UNDERSTANDING

Understanding means that not only have you listened to your coach's explanation, but that you've given the effort to retain the instruction. In fact, if you have truly understood a particular lesson, you should be able to turn around and teach the movement to a friend. Take stretching for example. Often times, athletes are asked to take charge and lead stretching. It becomes their responsibility to know which stretch is first, how long to hold each position, and make sure that each stretch is carried out. It is extremely easy to distinguish between those pitchers that had made the effort to understand the stretching routine and subsequently could perform it and those that had simply listened, followed directions, and then couldn't complete the routine on their own.

When I speak of understanding, I mean more than just hearing what I say. Making an effort to truly understand helps athletes get much more out of the time spent with an instructor. Understanding is the action of taking listening to the next level, absorbing new material so that you can apply it going forward. Each time you hear or learn something new, really think to figure out the what's and why's that help to explain the reason you are working on this.

In initially working with beginning pitchers, I do not ask that they fully understand the reasons behind your actions. Instead, I am more concerned that the athlete simply perform the movements correctly. However, as we get deeper and deeper into the details of the pitching motion, it now becomes important for a pitcher to broaden his pitching education. He should understand why the ball is missing high, what it means to finish with a flat back, and the reasons behind keeping the weight back.

An example of understanding has to do with the familiar term: Weight back! When I first asked you to keep your weight back when breaking from the balance point, we didn't spend too much time explaining the reasons for doing this. It's more important that you train your body to lead with the lift leg towards home plate and your weight back, than it is to know why you should not drift forward dragging your arm. Well... times have now changed! It is time for us to build upon the movements that we have learned and truly begin to understand how our body is moving. It is time to know why, and it's time to start asking questions if you don't yet understand something. To further relate this theme to keeping your "weight back," we keep our weight back when breaking from the balance point to the throwing position to establish a strong landing leg, allow time for the arm to get up into a high position, and ensure proper support of the arm through release. We don't want our arm to drag behind our body, so we keep our weight back to give it time to get fully high to the throwing position.

These details may sound familiar, and it is now your job to understand them. When moving deeper into the finer aspects of baseball mechanics, don't hesitate to ask questions in the effort to understand. Questions show that you are working not only to listen and hear what it is being said, but that you are taking the next step to understand why you are being asked to move that way.

The concepts of understanding can be directly related to your efforts in the classroom as well. In my experience, I always found material easier to remember if I truly understood what was going on. In college, I studied Economics, which is a difficult subject involving concepts of math, business, graphs and theory. Even if I listened in class and took notes, I found that it was terribly difficult to memorize the material and do well on tests. However, I learned that if I took the time to analyze the information and truly understand how the pieces came together, I could answer questions much easier and even handle questions that were somewhat different from anything I had seen before.

Now... you try it!