What Yoga Can Teach Us about Pitching

This summer we held class at a beautiful personal training and yoga studio called “Practice Chicago” in Lincoln Park. What a fitting name, right?! As you know, I love when pitchers practice, but I never looked at practice the way described in @practicechicago’s recent Instagram post:

“When an activity becomes a practice it shifts from something you are doing at a point in time to an ongoing process of becoming. The former lends itself to “good” or “bad” judgments, forgetfulness, and discontinuity. The latter lends itself to integration, continuous learning, and wholeness.”

One of the main things we’d like to do with Practice Pro is to add to the element of practice to pitching instruction. Many times, commitment, hard work, and persistence are forgotten when a young player learns how to pitch. Attending a pitching lesson here or there, only before important games, or when a parent thinks their child isn’t throwing enough strikes this week, is not a recipe for success. In most cases there is minimal practice in between these lessons. I not only want to give parents and pitchers the opportunity to learn mechanics but to also learn the hardest thing about pitching - developing a “practice.”

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” - Will Durant

When does a girl become a pitcher? Is it in the moment she declares her position? When her coach has appointed her the one who’s going out on the mound today? When you sign her up for her first lesson? Learning to pitch is a process of becoming someone who OWNS the position and takes full responsibility of her role of a pitcher. Although a girl is usually considered a pitcher once she pitches in a few games, her shouldn’t be to simply stand on the mound and throw enough strikes to keep her team in it. Her goal is perhaps something more, to own it. Own the mound, her practice, and her position.