How to Get More Results Out of Your Practice

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Although your daughter might feel the urge to use her practice to turbo-pitch balls to your shins pitch after pitch at lightning speed without thinking much about it, players should pitch with focus and intent. There are no other ways to build muscle memory and consistency.

Remember from the last two blogs that during practices and lessons we are trying to accomplish two things. 1) Improve by forming muscle memory (building neural pathways in the brain). Once they are built, games become a competition instead of constant mechanical corrections, which leads us to number two. 2) Mentally prepare for games by pretending practices are like games.

To have a focused practice, always make an exact plan for practices beforehand. I can’t stress this enough. Plus, you can make this fun. Pitchers will feel a sense of accomplishment and focus better.

Here’s a fun example of a workout I made and gave to players as gifts one session.


To create this plan, we need to understand the different ways to throw combinations of pitches within a practice:

  • Block- Practicing the same skill over and over again (pitch a drop ball, one after another)

  • Varied - Variations of skill practiced together (drop-inside, drop-outside)

  • Random- No two pitches thrown together are the same (drop, rise, screw, change).

Many studies show that random practice builds neural pathways the fastest. Even though this may be surprising, switching between more than one skill forces you to refocus as many times as the ball is pitched. Thinking and trying to perform a movement is what builds the neural pathways. However, when performing block practice an athlete gets lost in thought more often, consequently wasting her time. Even if the results of random practice seem worse, i.e., less movement, than block practice, the results during performances are much better. For example, players throw more strikes in games after random practice than they do block.

I believe it’s more important to make a plan beforehand and stick to it, focusing on each individual pitch, than it is to “get enough reps in.” The main thing is to try and make practice enjoyable between you and your daughter because that’s what will make you do more of it.