Overthinking is something all humans do. If you don't believe me, take out your phone right now and decide what you're having for dinner. Took longer than you thought it would, huh? Yep, that's classic overthinking, and it doesn't just stop at dinner choices. It also extends to baseball, and it's something that I encounter almost every single day when working with pitchers. The simplest way to combat overthinking is with its natural opposition: self-organization.
Self-organization is a fairly simple concept that can be applied to a wide variety of groups, but for today, we're going to use it to talk about training throwers. Camazine (2001) explains it best when he notes that self-organization takes place when "pattern formation occurs through interactions internal to the system, without intervention by external directing influences," (p. 7). In other words, the body is always talking, but we often miss what it's saying because the coach won't shut up (guilty!) long enough for us to hear it. As coaches, we want to provide value to our athletes, and we often interpret our value by the word count like we're crafting an audio book on a Dickensian contract. Don't get me wrong, words have value. What we say to an athlete matters. I'm certainly not suggesting that you sit back and relax every time you work with a pitcher, but there are times where less is more. When you just keep talking and talking, you're actually just overthinking. When you speak less, you can start to simplify, and you'll often find that the solutions to your problems aren't nearly as complex as you thought they'd be.
Let's go with a recent example. I'm working with a player who has recently returned from an injury and is looking to clean up his throwing motion. Here are two photos of his throwing arm from a recent session. Both photos (video stills if we're being precise) were taken at foot strike, albeit from different angles. The first photo features him using a derivative of a towel (I prefer med bands to towels) instead of a baseball. Here are the biggest issues I'm seeing:
Biggest Issues: The wrist has pronated too early, which makes it difficult for the angle between the hand, elbow, and shoulder (think triangle measurements) to stay <90 degrees. You can't see it in a photo, but the anterior shoulder is too far offline, and this is causing a pushy arm action. It's not necessarily wrong for the shoulder to pull back, but in this instance it's not happening naturally, but is instead being done as a movement compensation. The pushy arm action that comes as a result is then causing the throwing elbow to be below the shoulder line at release, putting the thrower at risk of new injuries.
Obviously, these are issues that we want to fix. I've seen progress over the weeks, but if you know anything about motor programming, you know that it takes hundreds, maybe even thousands, of repetitions to form a habit, especially if the new motor program is being recorded over an old one. Essentially, the only thing harder than learning a new skill is unlearning an old skill so that you can then learn the new one. However, there is a sort of shortcut that you can use to bypass some of that programming. Before we get there though, let's look at the "after" picture to see what changed.
Biggest Changes: Yes, this is a different camera angle, but you can see here that the elbow angle is now <90 degrees, and the wrist is no longer pronating. If you could see the rest of the video, you'd notice that the pushy arm action was gone, external rotation of the throwing arm improved significantly, and the athlete self-reported feeling "smother, and more athletic."
So, I'm a genius right? Yep. Book a lesson. Bring me in for a coaching clinic. Hire me to handle your pitching staff. Thanks for stopping by!
Ok, I actually have a confession to make. I didn't really do much to help. In fact, all I did was roll the player a ground ball and tell him to pretend it was the hottest thing he'd ever touched in his life so that he'd get rid of it quickly. That one little cue cleaned everything up, and I just sat back and watched. That's the shortcut that can replace (or at least cut down on) those thousands of reps needed to break a habit. But why was it so effective? The body can self-organize when left alone. Instead of being asked to consciously process dozens of cues and pieces of advice, only one task is given "Get rid of the ball quickly." This allows the brain to organize the body's movements to accomplish that one task instead of worrying about the hinge, loading the scaps, stabilizing the front side, and everything else that goes into throwing a baseball. Don't get me wrong; those things matter. Unfortunately though, you can't expect an athlete to be able to process all of those things at once. Instead, get them working on simple, natural tasks. Your body knows how to throw. However, dozens of different voices telling you dozens of different things have poisoned your brain's ability to just stick with what's natural. To get it going again, you need to limit conscious processing and allow the subconscious to do its thing. Use simple cues and organic situations if you want to yield natural results.
Before we go, I want to talk a little more about why I was rolling the player a ground ball instead of just handing them a ball from a bucket. After all, if we're working on throwing, why would fielding matter? I started incorporating "movement throws" or "throws in motion" after speaking with two incredibly smart people. The first, Dr. Ismael Gallo, can be found on Twitter under the handle @docbaseballflow, and at baseballflows.com. He's a DPT and former professional player (A doctor and a ballplayer? C'mon, now you have to check him out) who does a ton of work with helping athletes use natural movement patterns to develop their skills. The second is Damien Greenwell, and he gets credit for giving me the idea for the "throws in motion" work I'm now doing with players. Damien has a wealth of knowledge in the fields of medicine and training. He can be found as one of the admins in a Facebook group called Professional Baseball Drills and Advice, which I highly recommend for anyone trying to further their knowledge. Damien taught me specifically about motion based throwing (rolling ground balls is just an entry point to a whole lot of other cool stuff), so I recommend giving his thoughts a listen as well.
I hope this post helped with a couple of things, but to summarize, here's what I want you to take away from this:
Talk less and let the athlete do more
Add variety to the type of throwing you include in your training instead of just always keeping it pitching-focused.
If you have any questions about what you just read, send me a DM. I'd be happy to talk through it.
References
Camazine, Scott. Self-Organization in Biological Systems. Princeton University Press, 2001.
Gallo, Ismael. (2022). Retrieved from https://mobile.twitter.com/docbaseballflow
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