works with golfers of all time from professional, amateur, the whole thing. It’s interesting to get his perspective from the golfing world. Tell me just initially when you first came in and were like, you know what, this is really going to ruin backs and things like that. What brought you to that baseball hitting fundamentals decision? That observation?
Baseball Hitting Fundamentals: “You’re going to ruin low backs if you teach that!”
Lee Comeaux 01:40
Let me tell you the story how I got to anatomy trains, fascia, and things like that. I quit golf about 2000, every single move hurting and I had a lot of questions from my teachers. One of them was I tend to hit it with forehand a lot, right hand. Most instructors were usually lead arm, left arm. They changed me up, I just got tired of hurting, got tired of playing bad, I quit.
Lee Comeaux 02:07
My daughter, one night, let’s go the range, we go the range. I hadn’t hit balls in months or years even, I’m doing my thing, the next day she comes back, she said, “Dad, where’s the power come from?” Well, I really didn’t know.
Lee Comeaux 02:20
Long story short, kind of started over, I was like I’m gonna do it my way this time. I’m not going to go to instructor, I hadn’t played three to four years. Just started hitting balls in the range, just letting my right hand hit forehand shots, and before I looked up, I’m 10 buckets into it. I haven’t missed a shot, I feel great.
Lee Comeaux 02:43
What are these baseball hitting fundamentals things I’m feeling in my body? I started asking questions. My wife was a massage therapist, she just came home, and it was unbelievable. I went to the range, I took it back however I wanted, swung it down however I wanted, put one right where I wanted. I was feeling these things with my body, all she said was anatomy trains.
Lee Comeaux 03:06
You might as well say it in Chinese. Anatomy trains? Off I went! I found Tom Myers, anatomy trains, started to understand the fascia of the body. It really was how when we’re just sitting there and I’ll take my daughter, a daughter had a select career from 8u, all the way to 18u, .697 batting average. We kept it simple, the object was just to hit a ball. That’s it, not hit hard and in fact, when we would go to practice, talking about squeezing the last three. What I found was anatomy trains, I understood the arm lines, functional lines.
Lee Comeaux 03:48
I understood why when I grabbed a golf club, a bat, anything, for the last three, my hand is clenched. How my hand pivoted, how when we do simple tasks, paying attention to what your hand is doing, your grip. Not what does it look like, not in golf, is the beast point somewhere because all those things lead to how, it will lead to poor kinetics, it’ll lead to your brain and body being confused.
Lee Comeaux 04:22
The thing that blew me away was my back didn’t hurt, but also realize that first night how engaged my knees were, which you know and what you know now. Look how the functional lines attached in the knees, come up here and attach to the upper arm. We’re in golf, everybody’s teaching connection where when you learn that your functional lines attach on three sides of the humerus and they’ll connect about right here on the front, back and sides. It all starts making sense.
“Golf is about accuracy. If you ain’t accurate, you’re not gonna play a good score”
Lee Comeaux 04:51
Why my knees got involved was because it made my lumbar spine move around and time and space. Instead of me chunking hips around, and I’m never was a hip chunker, I was never one of those who bought into that theory. Golf is about accuracy. You had to be accurate, but powerful would be nice. If you ain’t accurate, you’re not gonna play a good score.
Lee Comeaux 05:15
When I played in college and professionally, accuracy was where it’s at. All of a sudden, I went from being sore and hurting to not hurting anymore because I was letting my body do things. It was wanting to do, not what that guy saw, what he saw, what he thought, I’m having results. I think of a shot and hit it, boom, there was.
Lee Comeaux 05:38
I think I’m gonna leave right there, in Texas we have crawfish holes, I’m going to hit it by a crawfish hole, about four feet, and have it stop right there and I’m like, whoa, never in my golf life that happened. Here I am at, I’m 52 now, this happened. Six, fourteen, thirty-eight and found anatomy trains, and was just started answering all these baseball hitting fundamentals questions of why things work. It also answered why things weren’t working in that, you can focus on things that are irrelevant and that really affects the way all this tissue operates.
Lee Comeaux 06:16
I’ve never heard in baseball, or golf. You never hear them talking about thoracic movement until you came along. It was always turning your shoulders, that’s great. They sit on top your thoracic that pivots, unbelievably, because that spiral line, but if you’re worried about throwing these joints around a rib cage, you’re going to struggle, you’re gonna fight it.
“All of a sudden, I realized, turn your rib cage, and then boom…”
Lee Comeaux 06:40
All of a sudden, I realized, turn your rib cage, and then boom, I just started looking. At 52 years old, I hit it further than I’ve ever hit in my life. Understand what thoracic pivot is, versus, I would never tell a student, turn your shoulders, turn your thoracic, because that’s what’s turning. As simple as that sounds, it is just it’s huge.
Lee Comeaux 07:01
Again, my daughter 697… .692 career, batting average. She went three years, she swung it for three years, whenever she pulled the trigger on the back move, she made contact, she averaged .954 percentile. When she swung the bat in a four-year period, she made contact, she may have found it, she might have popped louder, it didn’t matter.
Lee Comeaux 07:29
What we trained was, when this move, its job was to touch that ball. Confidence will teach you how to touch it harder and better, if that’s what you want, but what she found was you’re just going to want to hit it, you’re going to want to place it where they aren’t like Ichiro said. Same thing with her, it never hurt, never.
Lee Comeaux 07:37
It wasn’t until later in her career, in her college, D-1 career where they change things up, she started having back issues, but I knew that was going to happen because she knew that she had to do what they said. She also knew what they didn’t know, but we knew how to fix it. Thank God, through anatomy trains and things like that, you know how to fix it. I may want to leave it alone but that’s kind of the baseball hitting fundamentals backstory of how I got to that. Then, I saw you.
Lee Comeaux 08:18
I learned this in golf, come out in ’06-’07, talking about anatomy trains and fascia and pushing versus pulling and I was on a site called The Secret is in the Dirt, that Steve Elkington had. I look up one night and you look at all the hits on this website and if there were a million hits, 750,000 were my little thread.
Lee Comeaux 08:40
I’m some guy in Beaumont, just decided to pay attention to what was going on, to define some parameters or what I call good, listen to what my body was telling me, and then ask some questions, and my wife’s genius was anatomy trains. I look back and I’m glad that’s all she said, because she would have said anatomy trains and went into it real deep, I probably would have just walked away with “Yeah, I don’t care about all that”.
Lee Comeaux 09:07
Because it forced me for the first time ever, to research something I knew nothing about and you’re… I tell people this all the time, God gave you a gift called arm lines. It makes life so easy for human, for about four- or five-point human being. That’s why you can just throw, that’s why you can just swing and hit it. It’s when we get into the baseball hitting fundamentals of what does it do from the bottom of the feet.
Lee Comeaux 09:31
You’re not going to bat .692 in a 10-year span, you’re not going to not miss one or three years because you’re worried about you forced your motor cortex to worry about things that are irrelevant, none of that has anything to do with do this, other than the limbs are attached to it. That’s it. That’s why God gave you this and these, that’s it.
Lee Comeaux 09:53
You had no pelvis and hips and certainly Gracovetsky opens your eyes in his video is about the guy with no legs and how he was is able to propel himself, and when you get into the spinal engine, it’s like I tell people, especially in golf, the spine is such a focused-on thing. It’s probably focused on to a detriment, where it’s a curve, it’s an S, you’re going to slump some days, you’re going to be straight some days.
Lee Comeaux 10:23
Tiger showed us and a lot of these strike back golfers for sure. You look at the spinal injuries on tour, and it’s all from you not letting your spine. You got Nicklaus, who would always say, global flex. These are terms that weren’t around in 2006. Global flexion, local flexion, Hogan was a local flexing guy, it just wanted his arms around his waist, his hand, his hand path was around his pelvis. Make sense, so, this is where I was at years before where you got, and other people, and you’re seeing that more and more in sports.
Baseball Hitting Fundamentals: “You got to understand how the fascia and these trains all play because there’s layers upon layers in the body”
Lee Comeaux 10:59
You got to understand how the fascia and these trains all play because there’s layers upon layers in the body. While somebody listening to this may get a little bit as a parent, get nervous, but if you just leave it to pros and leave it to grip pressures, and you leave it to what’s my objective, all those other things do their job. Their job in hitting is to hit, you put this on the ball and how I taught her to do it because it tells me just like your brain tells you how to train anyone, mainly your kid.
Lee Comeaux 11:17
What we used to do was that here’s the deal, you’re going to get 100 looks tonight, you make 100 swings, wherever daddy throws it, you have to go put this bat on the ball. The minute you miss, we start over. If I threw it, if she had to jump and hit it, she had to jump and hit it, if she had to step over and hit it, I got her brain numb wrapped around what is the strike? I told her that ump you’re facing and how many times have we seen this?
Lee Comeaux 11:42
You got an ump calling strikes, here or at the ankles. We practiced in such a way that when the bat moved there was going to be a strike, whether you hit it or didn’t, you just initiated a strike. We just saw thousands upon thousands of not misses, and it got to where, but it became a game in the batting cage, I toss it or throw it harder, I thought it didn’t matter how I throw it behind my back. Her goal was no matter how it came at her, she was so focused on hitting it, so I throw it, top right corner, top left corner of the cage that’s got to where we would have to do that to kind of make it somewhat entertaining because she wasn’t missing.
Lee Comeaux 12:42
She was hitting it as hard as she wants then we got into it, barely hit it and hit, just to where it barely comes over my head, the batting cages and that what taught her all the anatomy trains in her body. It taught her control. How? What if you want to just bloop it up? What if you have one of those nights, you’re not feeling it and maybe all you need to do is get it out the outfield, and third base comes in and you win, I can’t tell you how many games she won like that.
Lee Comeaux 13:12
We did it and she did it successfully over and she got to where she could drop it into buckets, and we did it over and over. We had fun with it because the game was to hit just like the game is to throw the game has to catch. When that ends, she never hurt, that was pushing. I say pushing was the key to that, whenever we push, it’s very hard to hurt your back, whenever we pull, it’s doing what we have most of our injuries as a human.
Joey Myers 13:42
A couple things, and I love just listening to you talk and it goes into different baseball hitting fundamentals rabbit holes, you covered a lot of different things. Thing number one is swinging without pain. I just had last week, Monday, Tuesday, I had a gentleman come up from Ojai, California, which is down LA area and he came up 71 years old.
Joey Myers 14:07
He had contacted me over DM on Facebook and at first, I thought it was a hoax, and then he was legit. He’s like, “hey, what date? Tell me where to go? Give me the address.” He comes, 71 years old, we started swinging. He read my book, that was the thing, so he read my book, and then he’s like, “I love it, it makes sense”. He’s an attorney, international attorney.
Joey Myers 14:26
It made sense to him, a lot of the language he has read every book out there and a lot of people don’t know how to explain it. He comes we work on basically we call it neck pressure now. It’s the idea that the C and the T are creating tension, right that pressure. We took him from 51 miles an hour ball and speed off the tee, to 60 miles an hour within that first hour session.
Joey Myers 14:49
The one baseball hitting fundamentals thing when we talked about safety in the swing, was he took it he took a swing and he’s like, “oh my back” and I was like is it on the outside part of your back? Like your oblique, your external oblique? He said no, it’s the center and so I said, let’s do this, let’s do hollow.
Joey Myers 15:05
We call it the pinch, we take the belly button and the belt buckle, and we pinch those two points together, which is putting that flexion into the lower back and having swing and zero pain, no more pain. That’s number one, so maybe we could talk on that a little bit, but the other thing that you mentioned that I really love, that you gave me a huge idea back in the day, was you talked about Bustos, where she did a video where she had her bat, actually it was three tapes.
Lee Comeaux 15:31
It was somewhere blue, she had different videos, but the thing was pink. The one in her hitting where she hits the girl.
Joey Myers 15:40
Yes the target, so she had to hit, her girlfriend that was hitting with her was standing out, I think she was off the tee, she was standing out different places in the cage, and she’d have to not only hit the spot on the bat where she had taped there and I’ve done it in an ‘S’, I think maybe you had an answer something where there was like, maybe a half an inch, the actual tape itself, right?
Joey Myers 16:02
She hit it on one part of the tape, it could be this. the number one, number two or number three, and she had to hit their target that was out there, which was her buddy that she ended up hitting on her right back butt cheek and made it really hurt. But this idea that you talk about, that you don’t hear anybody talk about this, is hitting on a certain part of the barrel and hit a target, and you were saying with Goose is, it’s either hit it up there, hit it over there, it’s hit it in different spots, but also hit the part of the barrel. Those are two baseball hitting fundamentals things, both the safety of the swing that I’ve really learned from you and then the idea of changing targets and changing spots on the barrel.
Hitting for targets and areas on the barrel
Lee Comeaux 16:44
Correct. This is a manmade bat and a bat I’ve always preferred because of the way it’s made, and it has a lot of inertial value in it, but you take the measurements of the tool you’re using, you measure three quarters the length from the in you’re holding in this sweet spot right there. It’s a mathematical…it’s called center percussions. Now, where I started with her was, as I would put that, I made her start at the ball and go, with no wind up.
Lee Comeaux 17:24
For the people listening, you go to McKenzie Comeaux, M-A-C-K-E-N-Z-I-E Comeaux, C-O-M-E-A-U-X, she has a YouTube, 77 videos. There’s some of her hitting, but the main thing was, we start from here, we’re not ready to play, the minute we go, this thing lists tension, this about integrity of tension we need, we go, then it’s allowed. The same thing is when this lifts, that area lifts we go, and if I tell you, you’re about right here, and I tell you go left, you bet you got to be able to control this and go there.
Lee Comeaux 18:00
What it told her was, because when you’re in a game, you see the hole and you see the guy look at the pros, they’ll submit, the play offset…If you taught someone how to hit like that, and they shifted on you, and they left field wide open, you own them. Now, we got into what side of the ball to hit it, the left field wasn’t turned fast to hit a left field hit the outside quadrant, and that was just the deflection angle. That’s kind of where we went with it.
Lee Comeaux 18:34
It was a true game changer, and your anatomy trains. What I tell people is human bodies learn how much effort to put in something. It can go all out; McKenzie could lay a bunt this far off the plate every time. That’s controlling, that’s catching the ball with the bat, you want to catch it and drop, just take the inertia in and drop it.
Lee Comeaux 19:06
It’s actually fun when you do it, when you take the time to learn to do it, it’s just like golf. How to hit a fat chip on a fast green downhill because that’s the only shot you got. I see amateurs trying to spin it and they got no chip, no matter how much you spent, you got no chip, you should have fatted it, get it barely rolling, let the ground do the rest.
Lee Comeaux 19:27
That was kind of how we treated and she’s taking up golf so she’s really getting my analogies now because she’s gotten into golf at 19 but that’s anatomy trains, that’s the animal in the forest stalking that’s gotta turn it on. That’s human, humans got the same thing. We have been so joint focus for 200 years, structural focused. It’s just like tell people there’s a lining around the button, this is simple, there’s a lining sack around the bone that allows this arm. This looks goofy, but there are no biomechanical descriptions for that. They don’t know how that happens, if you ask somebody in biomechanics, what makes that go in those directions? They don’t know. Well, it’s that tissue, its fascia, it’s your ability to just think it and do it. That’s the beauty of it.
Joey Myers 20:21
What I love about what you bring to this, from the golf world, is precision, right? We’re talking about an industry, as you know, this baseball hitting fundamentals industry, baseball softball was more so baseball, but softball too, is this idea of hit the back, top third part of the cage, launch angles long, hit it hard, launch angles, launching and launching. It’s this push for aggressive swings all the time, where I think is lacking is the precision side and that’s where you come in.
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How to apply the “precision” golfing principle to hitting
Lee Comeaux 20:49
Here’s a challenge for everybody listening and follows you. I used to tell McKenzie, how easy can we swing at it? What you come to realize is the moment of contact between the two, when this bat touches the ball, like in golf, I told her, the moment I felt the ball touch the face, I could accelerate. That was something I always had and it’s just for that little bitty golf ball distance, same thing with a softball or baseball, but how easy can we go and still get this out the park? What was the bottom limit? What was the top limit?
Lee Comeaux 21:00
She learned some things like I’ve shared with you 45-degree launch angles, you can go very very slow, but if you have a 45 degree launch angle, that’s optimal projectile distance. All of a sudden, I don’t only remember bat speed, but just say, she could probably at about 35 miles an hour at the right launch angle, get it out the park, which isn’t a whole lot of bat speed, but you can’t quit on the hit, you got to drive, you got to create the inertia to get the ball out.
Lee Comeaux 22:02
She started understanding the differences. We’ve all hit a hard ball versus kind of hit a ball, it’s fast and quick, and it just had nothing. You see a lot of kids that make this contact the ball just kind of fizzes off of there. You put them on video, it looks like they just nailed the center of it, but then what happens is they kind of let go the grip pressure, they let go… they think it’s over with because they practice so hard to quit it at impact.
Lee Comeaux 22:04
We practice, that’s why I started impact through impact through, punch it, it’s what you do. Once you make contact, all the damage is done by keeping going catapult system, the catapult has got to keep, the catapult doesn’t quit. That thing is the slings or the ball way past the mechanical point. The cable still has it, once it all the way stretches forward, it launches it, it doesn’t let go when it passes the two prongs.
Lee Comeaux 22:59
It’s all about getting all the energy out and inertia out, that’s kind of how the anatomy trains, that’s how you save your back. It’s like I tell people, I hear it all the time, turn your hips, all your pelvis is doing is taking your lumbar spine. This is the back of my lumbar spine where your pelvis moves, and it just rotate. It’s what gives your lumbar spine move 45 degrees, because it only has one degree of motion.
Lee Comeaux 23:28
If I want my lumbar spine to look that way, my pelvis will move that way. It has nothing to do with power, it has everything to do with safe lumbar movement to have a lot of what looks like motion because the more motion you have, the better you are. You have to open up areas of joints and able to move through the joint, where golf dynamic x, where we’re trying to hold our pelvis still. Can I do that? Sure. That’s really on the short shot.
Lee Comeaux 24:02
I’m just trying to get it through the outfield… I tell people, everything we do is a catapult system, optimum human performance is a catapult system. No matter, we’re fishing, if we’re tennis’ing, whatever we’re doing, we’re trying to move an object with a stick or something outside of us. Here’s a term I’ll never hear but what I call it the right-angle feet.
Lee Comeaux 24:32
Right foot like this, left foot is going to be like that and it can be anywhere. Golf is no different. When I’m playing good golf, my right foot square, my left foot, flair it out. Here’s why, the minute you do this, the minute your footsteps. If you hit against a spine with feet like this and pelvis like this and hips like this, all the tension from all these diagonals changing, your ipsilateral is all going right to your lumbar.
Lee Comeaux 25:00
For all of you listening and go home tonight, open this foot up, and then turn. You take all the pressure off one side of your back, bye bye back pressure. If I go bye bye back pressure, guess what I have a spinal engine telling me how much do you want? How much can I give you? Your only limit?
Lee Comeaux 25:21
I’m asked, where does the power come from? I’ll give you a minute to say it or think it. The answer is simple, it’s your glands, your adrenals. All these glands you have a release this energy, that’s the days when I as a golfer or me as any athlete or anything, no matter what I’m doing, I have optimum power management and optimum power results for the given baseball hitting fundamentals situation.
Lee Comeaux 25:56
You can work out until the cows come home, but if those things are not moved, fluid moving and again, that’s why we curve the spine. The things I learned, when the spine curves, we hit certain buttons that help certain glands activate for us to be our best us. Our job is to learn how to, “I want to hit it out the park, but I really need to get this just over the second baseman or just out to the infield, because I need to score the guy on third, so we win the game”,
Lee Comeaux 26:24
I take the chance of hitting out of the park striking out, and that’s what my daughter got good at sending it on the ground, we practice trying to hit it and skip it off the earth as hard as possible. You know how many times she skipped it over second baseman head because she just practice beating up or over the pitcher’s head.
Lee Comeaux 26:44
You run out of things to do when all you’re worried about is making contact, we learn all these ways to control the contact to get a result, to get on base, to either score someone. We learned, we practice how to fly out to the right and left field to score somebody on third hit a deep, everybody thought, Oh, she flew out, but to her, I score the guy on third, or the lady on third. That was her job.
Lee Comeaux 27:08
That’s where you go with this once you learn, once you’re pain free, and once you can focus. You’re not worrying about these things you’re not worried about; I sit down for the next day. We never iced down. We got to have fun. We got to have a career that’s legendary around here.
Joey Myers 27:31
Yes, it was unbelievable. We talked about this idea of people, they are used to hitting .300, .400. They’re not used to hitting .600, .700, .800, right and one thing that came to mind when you’re talking about the lower back taking pressure off by taking that front foot and opening it up a little bit, is think about when at a bar, you have that barstool, you have the barstool, and then you have the little bar at the bottom for the foot. That was meant so that when you got your arms up on the bar, and these guys been there for hours drinking, talking, singing, and you’re standing for lengths of time with your feet like this, that little bar at the bottom there is for you to pick your foot up, put it down, and most of the time, it’s in that position.
Joey Myers 28:14
Another baseball hitting fundamentals scenario is you’re lying on the couch, watching TV, where you’re laying back, not laying, laying kind of prop down. You have both legs straight out this way, what you do when you start to feel your back getting tight, is you’ll bend the knee, and you’ll shift out this way and one side, you’ll bend the knee and go out the other way to take the valgus knee.
How to take pressure off the low back by flaring front toe out
Lee Comeaux 28:35
It’s because the bottom of your feet, now you get in the deep backline which starts right here on the forehead runs on top of your head, the bottom your feet. This is where people go, I get where people in golf were doing the spine and doing alignment squared because it’s based off of the deep backline.
Lee Comeaux 28:52
These are all things that God gave us as a gift to perform best but also to fix ourselves when we do ache and we do have pain. It’s just like my daughter came to me one day, I don’t know how long into this and she goes “Your femur head”. I’m like, “What do you mean your femur head?” I told her, your femur head is the reason your front foot is open, you got your femur head sitting here and you’re sitting here just like that, the pelvis and also one day you’re going to feel the same kind of slide move.
Lee Comeaux 29:24
What’s happening is people throwing their pelvis and hips are kind of all these femurs are getting. Everything’s getting all torn up. That’s when Nicklaus repaired his hip, that’s where people have bad hip injuries, or their hips get worn out because they’re trying to spin them and they’re getting all mangled and all sudden one day you feel it slide.
Lee Comeaux 29:43
I’m on the range one day, I felt mine, it’s a bulge, I get up pivoted around this joint, but that foot being that way, leave the pressure to where this thing can move and the ligaments around your femur head are probably the strongest you got, things just start. She went, I get it. I said, you get it now. And she’s like, yeah.
Lee Comeaux 30:08
Again, it’s because she was actually daydreaming once, she was at batting practice. She got bored of what to think about. She still felt it, there you have it. She was hurting a little bit. She had been at that point, I think some of the college coaches were trying to get her to do the hang back, throw it all out the last second. Whatever that means.
Joey Myers 30:33
Crazy.
Lee Comeaux 30:34
It’s like reverse catapult hit the brakes, work your ass off to go nowhere to get it. You went from barely swinging and hitting over the fence, to now you got to give it, you got to go work out just to get to the fence.
Joey Myers 30:50
It’s baseball hitting fundamentals with the emergency brake on.
Lee Comeaux 30:52
Very well put, it’s hitting in park. I like that.
Joey Myers 30:58
I know we can we can talk all day and I would love to listen to you all day, but I want to be respectful of your time. I got a hard stop here in a couple minutes, but I wanted to ask you, if there’s anywhere that you want people to go to find out a little bit more information on you, maybe there’s some people that will see this that are golfers that maybe want to look.
Lee Comeaux 31:16
If you can google me “Lee Comeaux golf” and I’ve got a basic little video on YouTube, now called “Making the Divot”. For golf, you got to keep the symbol just aim your divot, because it’s an aiming sport for what you do.
Lee Comeaux 31:35
The good thing is you don’t have to be an aimer, you can start keeping the lines and to be a .600 plus hitter, you start focusing on exact spots, and the Ichiros of the world, that’s what they did. That’s why they had the hits they had, and that’s who they were, and that’s the same people that come here.
Lee Comeaux 31:53
That’s what they all want to be. We all think we want to be the Barry Bonds with the homerun record, we really want to be an Ichiro with a long career. How many pitchers do you think, just when he came up, they’re like, I got no clue how to get about this guy? That’s what you want to be.
Joey Myers 32:12
The idea of them striking Ichiro out or even getting them out, didn’t even enter their mind, it was to minimize the damage or to get him to go someplace that they didn’t want him to go.
Lee Comeaux 32:25
Ichiro was a pure fascia. He said it a lot. You have to have soft muscle and you get that once you realize what soft muscle is, and when the fascia melts, and all this stuff is working in your favor, and you see it on high speed all the time, you will see the tissue in the arm just flapping around.
Lee Comeaux 32:45
That’s us in our best, that is always a high-end athlete you see it in and that’s why he had a cannon like he had. That’s why the guy could run this fast, this dude performed at a high-level catching, throwing and hitting. If you look at the complete package, and why because the guy obeyed his anatomy trains, he kept these squeezed.
Lee Comeaux 33:09
It’s the same thing I feed to my daughter, when you squeeze these three, the same thing happens to your feet and we become a supple leopard, like a lot of people talk about in… the older gentleman came to you and he learned it’s about, there’s so many blocks we put in our way because the way we just stand there really, and I like what you’re talking about with the head.
Joey Myers 33:35
Neck pressure.
Lee Comeaux 33:37
Golf is one where you see it in an opposite where they’re looking, a lot of people turn their head this way, so they go in a lot. What that is, is because their thoracic is trying to make the biggest motion possible and all the tissue connects around the head. If I turn this it allows me more, it allows me to turn my thoracic. That’s all it is.
Lee Comeaux 33:57
Unfortunately, it gets very confusing if you want to go this way. I’m more of a guy this way because I know I’m playing that’s where I’m going, I understand all this and I want a compact golf swing, so I turn mine this way and keeps it. It’s no different than baseball.
Joey Myers 34:14
Absolutely.
Lee Comeaux 34:17
I appreciate your time, I appreciate it.
Joey Myers 34:21
I love listening to you talk baseball hitting fundamentals, and I always learn something new. Tell Mackenzie AKA Goose, tell her we missed her and Merry Christmas to you guys out there in Texas and think about us in California because we need all the help we can get with our Governor.
Lee Comeaux 34:35
Big fan. I wish you the best of 2021, keep doing what you’re doing, I told you this a long time ago, your days are coming where you’re going to be the guy, they’re all going to be chasing you. Have a great Christmas, my friend.
Joey Myers 34:49
Thanks, brother. Keep up the good work yourself.
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Backspin Bat Tee Co-Founder Interview: If One Of The Best, Mike Trout, Is Giving Up An Average 20-mph Of Ball Exit Speed, How Much Do Mere Mortals Give Up Doing The Same Thing?
Here are the Backspin bat tee co-founder interview with Taylor Gardner topics that we discussed:
What do bat tee adjustments mean to you when it comes to talking to your hitters?
True or False: Hitters MUST straighten their front leg to be effective…
What if hitters used a more precision approach like golfers when operating between 90-degrees?
Instead of writing off the arm bar as it doesn’t work, why not ask how can it work?
Is there ever a time when ‘swing down’ or ‘barrel above the hands’ bat tee cues can work?
If one of the best, Mike Trout, is giving up 20-mph of ball exit speed, how much do mere mortals give up doing the same thing?
Where can people find more about you Backspin bat tee guys?
The following is the bat tee transcription of the video above. This is a sneak peak at the expert interviews we’ll be including in Volume-2 of the Swing Smarter book series. Enjoy!
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Oh, there’s the baby. You got that mixed up? I don’t think that’s supposed to go in your mouth.
Taylor Gardner 00:21
Probably should.
Joey Myers 00:24
Look at you.
Taylor Gardner 00:26
Yeah.
Joey Myers 00:27
Causing your parents so much so many sleepless nights.
Taylor Gardner 00:30
Yeah, momma needed a shower time and dad had an interview here.
Joey Myers 00:38
Double interview.
Taylor Gardner 00:40
Yeah. Oh my
Joey Myers 00:45
Look at that, first time I think we’ve done a zoom interview.
Taylor Gardner 00:49
Oh it has been working out, better adjust my camera?
Joey Myers 00:55
No, I think you’re good. What do you need to adjust?
Taylor Gardner 00:57
All I was going to bring it down a little bit. I think I always fall down.
Joey Myers 01:01
Yeah, I think you’re good. Okay. Are you ready? Let me do the official bat tee start. Hello and welcome to Swing Smarter Monthly Newsletter. This is your host Joey Myers from HittingPerformanceLab.com and probably for the half a dozenth interview. I have Taylor Gardner here from Backspin Bat Tee. Welcome to the show. Taylor looks like you brought a little friend.
Taylor Gardner 01:26
That’s right. Yes. Yeah. She has been influenced by any good or bad and…
Joey Myers 01:37
there. There we go. You froze for a little bit. Say it again? Say No. So, she’s been influenced by what?
Taylor Gardner 01:46
I said. No, we got we got a fresh template here. She hasn’t had any good or bad instruction to start working with this.
Joey Myers 01:54
Yeah, yeah. Tie the right arm behind your back and… is your brother? Is he lefty? Or is he righty?
Taylor Gardner 02:03
He’s a switch hitter. You can do both.
Joey Myers 02:05
He does both. But what about throwing? Is he a righty?
Taylor Gardner 02:07
He’s righty.
Joey Myers 02:09
Okay, cool. Well, hey, I wanted to get you on the on the other side of the screen here and wanted to talk about making bat tee adjustments. So that we could go into the hitting side we could go into the strategy side we can go into any different things. So, what do adjustments mean to you when it comes to talking to your hitters?
What do bat tee adjustments mean to you when it comes to talking to your hitters?
Taylor Gardner 02:30
The adjustment is, must be understood and adjustment is something if a hitter is already attempting to be on time, it’s really hard to make adjustments if you’re not in the time window to start with. If you’re going up there to hit and you’re just purely reacting your adjustments are also reacting maybe even twice as long or twice as late as they should be.
Taylor Gardner 02:56
Within the understanding that people were syncing up release point we have the timing window of the pitch coming in. Maybe we’re sitting on fastball and all sudden we a pitcher throws a changeup, and whether you recognize the spin or the speed or the trajectory angle, whether an off-speed pitch, what do you do?
Taylor Gardner 03:15
Well, if your plan was there to help you your approach is there to help you not hurt you, so within your plan or approach if you’re on time for fastball, and oh no it’s an off-speed pitch. What do you do? Well, easy answer is, you don’t stop your swing. I know we get told a lot of wait, let that curveball get a lot deeper. Now we’re talking about changing depths and it’s really hard to change depths of timing on the fly. So as instead of being reactive to making your adjustment proactive and making your adjustment one thing that my baby down actually brought a bat here to show you…
Joey Myers 03:55
Use the baby as a bat…how cute she is.
Taylor Gardner 04:02
One thing that we see a lot with hitters. He was left-handed here. I do apologize. Is they’re sideways, they’re pretty lined up with a pitcher in some fashion bat tee stance, and then we start to ride and stride as they start to witness that. Okay, this ball isn’t a perfect fastball down the middle. What do I do? Well, we see them not only continue to take their head and posture to the ball, but you see a lot of hitters start turn in and sit with the ball.
Taylor Gardner 04:33
As opposed to going uh oh, I’m a little early, let me pull out and then have to release my arms and hands to hopefully start to see hitters actually sit with that ball. Then because, you sit, any movement takes time. And if the plane is correct, you’re on time for the pitchers fastest pitch and then if you’re making an adjustment is to bite. This is where a lot of young hitters especially they don’t do a good job of buying time.
Taylor Gardner 05:00
They end up staying on their backside and opening up too soon and all they have left is like it with their own risk. And yeah, you can hit a ball and do that, and you probably get on base and feel good about yourself. But the faster you know that speed starts to go up and level and the more drastic change of off speed, you get a 90 mile an hour fastball and 80-mph changeup. That’s a little different than facing a 75 mile an hour fastball and 70 mile change-up.
Taylor Gardner 05:27
As a pitcher supposed to extend those timelines, adjustments and variables, the hitters have to as well. The ability to be ready for the fastest pitch and also be able to buy time while staying in a good posture position on the ball is something that we see really good hitters do and you know, quite frankly, amateur hitters don’t do as well. Oh, sure at some level. Yeah, won’t be a good fastball hitter. Every great hitter is known to be a great fastball hitter.
Taylor Gardner 05:55
If you’re looking off speed looking for that, that slow curveball every fast ball is going to beat you. On the timeline you got to be prepared for the pitches, pitchers fastest pitch as the fastest timeline. Therefore, your plan is there to help. Yeah, he’s going to be perfect every time, well of course not, it’s baseball. It’s tough. But at least the plan was in place to help you be on time for fastball and buy time for off speed.
Taylor Gardner 06:23
For example, this last weekend, my nephew, faced his first knuckleballer. 13 years old didn’t know this pitcher had a knuckleball it wasn’t his main pitch, so you know first at bat I don’t know hit a fastball for double, second a bat gets a strike or two on him a ball or two and then all the sudden, whack! He hits a single, steals second base eventually gets to third base and the coach at third goes, “good job Maverick you know you really sat well in your legs on that change up”, he goes “wasn’t a changeup coach, it was knuckleball”. He goes, “Oh, when did you realize it was a knuckleball?” “After I hit it!”
Taylor Gardner 06:59
It reminded me that he took a good plan to the plate, ready for fastball he happened to adjust instinctively to this crazy knuckleball, but it was more about controlling this contact depth. I’m not quitting on my swing. Did he sit more in his legs, sure. Did he have a locked out-front leg? No. But he found a way to keep his spinal engine and posture on the ball. By the time he pulled the trigger. Sure, the ball got a little deeper, he barreled it up, he got a good hit out of it. At the end of the day, it didn’t fool him, this random pitch that he really has never seen, didn’t make him react and freeze.
Taylor Gardner 07:36
It didn’t make him react it to slow down and touch it, his reaction was to stay on the ball and give it a chance. And it sounds easy to do until you start seeing a pitch come flying at your body. For us older coaches that aren’t playing anymore, I think sometimes we forget that. There’s a little fear involved. And so, a good plan leads to good adjustments. And sometimes knowing how to get over that fear or filter out your situation really helps that plan starts to stick together better.
Taylor Gardner 07:57
And therefore, those bat tee adjustments really become valuable. As far as other types of adjustments. And that was one type of sitting in your legs, other types of adjustments. We’ve seen Mike Trout sit in his legs; we’ve also seen him bend over a little more at his waist a little side tilt. That’s another way of buying time. Adjustments to me, in our world is a place to buy time, every movement takes time. But unless you’re ready to line your posture up for the ball on time to begin with, adjustments are just going to slow you down. You’ve got to make sure those adjustments are there to help you not hurt you.
Joey Myers 08:48
Well, you said a couple bat tee things that would blow a couple people’s minds they were listening to this… number one is sitting on your backside and swinging from that position number one, and number two, that you don’t have to straighten out your front leg that you can keep that bent. And I love that and that’s something that I’ve learned from you and your brother and Matty, Matty Nokes that the legs really set direction like the lower half basically sets directional force, it does contribute to some of the power.
Joey Myers 09:16
And we’ve learned discussions on that over the last couple of years saying you know, probably between 20 and 30%, it probably contributes to the power of the overall power thing. But the idea that you can use your knees bending your knees at front knee to adjust to pitch height like those are bat tee adjustments that we can make that if you’re from a train of thought that says you have to straighten it you have to brace that leg out, right, I mean that’s really not… We’re trying to like you said buy time.
True or False: Hitters MUST straighten their front leg to be effective
Taylor Gardner 09:46
Right. Speaking while the bracing the front leg, the front leg can obviously we can see it YouTube it, Google it. Now of course you can hit with a straight front leg and even sitting in your legs may still turn out to be a brace straightening front leg, you still bend your knee and still walk and brace into that front knee.
Taylor Gardner 10:06
But I think a lot of times as coaches and instructors that usually come to… an issue that I’ve seen come around is their teaching to push the leg straight, as opposed to letting the hip pull the leg straight. Pitchers do a really good job of this, they don’t just land in their front leg and then push straight up. Is their vertical ground force? Of course, there is.
Taylor Gardner 10:29
Now in hitting though, there may be little more of that vertical into horizontal ground force, it sounds funny to say, but you’re not just going to push up away from the ball every time. Sure, could you get away with it, of course, and there’s nothing wrong if you are on time and you get the barrel to it, great job. But like you like to say Joey, if it happens too much to ignore, I’ll just start paying attention.
Joey Myers 10:52
Yeah, and on that note, that was the one big bat tee thing that I pulled from you, we’ve been friends for probably over 6, 7, 8 years now, was that idea of staying sideways and keeping that back foot from completely turning over. Like a lot of coaches will say pivot that back foot, pivot that back foot, and meaning, that back heel will turn towards home plate. And it’ll continue to keep rotating. And so, I think we’ve developed almost a generation or two of hitters that are over rotating the lower half.
Joey Myers 11:23
And you say, using Matt Nokes’s lingo is stay sideways, stay sideways, I think is a great one. And to your point, or to our point that it happens too much to ignore, and you can’t just write it off. Some of our buddies in the past have said well, that hitter can do that because he XYZ that hitter can do that because it’s… no it happens if you take the top 100 hitters, 50 hitters, you’ll see half of them stay sideways and maybe the other half, get to this neutral with it. So that happens a little bit too often to be ignored.
Taylor Gardner 11:57
For anyone that’s listening, if you’ve ever played golf and if you haven’t fine taken a baseball bat take it slow, practice golf swing, go YouTube, Rory McElroy, Tiger Woods, anyone you want. Golfers have figured out how to stay sideways with their back foot. Now, their balls on the ground and it’s generally between them. Like ball being on a bat tee for hitters. They’re more allowed to buy but positions of contact with golf. However, you’re going to see baseball players do it too. But since the contact point in baseball can be further out front. Sure, you’re going to see that that back foot rotates a little more before contact. I get that told a lot. “Well, look at this hitter.”
Taylor Gardner 12:33
Yes, but look what happened the first 80% of his swing before contact, he was still sideways, he was still… now was he turning his shoulders, was he loading his core, the spiral engine. Sure, but the back foot was still sideways to hit, the back foot ends up becoming a bit of a rudder. I won’t even take that too literal. But you wouldn’t start with your back foot facing the catcher, you wouldn’t face with your back foot facing the pitcher. There’s a reason, it’s a natural position for the body.
Taylor Gardner 13:05
The ball is thrown in front of us and quite honestly, ball comes in and it is in front and to the side of us. If you’ve ever swung an axe, it makes sense to shift your weight and leverage up. That’s why we want to have a little more shift, not only for taking your head to the ball and be able to judge depth before moving very good and feeling your depth and putting a nice sense to it.
Taylor Gardner 13:34
But at the same time spinning against my back foot. Step on my dog… [laughs] spinning too soon. Now the ball is essentially to the side and behind us. Not that you can’t hit from here we opened up too soon. My swing’s wanting to go this way, I crossed my face this way, we want to cross our face into contact with the ball. Again, golfers understand this and their balls in front of them. They want to cross the face you don’t want to spin out and then cross their face too late that ends up turning into a slice and anyone who has played golf, probably vouch for that, my goodness I’m spinning off the ball. balls on never fixed.
Joey Myers 14:19
Well, and what I love the golf analogy is because in golf, you have a ridiculously small margin for error, you have we’re talking in hundreds of yards, not hundreds of feet and your little ball that’s got to get hit by this clubface and then the square center center contact with the clubface in the ball the straighter the ball is going to go. You can take that clubface and slightly like a couple of millimeters you can slightly pull it in like you’re going to hook it or slightly away like you’re going to slice it and those little, teeny millimeters by the end of that 200-yard journey is going to be way pull or slice.
Joey Myers 14:55
What I always tell my hitters, I say when we’re teaching this concept of staying sideways and keeping that back foot from over rotating is, we have to play almost like a golfer, where a golfer’s looking at one shot to the pin, I call it one degree of fair territory. And outside of that 359 degrees of foul territory, because in golf, the objective is the least number of strokes to get it in the hole. In baseball, of course, we have 90 degrees to play with, but we want to act like we’re doing like golf, we want to act like there is a smaller margin, and we have to operate within that smaller bat tee margin, right?
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What if hitters used a more precision bat tee approach like golfers when operating between 90-degrees?
Taylor Gardner 15:29
Along those lines, that it’s incredible you say that because the whole outside pitches, let it get deep, inside pitchers you’re magically allowed to pull for some reason, we’re talking about different depths there. Where in golf, obviously, the ball’s not moving, but to their benefit, they’re more precise, they have time to get their stance set up, time to adjust their face angle. So yes, maybe we don’t have that luxury in baseball, but we do have the luxury of knowing our contact depth.
Taylor Gardner 15:58
Do I like hitting the ball more? You know, some hitters like hitting the ball more off their front hip, some even further out front, some like hitting it a little deeper, more or middle of the other ball, whatever it is that you are super comfortable. That’s your decision. That’s what you’re going to battle with the best. And, again, based on your timeline. I have a lot of young hitters, and we constantly have to work on reminding them. Where is your preferred contact?
Taylor Gardner 16:29
And not to make them look like robots, but you’ll see them when uh, I don’t know, maybe like right there or up here. It’s like, Oh, you got to know, if you don’t know, you’re guessing, like your close, good job of being on time. We want to be on time with our contact point. This is a lot more precise. And as you know, aim small miss small, it’s may not always show up in baseball, maybe you had a day where you didn’t hit well. But you know what my plan was good. My adjustments were sound. And maybe I was just a little early or tad late, whatever that may be over under the ball.
Taylor Gardner 17:06
But you can sleep well at night knowing, man I had it at 99% today. And you don’t realize how much you haven’t figured out. You start thinking about more precision, besides movements. And then suddenly you go out three years ago, I was going to battle with a 50%. efficiency. That shocks a lot of hitters and I really do think a lot of good college players get to pro ball and maybe it doesn’t pan out for whatever reason.
Taylor Gardner 17:32
I think a lot of them whether they can say it or not verbiage that happens to a lot of if they get exposed, we get told at every level of baseball, you better swing faster Jerry, you better figure out how to get that faster pitching, you better, have quicker hands, whatever. Of course, we must make those adjustments because we’re being exposed. What if we got ahead of that being exposed?
Taylor Gardner 17:56
I don’t know if you saw the video that I posted on the baseball Illuminati page. I was actually crow hopping of doing run and guns, a nine-year-old ballplayer shuffle stepping out 25 feet in front of them throwing the ball 60-mph our reaction time stupid fast. So never seen anything that fast in their lives. As far as timing wise. And you know what he did? It took him a bit. He filtered it out. He figured out when to go when to shift, how to track the ball.
Taylor Gardner 18:26
And yeah, that ball was getting to him quicker than any pitch he’s ever going to see in baseball. And he started barreling balls up. Our brain’s a supercomputer y’all know that problem is if that supercomputer is putting in the wrong formula, it’s still going to, there’s still going to be a glitch. You still have to help it out.
Joey Myers 18:44
Shoot, I’d even go another step with the wrong formula and just saying that it’s becoming impossible, or you hear that from coaches? Well, that’s impossible, that’s not going to happen, or that’s not reality, or it’s not going to happen. And instead of saying that something’s not possible, why not ask why? or How can it be possible, right? We’ve talked about the front arm shape and trying to get that thing extended out. Whereas everybody in their mother seems to teach this bent front arm, right.
Joey Myers 19:13
The question that I always get when I put that post out there, people will go well, you know, I’ve tried to test it out and beer league softball and works there, but it doesn’t work in the big leagues and whatnot. And if you go way back, Joe DiMaggio and Hank Aaron, Ted Williams, Babe Ruth, all those guys locked out. So instead of saying, oh, that doesn’t work, today’s pitchers throw too hard and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Why not ask how can we make that work? Yes. How does that work? Right?
Instead of writing off the arm bar as it doesn’t work, why not ask how can it work?
Taylor Gardner 19:42
What if we made 90 miles an hour feel slower? Nothing’s any easier to hit. But what if? What if it wasn’t impossible. And clearly, it’s not, people do it every day. It’s not impossible. I’d like to say maybe the way we’re rationalizing it and maybe even practicing. Maybe we’re not doing our own job as a baseball coach, making, maybe it’s 75 miles. Now, if you’re struggling, maybe that’s what it is, whatever it is get ahead of that curve, not that you’re going to just start jacking home runs. But don’t be late. There’s no excuse for being late. There’s no excuse for not filtering out and understanding your environment.
Taylor Gardner 20:19
Maybe you don’t get to face a live picture every day or practice, that’s fair. I’m sure you have your work cut out for ya. But there’s no reason to get your doors blown off, when you have all of the potential to be as early as you want. Once you’re late, once the ball gets behind your timeline, and it gets behind your back. Pitcher starts in front of us. We as hitters, let ourselves be late. Maybe because we’re trying to do some crazy swing, like, oh, let it get deep and snap it or something, I don’t know.
Taylor Gardner 20:50
But whatever it may be, again, kind of back to the approach and those adjustments. Got to clean that up. And maybe you got to study more time. Maybe you got to study more spinal engine springy fascia and figure out where to get your running position. To your arm bar point… I think a lot of… uh oh, we have a wandering baby…
Joey Myers 21:13
Wait till she starts walking…
Taylor Gardner 21:15
I know I can’t wait! I understand folding your levers and engaging muscles, getting correct shapes. That makes sense. But when you see arm bar, and it starts to walk out, or to do slow motion. Yeah, looks funky in slow motion to arm bar. When you engage the body and it starts out, it starts to feel a little more natural golfers do the same thing. Luckily for us that in golf, you get to start with it extended and just connected to your body from there.
Taylor Gardner 21:55
But this bat is heavy, I completely understand why people want to hold it close to their body, it is rational. And it’s still close to the body. It’s not like we’re arm barring out here. If you’re still arm barring across our core, this bat is behind you, want lag and you want leverage, leverage, and just loose and lever sometimes, your hands are so close to your body. And even so close this way to the middle of your body. By the time you do a swing, yeah, you’re getting the barrel off your foot. And it may be a strong position depending upon position.
Taylor Gardner 22:34
But if I never got the benefit of the lag, and a clearing, and time to speed up the bat, it takes time to speed up the bat. This is not an instantaneous thing. I know this swing only takes like point two seconds; I get it. That’s slow through the world of everything happening, there is plenty of time and so that hand, grips on the bat. For most people they’re bottom hand is the weaker hand. Not doing anything left-handed if I have to. But you want your dominant arm to do his job.
Taylor Gardner 23:09
Not that you have to do it all with a dominant arm. But you certainly don’t want your weaker arm to be your dominant arm. Now, how do you get them in position? Well, as you get a swing, if it happens to lock out, you’re getting the benefit of lag and leverage. How is that wrong? If I understand timing, if I understand off your positions and swing plane. And armbar is nothing in the scheme of arguments. I’m linked into the lever. If I do it correctly, then of course, I have more leverage and more bat speed.
Taylor Gardner 23:42
But bat speed takes time. And so, when I see a lot of kids, they start here and the lever pull even more on their hands get across the face really soon, elbows way behind their hand and not even close to be slotted. And next thing you know, you’re chopping down or they slice it, and more important, their swing radius and swing arc may only go so far. Versus if I clear, I can get a further reach. And it’d be right within my wheelhouse of comfortability.
Joey Myers 24:13
If we go back to your contact points, right, knowing what your contact points are. When we work with our hitters on what we call our horizontal approach, or our line-to-line approach. Being able to hit the ball the other way, pull it, and go up the middle things like that. We talked about that there are two main things to be aware of… one is what you’ve already said is your contact point. But number two is when that barrel enters the hitting zone.
Joey Myers 24:38
And it’s going to be different for we call middle in and middle away. It’s going to be different. So middle away and middle down. That snapping early getting the barrel in the zone early makes sense. It’s a great middle down of the strike zone middle away approach. But when it comes to middle in the middle up, it doesn’t make sense, and I use those bad cues that I thought were bad about four years ago. Swing down, barrel above the ball, we do use those but only for middle in, middle up.
Is there ever a time when ‘swing down’ or ‘barrel above the hands’ cues can work?
Taylor Gardner 25:05
But right. Speaking along those lines… Yes, have you ever had a kid trying out a new baseball bat and Oh man, he’s struggling with the weight or it was too long for him. But that’s some of the stuff you’ve been told, just remember that when this bat is laying horizontal, is heavier, as far as where the balance is. There’s a reason we stack the barrel. And there’s a reason we hold this bat up, you can hold it with one finger.
Taylor Gardner 25:34
That’s how life, if you will, work how to control the bat, Matt Nokes talks about this, why, the barrel above the hands, it’s taken me a while, the feel can be down, in fact there is a down move in the swing, hold your posture. It’s called your head. The balls is below you. Yes, we want to swing on plane. Of course. But how you get to that barrel entering the zone. And before it starts that actual upswing? That is paramount.
Taylor Gardner 26:07
That also was still wrong with the down early method. Yeah, you’ve got there. But did you give up timing, to get to position at contact. Did you give up adjustments, because your only move is to get there. If you were able to just keep your hands and be ready for that high and inside pitch, as Perry husband would say we get to focus on EV tunnels.
Taylor Gardner 26:34
If I’m ready for that, then great. And then I can always adjust if I need to. Wait adjustment patterns, that kind of dynamic plan. Not everyone would agree with me on this, but just from a third party perspective, if the high and inside pitch is the ball that we have to get the barrel out there quickest to, it makes sense to me to be on time with that and adjust down and away with that, because you have more time or space, ball is further away from me to do so, obviously, you get in the baseball stuffs like, well, if you’re looking middle middle, and then that gets tougher if you’re looking away if you’re looking wherever.
Taylor Gardner 27:19
I don’t want to get into the approach part of it. But it just makes sense to me that you can practice, play around practicing with looking high and in, get that pitch locked in, and then we’ll work it down to middle middle, get that adjustment pattern locked in. Maybe for some people, it’s not so much that they have to change their approach, maybe they just need to be comfortable getting to all these pitches vertically, you might not have to worry about what my timing is good, I’m swinging at the right pitches, just getting jammed a lot on high.
Taylor Gardner 27:51
Well, maybe it’s just because you’re dumping your barrel too soon. It’s okay, you got to find where that issue is, and not fight it. But again, let your plan help you get there. The barrel above the hands is a great plan. It helps me already be ready for that movement pattern… sure, maybe you get to that pitch well maybe you’re facing speeds you can handle and you’re struggling with low and away. So maybe you do have to think about releasing that barrel sooner. Okay, nothing wrong with that.
Taylor Gardner 28:23
I would give everyone hesitation to just go out and put out a YouTube video saying this is the one and only way, of course it’s not. But we must understand all of it so that when you hear someone say something, to filter through what they’re saying, you’ll see why he’s doing it, that makes sense. When you come out and some of these instructors say just one swing plane for every pitch. And if I just wait longer than I can see it longer. We know that’s not exactly be true. Eyes don’t see the ball much longer just because we’re not swinging.
If one of the best, Mike Trout, is giving up 20-mph of ball exit speed, how much do mere mortals give up doing the same thing?
Joey Myers 28:56
Well and what’s also interesting is what the actual hitting operating system is when you can watch somebody, when you have been around the block and you’ve seen a lot of these different teachings, you can see what their main operating system is. And I know you and I were similar in this and we want to maintain high ball exit speeds.
Joey Myers 29:16
When you get a hitting guy that’s talking about a certain thing like hey, we need to get that at high and inside pitch with the bend in the front arm we need to get there, well we know that Perry Husband said Mike Trout, one of the best in the world will go down is one of the best top five probably, ever top five top 10 and down and away average ball exit speed is 101 miles an hour, not his top out but his average. And that’s where he’s locked out with that elbow at contact.
Joey Myers 29:45
And then at up and in, he’s reduced to a high school baseball player at 80 to 83 miles an hour. So he’s losing almost around 20 miles an hour ball exit speed that’s 80 feet. That’s 80 feet of batted ball distance that he’s giving up by looking away and adjusting in. Well, some people go well, that’s fine. But here’s the deal. And this is what I tell my players I say, Mike Trout is a once in a lifetime player. He’s just one of those people that we will look back on when he’s done with his career. And we will say he’s one of the best. One of the best ever is giving up 20 miles an hour ball exit speed.
Joey Myers 29:50
20 miles an hour.
Joey Myers 30:24
You know what the amateurs are probably giving up. 30-35 miles an hour ball exit speed? He’s one of the best he can get away with it. You’re going to be given up a lot more.
Taylor Gardner 30:34
Yeah. I can’t remember if it was you or someone else had brought to my attention. It was before COVID happened. I think it was the baseball season before. And they asked, who hit their highest exit speed most often? Try and word that correctly. And I was like, Oh, I don’t know. And there’s Jose Altuve. And Aaron Judge. I was like, oh, okay, wow, two different types of hitter’s sizes body length. They said, Oh, you know how often they hit their hardest exit speeds?
Taylor Gardner 31:06
And at first, I’m like, Oh, these big leaguers? Oh, man, I bet 20% of their hits or they’re popping out near their top exit speeds. It was less than 2%. Wow, less than 2% of all of their hits, on miss hits in the realm of hitting is as hard as you can. What does that mean, though? Does that mean maybe they’re slowing their swing down and touching the ball? No, I don’t think so. And in my opinion, obviously get fooled on some pitches. Okay, fine.
Taylor Gardner 31:33
But I think most of their base hits that they reported, I think their miss hits are that powerful. And once you start to realize that homeruns are the best result, okay, but maybe your best result is a hard line shot, single or double, whatever. However hard you get whatever type of hit is your hardest hit, which for most people is a low launch angle, I dunno, maybe 0-5, maybe 10 degrees. And then that makes sense. Balls coming down about 5, 7, 8 degrees.
Taylor Gardner 32:03
And you can imagine that plane, you’re going to give up exit speed when you raise or lower your launch angle. And I see a lot of people don’t understand that. Oh, no. My hardest hits home runs. Not exactly. I want to say the highest ball ever recorded was a ground ball. Double play. It’s okay. It’s okay that if your exit speed fluctuates, based on how well you struck that ball for a single, double, triple based on how high or low you hit it, that’s fine. And you want to start tightening those windows up.
Taylor Gardner 32:33
But Backspin tee, you know Taylor, Joey, you can’t control your launch angles, not saying you can control your launch angles. It’s just like I’m not saying you can even hit why I’m saying though, is you can work on the precision of contact and work on your precision posture and swing plane. And when it lines up, you smoke a ball at the pitcher’s head, you did your job. And when the next at-bat, it probably feels the same and you hit a homerun, guess what you did your job. You hit the ball far. But more importantly, your plan gave you the ability to fall as hard as potentially could that swing.
Taylor Gardner 33:08
And that’s Oh man, how many young kids have you seen? You throw them one change-up… They’re crushing balls… you throw them one change up. And then the next 10 swings are crap. They just can’t find it… it just ruins their world. It’s like, oh, man, you got to filter that out. Trust the plan and get to the next pitch. It’s okay.
Joey Myers 33:29
Yeah, exactly. That’s crazy. Yeah, that’s a good one to end on. And that’s another call for another day. I want to be respectful of your time because you’ve got a little one that’s down there. And she’s been great. By the way.
Taylor Gardner 33:40
She’s sleeping now.
Joey Myers 33:41
She’s asleep. Yeah, she’s asleep. I’m talking too loudly. I’m talking to you loudly. But hey, I want to let you get back to the baby and get back to the family. hopefully get some sleep. Maybe she’ll take take a nap with her. But hey, where can people find you? socials, website, any kind of deals that you got going on right now? Go ahead. And…
Where can people find more about you guys?
Taylor Gardner 34:04
Yes, so find us on Google backspin bat tee to find backspintee.com, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, we have a 20% off code at the moment. If you use the code BATBROS. For those of you that follow the baseball bat pros, I’m very good friends with them. They are great people Bill Taylor and them and they’re amazing people. But you’re also going to find our bat tee in Dick’s Sporting Goods here soon. So be on the lookout.
Taylor Gardner 34:28
Hopefully, Academy is a follow that as well for those that maybe that’s closer to here. And we’re trying hard to get Mark word shields and some other big retail stores. But the Dick’s Sporting Goods we’re shipping that out here in a couple days. Extremely excited to make that next jump to the big retail because we’ve done so well on the individual bat tee sale and it’s time to make that move.
Joey Myers 34:50
Yeah, congratulations, buddy. I’ve been with you for a lot of this bat tee journey. I think we jumped on probably we start building our relationship maybe your second year I think you guys are. So, so I’m just excited for you guys. And I know you guys have been just like all of us been through our ups and downs and stuff and it sounds like you guys are starting to starting to rise again. So yeah,
Taylor Gardner 35:12
Yeah, it all started with Joey Myers experiment video, my bat tee versus the other tee, and we didn’t know each other so you have to watch that video.
Joey Myers 35:20
Again. See how they turned out? Yeah, it was in a very bias thing, I was probably, we had run into each other a couple times. We talked on the phone maybe once or twice and I was like, you know what, let’s try this out. Let’s do a bat tee experiment on it. I think it turned out well for you guys.
Taylor Gardner 35:34
Yeah, I think well back to the precision of contact, just changing that visual. You had a more funnel effect with the Backspin Bat Tee, and with the traditional tee, it was a little more scattered and it just makes you wonder, not promoting my bat tee over another tee… Tee just are you working on your precision and in your vision obviously has a lot to do with that so, pick up a Backspin Bat Tee, give it a shot, if you don’t like don’t like it, then I’ll give you your money back. Yeah, definitely.
Joey Myers 36:01
Right. Then percent off and you get 20% BATBROS. B-A-T-B-R-O-S, and that’s all caps, correct? Cool. All right, brother. Well, thanks. Keep up the good bat tee work. Congrats on everything and congrats on the little girl. My first time seeing her.
Taylor Gardner 36:13
Thank you bud.
Joey Myers 36:14
Alright brother. Take care of yourself.
Taylor Gardner 36:16
Have a good one.
Joey Myers 36:17
Have a good Easter.
Taylor Gardner 36:18
Thank you.
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https://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/bat-tee-e1617902685923.png281500Joey Myershttps://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/hitting-performance-labs_c90c0362088ef1d3d528f3078f4f8ac1-300x75.pngJoey Myers2021-04-08 17:31:572021-04-08 18:14:29Bat Tee Co-Founder: How To Make Adjustments [VIDEO]
Athletic Performance Training Interview With Jeremy Frisch: Is It Smart To Shut Down Overhead Shoulder Development?
Here’s what we go over in the athletic performance training interview with Jeremy Frisch:
What do you feel the biggest mistake is when those kids are being trained by strength and conditioning coaches?
What do you think about something like that, where you’re totally shut down any overhead shoulder development for baseball, softball players?
When you do an athletic performance training evaluation of a hang, what do you look at? How long if a player is poor in that, versus is good in that? How long can they hang for?
When you get a kid like that a high school, junior high school on up, what do you do with that kid? Do you have to go back in
time, work that out? And how long does that usually take?
“…you had them wrestling or something similar?”
Are you looking to do some franchising or something like that, to where people can have access to that around?
Is there a certain athletic performance training formula like maybe the four or five things that you look for that we make sure in one hour that we’re getting done?
Where can people find more about you? And so that’s number one. And two, are there anything new? Any kind of projects you’re working on right now?
Any other parting thoughts before we go?
Here’s the athletic performance training video transcription… (estimated reading time is about 30-minutes)
Joey Myers
Hello and welcome to Swing Smarter Monthly Newsletter or Newsletter Monthly, I say it both ways. This is your host Joey Myers from hittingperformancelab.com and I have the honor today, finally, to get Jeremy Frisch and it’s Frisch, right? Not Frisch. I have Jeremy Frisch on with me. He is the owner of Achieve Performance Training.
.net. Okay, cool. Then it reroutes? The big thing Jeremy is a big, like, if you go onto his Twitter is @JeremyFrisch and Frisch spelled F-R-I-S-C-H. If you go on there, and his Twitter says, strength conditioning, long term athletic development, which we’ll be talking a lot about in this call. He’s a physical education youth football coach at Clinton High.
Joey Myers
I see that, I think he’s actually out though, I know you’re at the elementary school, huh? Elementary, that’s where all your training is?
Jeremy Frisch
Yes.
Joey Myers
Clinton High, Bridgeton Academy, looks like Worchester State University. So welcome to the show, Mr. Jeremy.
Jeremy Frisch
Fire it up. I’ve been a big fan for a long time and read your books and your live drive baseball package that I bought and watch those videos. This is exciting for me.
Joey Myers
What I love, is the very thing that you do to help kids get into, is the biggest component i think that is not put in or at least it’s put in wrong, it’s plugged in wrong. My first question to you is, what do you feel on the strength conditioning side with the kids that you’re talking about? Say, maybe through elementary school? What do you feel the biggest mistake is when those kids are being trained by strength and conditioning coaches?
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What do you feel the biggest athletic performance training mistake is when those kids are being trained by strength and conditioning coaches?
Jeremy Frisch
I think over the years, you got athletic performance training started up with professional and college level, and it’s trickled down and it went through the high school and then and now it’s at the middle school. And I think with private facilities, people try to make money so they’ll have some type of like, kids’ program, right? And what happens is that, I think a lot of facilities may not have the experience of working with kids, so they just default to what they know.
Jeremy Frisch
They’ll put on training programs that are made, probably more for adults, than for kids. They sort of watered down a little bit, and try to make them kid friendly, but they’re really not. You know, what I mean? The elementary school age, what we’re really talking about is physical education, right? And we want to get those kids to be able to move around as much as possible.
Jeremy Frisch
I think the most important part of that is you could say move around a lot. And you can get them to do jumping jacks, and hops and stuff like that, and all that stuff’s great. But to get them in an environment where they have to think and react and move, and that’s why that age, games are the best, right? You get them in an environment, playing tag, or chasing each other things like that, or playing dodge-ball, those type of things develop kinesthetic awareness, they develop spatial awareness, they develop their ability to track with your eyes, which talking about baseball, right?
Jeremy Frisch
I mean, that’s the name of the game right there. And so those things lead to, being able to track not only is awesome for baseball and other sports, but it’s also awesome for reading, right? Because we all know we need that, too. Any activity that allows us to track a ball or track a person, or be able to have to react to a ball or a person or auditory signal or anything where we have to react to something in front of us. It’s probably the best thing that you can give to a child that age.
Jeremy Frisch
The other thing that they really need to be able to do, is to be able to handle their own body weight. And like people think about that it’s like, “Ah! We’re going to get them to do pushups and squats and lunges and stuff.” And it’s not that. It’s more like can they climb up a tree? Or can they climb on a bar and hang? Can they do a forward roll? Can they bear crawl? You know what I mean? Can they jump off a box and land without totally collapsing and hitting the ground? You know, what I mean?
Jeremy Frisch
When I was a kid, we used to jump off stuff all the time. You know what I mean? And we did it in like a play type atmosphere, but those type of environments really developed the athleticism, and we didn’t even know it. You know what I mean?
Joey Myers
Right. And, obviously in baseball, we’re talking, hitting and things like that, but throwing and one of the things that I thought, I didn’t know really much in junior senior year of college coming out, but one of the athletic performance training programs I think was University of Texas, it just won the College World Series. I think that was my junior year and then my senior year, their strength conditioning program almost got rolled out to every D1 all over the country.
Joey Myers
And one of the things that they did not do was anything over shoulder, no vertical shoulder, anything. We weren’t allowed to do any vertical shoulder stuff. And to me at the time, I remember thinking to myself, wait a minute, don’t you need to be strong in every position possible? I understand that we’re overhand a lot. We’re doing a lot of overhand throwing and stuff. But what’s your opinion? Or what do you think about something like that, where you’re totally shut down any overhead shoulder development for baseball, softball players?
What do you think about something like that, where you’re totally shut down any overhead shoulder development for baseball, softball players?
Jeremy Frisch
Yeah. The old saying, if you don’t use it, you lose it. You know what I mean? You’re asking these guys to pitch and they’re going through an extreme range of motion at a very high velocity. You better be strong to be able to do that, you better be strong when you start doing it. And I think when we’re talking about kids, there’s probably thousands and thousands of kids across the country that pitch every weekend, probably can’t hold himself up, like hanging from a bar for more than 30 seconds.
Jeremy Frisch
They don’t have the grip strength in the hand, they don’t have the strength in the shoulder to be able to hang, to hold themselves there. But you’re asking them to pitch a ball as hard as they can, or swing a bat, as hard as they can. I think when you look at it that way, too, it’s no wonder that I think some guys have trouble teaching kids how to hit or how to pitch because the physical abilities aren’t there. Right? The physical abilities aren’t there, to be able to teach them how to swing a bat fast, or how to throw hard.
Jeremy Frisch
I think there’s needs to be a foundational level of strength for kids before they actually get into their first few years of playing sports. I’m a huge fan of hanging or pull ups or climbing all that stuff for kids is awesome. And I test because my kids play baseball, so some of their friends come in, and we get kids from the surrounding area that are supposedly really good players. And the first thing I test like, how long can they hang from a bar? And it tells me right away what they got going on up top.
Jeremy Frisch
It’s a really good sign, obviously hitting and pitching and throwing, and a lot of that comes from the forces through the ground, too. But it’s important that their shoulders are strong, scapula is strong, has good range of motion. I’m a huge fan of when those kids start to hit like their tween years, like the 11, 12, 13-year-olds, we do tons of one arm dumbbell presses, we’ll do stuff where they’ll hold the dumbbell overhead and walk. I’m a huge fan of that stuff. Huge fan.
Jeremy Frisch
And for power development, we do a lot of medicine balls, most kids will throw medicine balls between probably four pounds to eight pounds, 10 pounds, but we have these medicine balls that are 15, 20, 25, 30 pounds, and we do a lot of vertical throws with them. The kids are going to do a push press when they launch the ball in the air. And will let it go and hit the ground, and they’ll repeat. We do a lot of that stuff. So yeah, I’m a big fan of trying to get as strong as you can through a complete range of motion.
Joey Myers
I love that. You mentioned the hang. When you do an athletic performance training evaluation of a hang, what do you look at? How long if a player is poor in that, versus is good in that? How long can they hang for?
When you do an athletic performance training evaluation of a hang, what do you look at? How long if a player is poor in that, versus is good in that? How long can they hang for?
Jeremy Frisch
I want to see the base level, like 30 seconds. I remember that summer, I had like three or four kids that were between the ages of 11 and 12. And thought they were, and these kids play a lot of baseball, and they’re pretty good. But they were struggling at 30 seconds. But you know what the great thing is, is if you practice that every day or every other day, you could get really, really friggin good at it. It doesn’t take a long time to get stronger. And I use that as proof for the kids like look at, if you work at this, just like swinging a bat and pitching a ball…
Jeremy Frisch
You work at this every week or every day you’re in here, you’re going to get better and we got kids that went from like barely getting 30 seconds to well over a minute. It’s a huge part of my program when I first have kids that come in to my facility and I love the younger kids, not only just hanging but get them to like shimmy across the bars, back and forth where they have to sort of like navigate across the bars. My kids, I set up years ago, and they’re still in there, they’re like the gymnastic rings like monkey rings, so they have to swing from ring the ring go all the way down the rack and back.
Jeremy Frisch
I tell you, I think it’s great not only for shoulder strength, but grip strength as well. And I think that’s another thing that so many baseball players, I think leave on the table is grip strength. I mean, you’re literally holding a bat. The bat is in your hands, right? And everyone overlooks grip strength. You have so many nerves in your hands, and it connects all the way up into your shoulder. And I think that’s another thing that’s totally overlooked in a lot of training programs is grip strength, you know?
Joey Myers
You know what’s crazy is that people now have to pay strength conditioning people, athletic performance training yodas like yourself to do this kind of stuff instead of like you and I, when we were younger, we went to the playground, and we did all the monkey ring stuff and all that. And now we have to pay a Yoda like yourself now in order to get that kind of training.
Jeremy Frisch
Yeah. And I think too, if you do it early, like my son, my oldest is 13. He’s a big kid. He grew up got six inches over, he hit his growth spurt over COVID. And he’s just sprouted up. And he’s not skinny. He’s pretty solid kid. Right? When he was little, we did rope climbs all the time. He used to climb that rope all the time. And I swear, even though he’s grown a lot, developing that grip strength and shoulder strength when he was that age, allows him to be able to still do chin ups at his size, and stuff.
Jeremy Frisch
I feel like he developed that strength when he was younger. And now that he’s gotten older, even though he’s grown, he’s been able to hold on to it, because he’s trained through that time period. And he’s able to do those things. I think for younger kids, it’s just huge to be able to get… and it’s fun, right? That stuff is fun. We’re not like making them do one arm dumbbell rows, and like SCAP pull ups, we’re not doing corrective exercises. That gets fun, you’re climbing on bars, you’re hanging, you’re trying to get from ring to ring, it’s like you’re playing but you’re training at the same time. I think it’s huge.
Joey Myers
That kind of stuff in the gym, the monkey bars, and the whole gymnasium type of thing in the parks that we play in, it was tag, we were walking on, like I see your kids doing walking on little, whether they’re beams that are above the ground, or you’re having to balance, you’re having to, all this kind of stuff. And that’s what I really like.
Joey Myers
One of the athletic performance training questions I actually wanted to ask you, you did the strength conditioning episodes on your site in the about section, like bottom third of the page, and they were talking about some things they asked you about the older kids that you get, whether they’re high school, maybe even college guys that come back, or maybe just started to work with you. And that there were some developmental holes in their past. When you get a kid like that a high school, junior high school on up, what do you do with that kid? Do you have to go back in time, work that out? And how long does that usually take?
When you get a kid like that a high school, junior high school on up, what do you do with that kid? Do you have to go back in time, work that out? And how long does that usually take?
Jeremy Frisch
That was a big change for me with my programming. And when I really started working with the kids and realize like, these are the things that kids need. And these are the things that will help them to develop to be a better athlete. I sort of took that idea and morphed it into using it with the older kids. And the idea came, well, let’s try to fill in these developmental holes with these kids during their warm up period. Right?
Jeremy Frisch
10 minutes a day, 15 minutes, they’ll come in, we’ll do a little bit of crawling to work core strength and stability of the shoulder. Because we know that’s good, it’s a little bit more structured. It doesn’t look as fun as the kids do it. But it would be like, alright, we’re going to do 50 yards of total crawling, broken up into small parts. We’re going to do some foundational… we might do hanging, we might have them use a bar, where they’re going to work on their typical strength exercises. Just to get them in the right positions to be able to do a squat or bench press or shoulder press, whatever.
Jeremy Frisch
We’ll do a lot of stuff on the balance beams. We’ll get them walking sideways on a balance beam, maybe doing a low lunge on a balance beam. We’ll get a medicine ball in their hands and get them throwing the ball different ways. That’s another big one, like just side throws, overhead throw, slams to the ground, get them in circuits like that, so they get to move their body through a bunch of different ranges of motion, directions and stuff.
Jeremy Frisch
Stuff they’ve never been used to. And for me, that’s where I fill in those developmental holes. We use the warmup period to go back and maybe touch on the things that they may not have developed when they were younger.
Joey Myers
Correct me if I’m wrong, I think I’ve seen an athletic performance training video on your Twitter before, where you had them wrestling, or some sort of wrestling. I know you guys can roll out the wrestling mats out in the hall I think you were saying, and then you had them wrestling or something similar?
“…you had them wrestling or something similar?”
Jeremy Frisch
Yeah, so sometimes we have them do… they’ll get in a bear crawl and face off. And they’ll have to grab each other’s arm and have to try to pull the other one over. Or we’ll do plyometrics where an athlete will jump in the air. And then while he’s in the air, the other athlete will whack them, sort of push them, so they land a little bit awkwardly. We’ll do stuff like that. We’ll do where the athlete boxes another guy out, like in basketball, a box out drill.
Jeremy Frisch
You have to work on like they’re pushing each other back and forth. Yeah, so I love that stuff. Because I think it’s a different type of strength. Right? You ever have a buddy that wrestled? He grabbed you, and you’re always knew, shoot, this dude. It’s just a different type of… because he’s used to just pushing and pulling with someone and he knows, the moment you try to make a move, he knows how to counteract that, that type of motion.
Jeremy Frisch
It’s like you always knew when one of your buddies wrestled because they just had that extra, this sort of sixth sense in strength. I love that stuff. And you’ve probably seen it, the younger kids wrestle all the time. And I tell the parents listen, your kids are going to wrestle when they come in, they’re going to push each other, we’re going to put the mats out, we’re going to roll around, we’re going to play games that forced them to tackle each other.
Jeremy Frisch
I’m a football guy, too. I coach football. If I can get kids to get used to that physicality of the game. I think you can’t beat it, because those skills are going to use later on.
Joey Myers
Yeah, and because I focus on the hitting side, I don’t have… we have a few places there’s a parkour place that we have our son at, we have a place called Little gym that they do beginning gymnastics. Both my son and daughter were in that for a couple years. They do a lot of cool… a lot of things we see on your videos, not everything, but a few of those. And then with the whole COVID thing, the little gym shut down.
Joey Myers
We were trying to find another place, so they do parkour. So a lot of the things that you’re doing, so we don’t have a ton of that here, which I wish there was, but what I usually suggest to my hitters, is to get in things like martial arts, for the females dance, even swimming is good, you just don’t get the ground reaction forces in that. Those kinds of things are gymnastics, obviously, are always good as developmental things to do, if we don’t have access to something like what you’re doing.
Joey Myers
Are you thinking? …Are you looking to do some athletic performance training franchising or something like that, to where people can have access to that around? Have you given that thought?
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Are you looking to do some franchising or something like that, to where people can have access to that around?
Jeremy Frisch
I’ve had so many people contact me about, do you have a facility in: Georgia, Florida, Texas, California, I’ve had people ask me. If I could have an entrepreneurial side of my life, like a group of people that could do that stuff, I would do it in a heartbeat. But I am way too unorganized. I’m just getting by every day, just having my own place as a businessman, you know what I mean?
Jeremy Frisch
I’m like the idea guy, I love going to the gym and coming up with all the different ways to do it. Laying that out on a national scale. I think for me, it’s way above my head. But it would be awesome. Because I think you’re right, there’s not enough places around like that. And I think for me, even thinking in an even broader scale, like you just said, I would love to have a place that catered to, you have your gym, where you have your older athletes so they can lift and do your traditional training.
Jeremy Frisch
You have your PE slash transition into strength conditioning that I do. And then you can also have that area where kids can just go and play and do parkour, or Ninja Warrior. You could even take it one step further and have a big space where you had a batting cage, and a basketball court and a little turf area where kids can play seven on seven football, or play hoops or play baseball. You know what I mean? That’s my dream. My dream facility.
Jeremy Frisch
We have yet to find the space because I think if you can have something like that you have kids have access to so much athletic development. And I’ll tell you what to, and I wanted to say this before… watching my kids go and transition from Little League into a higher-level baseball, right? Definitely jumping from like a USA bat to a BB core bat. And seeing kids who are not physically developed or strong enough to struggle, because they just went from a drop 12 to a drop three.
Jeremy Frisch
Its kids get up and they’re swinging a freakin tree. Yeah. And one of my athletes, he’s actually a football player, but he likes baseball. He doesn’t put full time, like a lot of attention into it, he just plays. But I was blown away this summer watching him be able to use his athletic ability on the baseball field, running the bases, running balls down in center-field, just making contact where he put the ball where he needed to so we could get on first.
Jeremy Frisch
It just got me thinking, man, just having those skills is so big for baseball, you know? And so for me, I’m always backtracking, how can we develop those skills with kids, so when they do get to this level, there’ll be successful?
Joey Myers
Yeah, I agree. And like I told you, at the beginning of this athletic performance training call, that everything you’re doing is a piece of the puzzle that a lot aren’t doing. And I think a combination of what you’re doing with that transitioning side, you talk about this football player, is just an absolute athlete, been working out with you doing that kind of stuff. He’s got the foundation to be able to just step in.
Joey Myers
Then the next piece of the puzzle are the movement principles, the human movement principles that are validated by science, we apply them to hitting a ball. And those are the things… I’m a big spinal engine guy, love springy fascia and as you know, and that is the next step once you get moving correctly, and you can take out ankle mobility issues or shoulder mobility or thoracic spine once you take that stuff out. Then it’s all hands-on deck.
Joey Myers
Now they have full range they can create things like neck pressure where they wind up the head in the shoulders and things like that. Ever since we connected, I wish I could have, Frisch heaven, about all these surrounding developmental things. One of the biggest things I wish I had was a Jeremy Frisch next door to me that I can tell my hitters, this is a must you need to go to this. That’s going to make what we do in the cage or on the field so much better.
Joey Myers
I just wish we had a Jeremy Frisch next door. But maybe that’s something that we can talk about. Because we’re working on things that we could talk over the phone, on the franchising side of it. There could be something there, we just have to take your brain and formulate how that would look and would be really cool. Something like a little gym. Right little gym is very formulaic. You don’t have a little gym out there, a little gym, just a smaller version of gymnastics, right? They’re going to do the flips and all that. But it’s all building up to the back-flips and all those things.
Joey Myers
But maybe that’s something we can talk to you… one thing before I let you go, I wanted to ask about where people can find you. But before that, what is your kind of formula for… when we do a workout, we want to make sure we’re doing a roll, we’re going to make sure that we’re doing sort of a hard press a jump? Is there a certain athletic performance training formula like maybe the four or five things that you look for that we make sure in one hour that we’re getting done?
Is there a certain formula like maybe the four or five things that you look for that we make sure in one hour that we’re getting done?
Jeremy Frisch
Sure, yeah. And I can even give you like… so a lot of the athletes that I train with are probably between the ages like 10 and 14, 15. Right. And so that’s a great age, because there’s so much development going on. And that’s really the golden age of when you start to see their athletic skills start to blossom.
Jeremy Frisch
When an athlete comes into my facility around that age, we spend a tremendous amount of time, we’re going to spend a good chunk of time when they first come in, we’re going to move. Before we do anything, we try to increase our body temperature. We move. We have circuits where we’re working on smart fundamental movement skills, so that’s a great time. So we’re going to do 20 yards of skips, 20 yards of shuffles, 20 yards back pedaling, 20 yards of hops, stuff like that.
Jeremy Frisch
Another series, we do in place, where we just do jumping jacks, or skips and hops side to side, but we want to move, and when we do move, we want to do everything. When we’re skipping, we’re doing arm swings. When we’re backpedaling, we’re holding our arms overhead. When we’re hopping, when we’re doing side shuffles, our arms are making big circles. We’re trying to integrate the entire body and make it awkward and weird for the kids.
Jeremy Frisch
Just because we know all that movement is going to lay a bigger foundation, the more movement you do, the better you get at it. The first thing we always do is movement, to warm up, and usually fundamental movement skills. Then from there, we usually move on to two things, we work on stability, and then range of motion.
Jeremy Frisch
Stability would be like getting the kids on the ground doing short stints of like bear crawl, or crab reaches where we’re really focusing on the core and they have to lift an arm off the ground and stabilize themselves in a good position or lift a leg off the ground, or crawl like maybe 10 yards really slowly with their knees close to the ground. It’s hard work.
Jeremy Frisch
But you’re really focusing on staying stable and not moving much. Or moving very slowly over a short range of short distance. And then to go with that, I usually do them together, we do these, what we call it’s, the name of the company is called stick mobility. But we do like these big ranges of motion with PVC pipes. We’re asking them to overhead squat, we’re asking them to do a lunge with a bar overhead, we’re asking them.
Jeremy Frisch
A big one I do with the pitchers, they get in a lunge with the stick over their head, and they create a lot of tension in the shoulders. And they’re going to bend side to side, at their waist, we’re going to do big side bends, we’re going to do laterals ups, we’re going to do step ups and single leg work. We do this stability slash flexibility at the same time. And that happens in every session.
Jeremy Frisch
The next part of our workout, we do plyometrics. We always do jumps. And again, we pair that with… this is where we get into, I guess more specific throws off the wall where we do our plyometrics, like medicine ball work, side throws, similar to like, I want to see the kids loading. Try to get that upper body rotation while they’re stepping forward, I want to see how they look almost similar to how they swing.
Jeremy Frisch
We do a lot of that stuff, overhead throws, heavy slams. One arm punches, all different… we have medicine balls, that we do drills that are two pounds, we have medicine balls that we’re all the way up to 30 pounds. So that’s a huge one for us. And then from plyometric work, and their jumps. So I should backtrack, after we do our throws, before we do our jumps, we’re always going to do something double leg, and we’re always going to do something single leg, so we’re always going to be hopping off on one foot, we’re always going to be jumping up at two feet, just to make sure we cover all our bases.
Jeremy Frisch
The last thing in our movement series, after plyometrics is we’re ready to go. This is when we’re going to sprint. We’re going to do short sprints, we’re going to chase each other, we might do resisted runs, we might do some type of agility, where we play tag and run each other down. Or we’re going to do some type of high-speed work. Where we’re really moving. Yeah, so and then from there, it’s all your basic stuff from in the weight room. We teach our kids how to Olympic lift, we’re not scared of teaching getting the bar on the kid’s hands, we definitely teach our kids how to squat, dead-lift, hinge, get strong on one leg, they do plenty of pull ups, lots of rows, really basic, basic barbell dumbbell movements.
Joey Myers
I love that dude. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. And again, we got to figure out how to get you a lot more outside of the Massachusetts area, Clinton, Mass. area. But before we get there, I appreciate your time today. Where can people find more about you? And so that’s number one. And two, are there anything new? Any kind of projects you’re working on right now?
Where can people find more about you? And so that’s number one. And two, are there anything new? Any kind of projects you’re working on right now?
Jeremy Frisch
Yeah, so you can find me, there’s a bunch of athletic performance training articles that I’ve written, I think five or six on simply faster. If you just type in Jeremy Frisch, simply faster, all those will come up. You’ll see a lot of the things that you and I just talked about; you’ll find a lot of those things in those articles. And there’s a lot of great videos in there, too. Some good examples for parents looking for ideas to use with their kids, or coaches looking to do stuff with their athletes.
Jeremy Frisch
And then, I’ve been slowly just trying to take videos of the things that we do, and sort of database them. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, if I can present it to a group of coaches that want it, or say you want it and say, Hey, give me the, I need 10 exercises for my baseball players, boom here it is. I’m trying to put that together, there are so many exercises, it’s a little overwhelming right now.
Jeremy Frisch
Once I get that athletic performance training database growing, and explain it all… the other part of it is too is, you see the games that we play, I posted about the games that we play, but I’ve never really, there’s never enough space on Twitter or Facebook, and I don’t really have the time to explain how they work.
Jeremy Frisch
How the games work, and what are the rules. I’d love to put together a database of games that athletes can use and how do you play this? What are the rules? And what are we working on? That’s my current project.
Joey Myers
Very cool. Well, we’ll talk more about that you and I just do a phone call. I showed you some things there that we can… whether that’s an online thing or franchise thing is going to take a little bit longer because that’s going to take into account creating some standard operating procedures and operations manuals. You know, that kind of thing. That’s going to take probably a little bit longer, but an online thing might be something worth looking at right now as the low hanging fruit.
Joey Myers
And we mentioned your athletic performance training website, you said was AcheivePerformance.net? People want to find you there. Twitter. Where can people find you? What’s your handle? I know we discussed earlier, but just as a reminder.
Jeremy Frisch
Yeah, it’s just that @JeremyFrisch. And I posted, I love Twitter. I love being able to come up with my ideas and little short phrases. It’s way easier to do it. Do that then have to write an entire article or book. Obviously, videos can truly show what you do. I love posting on there. Mostly, just because I think there’s a lot of people out there that could use it. There’s a lot of mom and pop coaches, there’s a lot of Phys ed teachers, there’s a lot of different people that could look at that stuff and find it useful.
Jeremy Frisch
So yeah, and then I’m on Facebook, too. It’s mostly people from my town, that are college friends and stuff like that, but I do post some stuff of the things we do with the kids on there. The rest of my time, if I’m not working, I’ve got four kids. I usually coach football in the fall and basketball in the winter and baseball in the spring. So yeah…
Joey Myers
Busy guy, dude, busy guy. Well, hey, thank you for everything that you do out there. And we’ll see if we can touch more people besides over there in Clinton, Massachusetts, and appreciate your time today Mr. Jeremy, you guys have a Happy Thanksgiving. Any other athletic performance training parting thoughts before we go?
Any other parting thoughts before we go?
Jeremy Frisch
Well, thanks for having me on. Really appreciate it. Like I said, I think I read both your books, and they were fantastic. And they’ve definitely helped us. My kids help me as far as coaching goes, but also giving me an understanding of how, I didn’t understand all of it with the hitting book, and then you said, Oh, I threw the shot-put in college, and I saw shot-put and I’m like, Damn, like, That’s it. That’s it, it’s there, I understand what he’s talking about. It was really great. It was really great for me that I could take what I knew about shot putting, and I could put it back into teaching my kids how to hit, which is great. Awesome stuff. I appreciate you having me on.
Joey Myers
I love it, dude. All right, man. Well keep up the good work again. Happy Thanksgiving. And we’ll talk soon. I’ll reach out and we’ll have a conversation about some of the other stuff we were talking about.
Jeremy Frisch
Sounds great. Can’t wait. I’ll talk to you soon.
Joey Myers
Alright brother.
Jeremy Frisch
Bye.
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Baseball Hitting Trainer Interview: How To Transition Cage Swings To The Game With Curtis Nelson
Here’s some of what will be discussed in this baseball hitting trainer interview with Curtis Nelson:
Rapsodo getting used as a paper weight?
What are the top two mistakes that you see coaches doing when they’re teaching hitting?
Random pitch training. Explain that a little bit, how you guys do that, and how that looks…
How to transition grooved cage swings into the game
Do you teach your hitters any kind of plate or pitch approach?
How do you evaluate hitters and teach them to make an adjustment?
How do you get a pull happy hitter go oppo, and how do you get an oppo happy hitter pulling the ball?
“Curtis, so and so said that timing cannot be taught?” What do you think about that?
What are some of the adjustments you have hitters make to slow pitchers?
Where can people who want more information find you?
The following is the above video’s baseball hitting trainer video transcription. Let’s get to it!
Joey Myers 00:27
Very cool. How did today go?
Curtis Nelson 00:30
It went well. I got a couple guys actually in town from AZ, that was fun and got some good work in, so today went well. My internet was not working at the end there, so always fun but I’m not a big tech guy so the tech stuff for me sometimes gets me a little fired up.
Joey Myers 00:50
What were you using the internet for? Were you just showing them some baseball hitting trainer video and stuff?
Curtis Nelson 00:54
Yeah, so I send a lot of videos from here. When I make either a voice over video or I make myself showing a drill or something, I send from the cage. I try and get most of my work done here. We got a nice little like 6000 square foot cage here.
Joey Myers 01:10
Beautiful.
Curtis Nelson 01:11
370 foot cages with 20 foot ceilings and 25 foot nets. It’s kind of a fun little one. It’s kind of our little home, it’s old school. My boss played at LC state, he has been doing this in the state of Washington for years and years and years and years. He’s got a little bit of that old school, so “you don’t like that cookie cutter” kind of look, you know?
Joey Myers 01:32
Yeah. I agree you guys don’t have HitTrax or any baseball hitting trainer like that either.
Baseball Hitting Trainer: Rapsodo getting used as a paper weight?
Curtis Nelson 01:37
Conforto bought me rapsodo, I’d say four years ago now, kind of when it first started coming out. He went out and bought it for me and just kind of gave it to me and I use rapsodo occasionally. I think that you know for some of my young ends or some of my high school guys, I want to go to a PAC 12 school and I don’t know any Pac-12 guys that are below 90 miles an hour on their exit velocity. I think it’s good to be able to show them that obviously with recruiting videos nowadays and in a lot of these colleges are asking for it right? I think that is an important metric.
Curtis Nelson 02:12
Obviously, if you make a swing adjustment and your exit velocity drops a big amount, there’s probably something behind that right so I think that there’s a time and place but in my experience with hit with rapsodo I’ve seen a lot of really good-looking swings and then when they go on rapsodo it starts becoming a little bit more of a slow-pitch softball home-run Derby, but as long as we’re using it the right way.
Curtis Nelson 02:35
I like to use it when I’m doing mixed BP. I like to do it when it’s more of a live setting. You know, we have our pitching rapsodo set up in our hitting rock solo setup in the same cage and we’re doing live stuff, you know, closer to the season time. I think there’s a lot of value there but most of the time a rapsodo is kind of getting used as a paperweight.
Joey Myers 02:52
An $8500 baseball hitting trainer paperweight?
Curtis Nelson 02:57
Yeah, I think that the first one we got was like five grand or 4500. Whatever. Not the second one, but that’s a very expensive paperweight change.
Joey Myers 03:06
Exactly. I’ll keep this in, sometimes it depends on what we talked about before just to get warmed up. I’ll keep it in. I think I’ll keep that stuff in. But are you ready for an official start?
Curtis Nelson 03:18
Yeah.
Joey Myers 03:19
Alright, let’s do it. Hello, and welcome to swing smarter monthly newsletter. This is your host Joey Myers from hitting performance lab dot com and with me today is actually our first intro. We had a little phone call earlier today but I’ve heard so much about Curtis Nelson, through a mutual friend Daniel Robertson, I call him D. Rob and Daniel was hitting with Curtis quite a bit in the off-season, this past season that he played in not just last year, but the year before. I think the year before, I think it’s been a couple years but I’ve heard Curtis through D Rob and there’s a lot of mutual hitting minds that surround Curtis. First of all, I want to welcome you into the show. Welcome, Curtis.
Curtis Nelson 04:01
Thanks for having me on. I look forward to it.
Joey Myers 04:02
Thanks for coming on, man. Okay, cool. We had a little conversation, which I’m going to keep in like I said, about rapsodo and different things and got to see your cages, just kind of cool. One of the questions that I wanted to ask you since I’ve seen a lot of your stuff on Twitter, and I agree with I think most of it. You’re one of those guys, we call them lone wolf, mad scientist and the guys that tend to think for themselves and don’t follow others lockstep, right?
Joey Myers 04:06
You take a little bit of something, somebody’s saying, “Hey, I think that works. Let’s go try and experiment with my hitters and see if that’ll work with them”. If it does, you keep it, if it doesn’t, you throw it away. I’m really looking for those lone wolves, the ones like myself, who are on like a passionate curiosity journey to try and find what the truth is what really works. My question to you is, what are the top two things, baseball hitting trainer mistakes that you see out there on whether it’s Twitter or social media, that you see coaches doing when they’re teaching hitting?
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What are the top two mistakes that you see coaches doing when they’re teaching hitting?
Curtis Nelson 05:05
I think the first one to me kind of goes back to at a very young age, kind of what is the typical things taught with very young hitters. You’re typically going to see, you know, take the weight back, take the hands back, as a pretty generic kind of thing taught. I think if you look at a lot of really good swings, there’s so many different guys out there, I love all their swings and their different commonalities but at the same time, I think you see so many hitters that have this certain sequence involved in when they get to a certain position.
Curtis Nelson 05:40
You see, some hitters might have a certain movement in their swing that might be different, but it works for them. I think at a young age, you see a lot of hitters with a big movement backwards, a huge hand load getting outside the body. It just starts to create these habits at a young age that can really start to affect us as we get older and pitching gets better.
Curtis Nelson 06:02
I really like to see limiting the amount of move, we go back and allowing our hands to kind of get to a good hitting position. More on the forward move, we don’t want it to be rushed, we don’t want it to be something that kind of jerky, it might feel that way for someone and feel smoother for another person. That’s the individuality about it.
Curtis Nelson 06:23
Ultimately, I think that that would be like my number one thing, I see is so many hitters come in, and they’re constantly with a big shift back, a big hand load on the way back and they’re constantly fighting their bodies. That’s the number one for me. We talk a lot about not chasing results and chasing exit velocity. I think at the exit velocity side of things is something that’s important for hitters to know and understand the end.
Curtis Nelson 06:25
Like we were saying before, if you see a big drop in exit velocity, you see a big drop and how the balls coming off the bat, and then there’s some rolls there for us but I see a lot of hitters, a lot of young hitters nowadays on the internet, that are trying to chase results instead of chasing the process that brings about the results.
Curtis Nelson 07:09
Everything for me is about getting hitters better in the game, we have to be better hitters in the game, whatever we’re doing inside in terms of training that needs to translate to the game. If whatever you’re doing, whatever style or thoughts you’re doing, or however your training is translating to the game outside, and you’re a better hitter because of it, then great, we’ll work our way around those things to a certain degree and make sure we understand the difference.
Curtis Nelson 07:35
I think those are my top two things right now, it’s making sure that whatever we’re doing is going to translate to the game. That’s all that matters. We don’t want to be caged hitters; we want to be gamers.
Joey Myers 07:43
Right. I know one thing when D Rob was training before his last year in independent ball, he was doing with you guys, you mentioned it here too, it’s the baseball hitting trainer random pitch training. Explain that a little bit, how you guys do that, and how that looks.
Random pitch training. Explain that a little bit, how you guys do that, and how that looks…
Curtis Nelson 07:58
I started doing it as a player when I was young myself and one of my good friends, Cody Atkinson, he’s with the Texas Rangers as a coach now. We started doing it as players and it was just our best way to emulate game pitching. It was just doing mixed BP, we always call it dirty from 30, about 30-35 feet away, we’re not trying to throw as hard as we can, it’s just a crispy BP fastball. We’re just mixing and breaking balls and really just kind of playing games against each other, you go play nine inning game and you get three outs and you will be judging jury and it brought about some good competition between us.
Curtis Nelson 08:34
Ultimately, it taught us how to have an approach, how to be on time than the fastball, how to adjust off the fastball, on some breaking ball stuff. I think it really shows the holes in the swing, it shows where the weaknesses can become and some guys that it might even just be the mentality change, that might be the difference.
Curtis Nelson 08:51
You can see a lot from just doing just kind of a mixed BP, can I cover the fastball away and still cover the breaking ball? Can I cover the fastball in and still take the curve-ball down in a way and it shows this a lot. I’m a huge proponent of it.
Curtis Nelson 09:06
We do our machines, we do our challenge stuff, because I can’t throw the ball 90 miles an hour, but at the end of the day, we do need to see it, that live arm and that kind of mixed it in having to make a decision rather than to seeing a fish down the middle every time on a machine.
Joey Myers 09:21
Very smart and there was a baseball hitting trainer study that was done, I can’t remember the guy’s name offhand on YouTube, but it was a video, not sure. I think it was maybe in one of the books that I’d read but it was a Cal Poly study. It was Cal Poly baseball guys, and it took half the hitters out in the field hitters, they worked with what they call mass practice.
Joey Myers 09:42
They did 15, they took BP where they took 15 fastballs, they hit 15 fastballs, hit 15 curve-balls, hit 15 change-ups and they had the other half of the hitters, fielders, did what you’re talking about a mix of BP and even though the second group that got the mix BP early on wasn’t very good, they’re showing a BP wasn’t very good.
Baseball Hitting Trainer: How to transition grooved cage swings into the game
Joey Myers 10:03
What ended up happening is they got better as the season progressed, and their numbers were better, which you’re talking about transitioning into the games, which I hear I’m sure you do, too, from parents and even players, how do we transition these mechanics into the game? Because we’re seeing a great swing in the cage, but then in the game, they’re not really performing and that baseball hitting trainer study what you’re talking about mix BP, I think it’s one of the most important things and that’s a study that shows right there. That was just one season but I bet if you took it over three, four or five seasons, you get the same result, it would just obviously look a little bit different.
Curtis Nelson 10:40
It comes down to kind of open skill and close skill environments, right. In golf, the balls not moving, it’s a very close type skill. We kind of know our outcome before it happens and it actually leads in this to one of my pet peeves, and I grew up hitting like this. You see the outside pitch, and you immediately are trying to go off with it and manipulate that result, where the only thing that dictates where that ball goes is my timing.
Curtis Nelson 11:08
One of the first things I tell hitters, when they walk in the cage with me is, I’m never going to tell you the pull of the inside pitch, I’m never going to tell you to hit the outside pitch the other way, your timing will tell you, your job is to hit through it, and just kind of see what happens and then you can make adjustments off of that.
Curtis Nelson 11:22
That open skill environment of having to basically variable change, you have to have the ability to be on the fastball and then adapt and adjust. I think so much of hitting is about that adjust-ability because how often are we right on time? How often are we perfect, guys in the big leagues, there might be perfect 30, 40, 50 times in a year, and getting paid a lot of money for it, but we’re not getting five 600 at bats, so we have to be a little bit more adjustable, to a certain degree at a younger age level.
Curtis Nelson 11:52
He’s breathing that into them and a younger age level, to have that ability to naturally translate over to the game. A lot of hitters that I see that struggle on that transition from cage to game, they’re doing a lot of machine where it’s in the same place every time, they’re doing a ton of Tee work, a ton of flips, we don’t typically use these in here very often, very, very rare.
Curtis Nelson 12:15
With younger guys, I will, but a lot of times with my college and my professional groups that are coming in, we’re really not using Tees at all, because we want to see the ball moving, sometimes we’ll use a tee for a feel and kind of maybe a specific drill. As a whole, we want to see that thing moving and having to make a decision soon. Just hard, soft flips, or fastball, curve-ball, mix BP or full on, dirty from 30.
Curtis Nelson 12:41
Anytime you get an opportunity to do that, you’re going to be playing the game of baseball in that environment much more like outside, right? It’s going to translate over better. When it doesn’t translate over, now you can start looking at some of those pieces within the swing that might play a role with why it’s not translating over or in the head, you know what I mean in terms of mentality.
Joey Myers 13:01
Do you guys do any kind of baseball hitting trainer approach? You were mentioning, if the ball is away, you don’t have to spray it away, you can pull that ball and my last year in college at Fresno State, we got the new coach, Coach Batesole. Now my last year is 2003, I wasn’t a part of the 2008 College World Series team, but he was a coach at that time.
Joey Myers 13:22
My last year was his first year and one of the things he told us, and the first time I had learned this, was to have two thirds away or two thirds in approach. Two thirds of the plate away or two thirds in, now we just go half, we go half away or half in. That’s how we do it now with my hitters.
Joey Myers 13:38
That was the first time I had heard that to split the plate into two thirds and he said if you’re looking two thirds away, as a righty, he said you can work left center-field all the way to right field. Anywhere in there, you can hit the ball, you don’t have to hit it straight to right and the opposite is true. If you’re looking two thirds in, then you can work right center all the way to left and that was the first time I heard that because most of my coaches would say if it’s away, boom, hit it over there. Hit it where it’s been, you guys do any kind of approach like that?
Do you teach your hitters any kind of plate or pitch approach?
Curtis Nelson 14:08
Through the years of doing this now, you’ve seen them all right, there’s so many different approaches. I think that as long as whatever we’re thinking is working, then great, do it but at the same time I think that thinking in general, we talked about open skill, close skill environment, hitting is one of the most purely reactionary sports there is, in terms of hitting a baseball, it’s moving, that can change direction and speed and everything.
Curtis Nelson 14:33
Sometimes approaches, it’s almost too much thinking for some hitters. We’ve done the whole look away reacting, we’ve done the even counts, you’re looking middle away, the positive counts, you’re looking middle in. In the past, I’ve talked about going to your strength is you got a positive count, if your strength is middle out, then look there, then drive into the big part of the field. If you like pulling the ball in your better middle, middle in, in that count looking at those places that you have success.
Curtis Nelson 15:03
I think the best hitters in the world in terms of the best swings and approaches, they can game plan their approaches off the pitcher. If you don’t have any holes in your swing, now you can go off of what the pitcher’s weakness is. Generically, people tend to look at what the pitchers out pitches or how he’s trying to beat you. We try and counteract that instead of going well, how is he going to get ahead of me to get to that point?
Curtis Nelson 15:27
If I’m looking middle in because he’s going to beat me there, but he actually gets hit up in a way then maybe I’m looking up in a way, and I’m going to own that zone based on the guy I’m facing. Now, when you start getting into game planning based off pitchers, you got to have spin rates, you got to have a scouting report of how he is, as a pitcher in general.
Curtis Nelson 15:46
If we don’t have that information, we got to keep it pretty simple. With driveline and what they’re doing with the pitchers nowadays, in terms of tunneling pitches, and making pitches look the same for a longer amount of time, the game is not getting any easier. We want to know where to look.
Curtis Nelson 16:05
We talk a lot about arming pitchers way off to the side more three-quarter arm slot, you should be looking up and out for that guy, you facing Bumgarner, and he’s throwing the ball from second base, we want to be looking up and out, because the ball is coming from that direction, and I think a lot of people make the mistake. It works at a younger age level when the ball is not moving as fast but a lot of people make the mistake of looking at the plate, because not always where it starts is not always where it’s going to finish based on what kind of movement they have.
Curtis Nelson 16:34
Oftentimes, you’re looking middle in and out a hand it looks middle in, and then it’s going to hit you in the hands, or you’re looking middle away, the next thing you know, you get a slider into the batter’s box that you chase. We try and kind of counteract what we’re facing, by how and where we’re looking, to a certain degree, obviously, that depends on the level you’re at.
Curtis Nelson 16:53
With some of my younger teams, we’re trying to keep it as simple as possible. A few years back with one of my teams, we had some pretty darn good hitters and some good swings, we ended up just kind of taking the approach of doesn’t matter what count it is, if it’s a strike, let’s smash it, and just kind of the old see-ball, hit-ball approach, and just make sure we’re on time and adjustable from that point. We had a lot of success with that.
Curtis Nelson 17:16
We basically said, we’re going to flat out own the zone, and we’re going to take balls, and the guys were mature enough to go do that, some hitters need to be a little bit more specific about how they think. I always go full circle with things and making them more individually based for the hitter, right? If I got a hitter that flat out pulls the ball, like there’s no tomorrow, and is a really good pole hitter, then that’s probably where we’re going to look because probably something that you can pull to a certain degree, especially early in counts but that also limits him on his ability to adapt and adjust to what he’s facing to a certain degree.
Curtis Nelson 17:50
To kind of get that complete hitter, the swings got to be able to kind of withstand different zones, different timings and different angles of pitch, to be able to game plan fully, I think the better the swing, the easier it is the game plan off the pitcher and that’s ultimately what we’re trying to do.
Joey Myers 18:06
With your young hitters, and I know you when you say that, if you got a hitter, that’s just dead pole and if that’s a strength, you’re probably talking about the older guys, whether it’s high school, college, on up. What about the younger guys? Do you have more of being able to use all field approach, and if so, if you have them set up like what we do, we do small private groups. We have between two and four hitters in a group, with the whole COVID thing, we used to do six, but I try and keep it to four at the max and we’re pretty spread out outside and stuff.
Joey Myers 18:38
What we do is we set up the tee at the beginning, we take our baseball hitting trainer ball exit speeds, but what I’m also looking for is not only the number, but I’m looking for we set that tee up, it’s center center. They should be hitting it right up the middle, right? What I’m looking for and I’m observing is if they’re pulling all five swings that they’re going to get or they’re going the other way, all five swings, where it’s center center, do you do anything like that and eval and try and get them to make an adjustment?
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How do you evaluate hitters and teach them to make an adjustment?
Curtis Nelson 19:05
Not so much of the tee. We film everything, I’ll film a rear-view angle, so I can kind of see ball flight, I can see timing, posture, hand path and we’ll do a side view. I’ve always gone to the film, you look at contact points, you look at when the barrel is coming out, you look at timing, and then you look at what’s coming off, right? You’re taking middle pitches, and you’re just hooking them every time into the net, the film is going to show you that you’re around and outside that ball pretty early.
Curtis Nelson 19:34
Ultimately, we want a hitter that can cover the line. I want somebody that can drive a ball, dead straight off, and the ball flies straight with backspin, and then all of a sudden that pitches inside or they’re a little bit early and they can pull it with true fly. Especially in Washington state, we get a lot of hitters that only hit when they’re inside until the game because there’s just not a lot of fields out there that you can hop on and just a lot of hitters are just doing indoor lessons and practicing inside. They just don’t see the ball flight as well.
Curtis Nelson 20:04
That’s where the wraps around the hit tracks can be nice in terms of being able to really truly see where that ball is going. Also, with how cages are built, right, we have these tunnels in cages where we get this tunnel vision going, where a lot of hitters will come in and just pepper their back-net pepper right center, and not pull a single ball into the net.
Curtis Nelson 20:13
We had a lot of hitters in Washington that just pushed the ball in the right field. Learning how to pull the ball correctly, or learning how to drive the ball opposite field correctly. It’s different for everybody, but ultimately, I rely on the film, in the flips. I’m not doing a lot of the tee stuff but if you find value in something, by all means, do it.
Joey Myers 20:45
Now, if you were going to teach a guy, if he was pulling everything into the left side of the net, or even going off way too much, how do you get an Oppo person to learn how to pull the ball? How do you get a pull person to learn? What’s your go to drill for that?
How do you get a pull happy hitter go oppo, and how do you get an oppo happy hitter pulling the ball?
Curtis Nelson 21:00
It depends on what the reason is, whether it’s just a mentality thing. That’s where I tapping into each hitter, in learning your hitter and understanding what their thoughts are, what they’re trying to do. You can compare that to the film, we have something called a deep dive, where you kind of dive into the analytics a little bit in terms of professionals. You go look at all the analytics, then you compare it to game film, then you compare it to the indoor cage routine stuff.
Curtis Nelson 21:28
If you have all that information, it starts to paint the picture a little bit of why they might not pull the ball in the air as well, or why they might be pushing the ball off. Ultimately, I think that I’m going to look at the film, I’m going to look at how they’re moving. Obviously, like what you were talking about is putting them on that tee and getting a feel for.
Curtis Nelson 21:49
This was D Rob’s argument to me about the tee stuff because he loves the tee stuff. That’s where I told him, at the end of the day, if that is a routine that has built you, you’re finding comfort in a certain position, that maybe you’re not feeling when the ball is moving, by all means getting on a tee and feeling that contact point out or hitting the ball deeper in the ball more out in front, based on what you’re trying to create, you can gain a feel in that atmosphere.
Curtis Nelson 22:14
I’m not saying that I’m against tees by any means but I’d much rather see the ball moving and how they respond to it moving with some film on it, so we can kind of see that overall picture. I think it’s going to be different for every hitter based on what they’re thinking, based on what their mechanics are and then obviously comparing that to the results or any kind of data that we do have, but that’s a good question, I like that.
Joey Myers 22:38
One of the baseball hitting trainer things I hear a lot of what you’re talking about is timing. There’s a lot of people out there, believe it or not, that say that timing cannot be taught. What would you say to that coach, instructor, parent, that hears that, comes to you and says, “Curtis, so and so said that timing cannot be taught?” What do you think about that?
“Curtis, so and so said that timing cannot be taught?” What do you think about that?
Curtis Nelson 22:58
I teach timing every day, every single day. Some hitters are going to grasp some concepts better than others, and some hitters have that ability to be on time more consistently, whether that’s because of their swing, or because of their athleticism, their hand eye coordination, whatever it is, they have a gift to show up on time more than others.
Curtis Nelson 23:23
I would say 95% of the hitters that come through my cage, getting them aware of their move, whether it’s improving the move first, and then making them aware of their move in relationship to time and space, is one of the most important things that I do. I truly believe there are hitters out there that just time naturally, and it’s very natural for them to do so.
Curtis Nelson 23:46
They don’t need to understand their timing, they just show up on time more often than others. For every one of those guys, there’s 150 to 1000 of the other guys that need to understand their timing. We do a lot of timing stuff in here, just really a lot of rear-view films to kind of show hitters, when are you picking up in relationship to where the pitcher is.
Curtis Nelson 24:06
When I was growing up, it was all about getting your foot down early, get your foot down early, get your foot down, and that’s all we ever heard when we were late, that can breed a lot of issues. If you got a swing like Rendon, or Nelson Cruz or Paul Goldschmidt, that is a different type of stride.
Curtis Nelson 24:22
You still see them have a good feel of time, they get that foot down and then the body shifts back to center to a certain degree to hit, everyone’s a little bit different on that aspect. Ultimately, I think rhythm and flow, that we talked a lot about flowing, a lot about dancing with the pitcher. Those are some pretty simple terms that can apply to timing but if you can arrive on time to a good fastball and then you can still have adjust-ability on breaking balls, we got a great opportunity to hit in the game and having markers in the swing or the pitcher.
Curtis Nelson 24:53
Whether it’s some guys like to go on handbrake or some guys like to make their move on arm up or other guys like to just game plan off of “Hey, I’m ready to pull the fastball, even though I’m not trying to.” There’s different ways around that to get somebody on time but making hitters more aware of their timing when they’re on and when they’re off or when they’re late or they’re early, is a really, really crucial piece to what we do here.
Joey Myers 25:18
Before we get to where people can find a little bit more about you, we’re kind of closing in here, I want to ask you just one more question on that. If you got some young hitters that come in, think about the team that you’re talking about that have the young guys where they’re just basically swinging strikes, take balls, if they’re facing a really slow pitcher, which tends to happen quite a bit where the pitcher can break a pane of glass, what are some of the baseball hitting trainer adjustments that you have them make or go through?
Baseball hitting trainer: what are some of the adjustments you have hitters make to slow pitchers?
Curtis Nelson 25:42
It’s such a good question. I love answering this question. I think that when I was younger, the generic and you still hear it with hitters, you still hear with coaches, whatever ones taught against that soft lefty. I remember showing up to the field, and we’re facing a PAC 12 recruit throw in 93-94. I’m like, we’re going to score 10 runs today, because we hit this guy like there’s no tomorrow, we prepared for this. You show up, and you face that soft lefty throwing 75 and I’m like, I don’t know, if we’re going to have a hit today, it’s a bad feeling.
Curtis Nelson 26:11
When I was growing up, you saw the slow guy warming up and you’re like licking your chops. Well, I’m about to be free for a couple doubles and a home run and that guy usually didn’t make it out the first ending. I think it goes into kind of training nowadays is a lot of machine, a lot of velocity, a lot of that stuff. We’re better against firm, but I do think that the approaches, and the way we’re taught against those guys can really play a role.
Curtis Nelson 26:12
Growing up, we were all taught to hit that guy off and push that ball into right, hit it off, let it travel, see it, the start your rhythm later, make a forward move later in the process, however you want to say it. That actually is what the lefty pitcher wants you to do, I want you to be defensive, he wants you to push them all off. He wants you to weight back on him.
Curtis Nelson 27:00
The best approach against the soft guy is to shrink the zone, make the zone smaller. He doesn’t have the ability to strike you out unless you chase his pitches, and you’re going to see his pitches better because the ball is moving slower, we see the ball better when it’s moving slower, you can’t argue that.
Curtis Nelson 27:16
At the end of the day, if you shrink your zone and go, “Hey, I’m going to be here, this is my goal zone against this guy. I’m not chasing those pitches out there”. Even if they look hit-able moving slower, I think we’re going to have a lot more success doing that, we’re not necessarily trying to go off, but we’re not trying to go up there and roll over to third first pitch either, I think it’s really just commanding your zone and kind of going back to the simplicity of just trying to hit through the ball and see where it goes.
Curtis Nelson 27:41
I think we tend to manipulate the swing because of what we’re facing, that slow guy is like, “I’m hitting a home run against this guy”. We’re spinning off that slow when away, but we tend to beat ourselves more than maybe they beat us. We try and stay away from the generic hit the ball up against the slow guy kind of mentality. The end just kind of stick to say, “Hey, this guy only beats me if I chase, so we’ve got a good pitch to him.”
Joey Myers 28:07
That’s funny you say that because that’s the same with the same lefties that we’re seeing, that can’t break a pane of glass, you see the guy throwing 93-94. 93-94, it’s Friday night, and then Saturday night, you see the guy can break pane of glass and the way I’m going to just pepper it to the opposite field, but one thing he is slow anyway, so you can have to wait longer and then now you’re saying that you want to hit it the opposite field, and now you got to wait even longer. You got to see it even deeper, it’s almost like it’s two double negatives there. I get that. You’re chasing your tail, basically.
Joey Myers 28:42
Curtis, I appreciate your baseball hitting trainer time. Where can people find you? I know you’re on Twitter, because that’s where I’ve seen you. If you guys have a website, where you guys are in Washington, if anybody wants to come out and check you guys out, where can more people find you.
Where can people who want more information find you?
Curtis Nelson 28:58
Our cage out here it’s called Atkinson Baseball Academy. It’s out in Kirkland, Washington. I know there’s a website for the cage. I am separate from that in terms of my hitting instruction. I am on Twitter, it’s @Nelson_Hitting, used to be cheat hack nation. That was kind of a joke that we threw together when I first developed because of all the swings we’re seeing that were a little bit aggressively big. I don’t have my own personal website, I probably should by now, but I spend majority of my time in the cage with hitters, so the internet and social media side of things, I’m still relatively beginner at that. I would say Twitter is the best way to reach out if you have anything, just shoot me a DM and I’ll get back to you as soon as I possibly can.
Joey Myers 29:49
Maybe not 100% probability but you can take a baseball hitting trainer like yourself who’s always in the cage doing stuff. You can take where somebody like you, you think he’s got 20,000 or 100,000 followers because it’s great stuff, if you read your stuff, you watch the videos that you put up and think it’s awesome stuff and you should have like the 50,000 100,000 but the reason you don’t is because you’re not on Twitter all the time, you’re in the cage, working with hitters, so that’s always not always a sign of a good hitting coach but I would say more likely than not, guys like Matt Piers and Jeremy Johnson, they don’t really have big followings but they got great gyms that they put out there and can really help hitters. I really appreciate what you guys are doing out there in Washington, keep up the great baseball hitting trainer work. If you see D Rob before me, say hi to him. I think he’s up in Seattle, he still lives in Seattle?
Curtis Nelson 30:45
Yeah, he’s over in West Seattle. They got a bridge out so that is a pain in the butt to get out of West Seattle right now, but he’s over there. He pops in the cage, he comes, he hangs out. His experiences and his knowledge is just bar none. He’s been doing it for so long. It’s a lot of fun getting that guy in the cage and kind of just talking.
Joey Myers 31:05
He’s a baseball hitting trainer Yoda for sure. I know he wants to be a GM and I can see that he’s got the chops on the field, he understands intellectually the game and like you said, it’s fun to talk with him. So, tell him hi for me if you see him before me. How far is Kirkland from Seattle? How far are you guys away?
Curtis Nelson 31:27
Very close, if you take away traffic. Right now, with COVID and everything, the freeways aren’t as crazy out here right now. You take away traffic, I can get over to West Seattle, it’s kind of over by the airport, you can get over that direction in 20 minutes, 15 to 20 minutes, but you throw in the traffic of the normal out here, you’re looking at probably more like an hour and a half.
Joey Myers 31:50
Got you. Cool. All right, Curtis, well, I’ll let you go, man. Thanks again for your time and Merry Christmas to you and the fam.
Curtis Nelson 31:58
Merry Christmas, you guys take care. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
Joey Myers 32:01
You got it.
BREAKING NEWS:
Grab two chapters of our NEW Amazon book FREE...
"Swing Smarter: Science Based Hitting Training Built To Understand How, Why, & Reasoning Behind It"
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