How To Sell Hard Work To A Skeptic

One of my biggest flaws is that I procrastinate. It’s a never-ending cycle of telling myself “I’ll write this blog tomorrow,” or “I’ll sleep in and just exercise at later in the day.”

Can you guess what ends up happening? I’ll wait until the wee hours of the night to start my writing and get only a few hours of sleep. I’ll push back my run so late in the day that I’ll loose all motivation. The result is a sub-par blog or a scrapped run.

Enter: discipline and habit formation.

This session I chose to focus our veteran mental game lessons around the topic of creating routines.

Since I’m an expert at procrastination, I know it when I see it. I observe pitchers thinking they have all the time in the world before the season begins. They decide they can start with their preparation in February or March, right before their first games. This is a big mistake.

Pitchers should never “begin” to train for the season. “Beginning” implies that they stopped in the first place! Pitching is a year-round commitment. Breaks exist, but you must understand that there are “beginnings” and “ends” of training seasons.

For experienced pitchers, year-round training should be divided into sections including the off-season, pre-season and in-season. They each serve their specific purpose. In the offseason (October through December), experienced athletes should learn new movement pitches and make major changes to mechanics if necessary. These two things affect accuracy, so the offseason is the best time to adjust.

Beginners, on the other hand, learn in a linear fashion, regardless of the season, as they need to perform the fundamentals. For the new recruit, lessons can begin as soon as she makes the transition from coach-pitch to live pitching. If she doesn’t begin the mechanics six months to a year before player pitch, she’ll find herself nervously stepping onto a mound in April, wishing she had done more to be prepared.

Building neural pathways in the brain is a long process that occurs over time. Practice “a little, a lot,” as sports psychologist Brian Cain says. It’s best to do a little practice today, a lot of days of the month. It’s like going to the gym. In order to get stronger, you must workout and lift weights on a regular basis. You can’t skip a few weeks and expect to regain this strength after one hard 6-hour lifting session. Like pitching, you can’t fit a year of work into a single month or two of practices.

Cat Osterman said that if she didn’t pitch for more than two days in a row she would start to lose her accuracy and get this impression of being “off.” As a former college pitcher, I know this feeling. We never recognize the importance of practice until we don’t do it.

Pitching is year-round because it increases your “feel.”

It’s year-round because it builds your arm strength.

It’s year round because it builds your confidence.

Can you get away without pitching year-round? You may be able to pitch in games without wild pitches, but you won’t have the confidence or experience to be effective. You won’t move beyond fastballs, which will get you through 12U, maybe, if you are fast enough. Learning change-ups, movement pitches, and hitting spots are going to give you the tools to succeed, all things you learn during the off-season.

Remember, breaks are healthy and necessary at the right time, but should not be taken advantage of. It is the pitchers who are consistent and dedicated during the winter that have the most success when it really matters. They don’t have to play “catch up.” They have fewer bad games in the beginning of the season. If you are someone who could do better at practicing during the off-season, slowly build a habit. Researches say it takes two weeks to two months to build a habit. Once it’s built, it seems less of a “have to” and more of a “get to” kind of thing. Set goals and have a plan. Practice is more fun when you have something to work towards.