Did you know that you are suppose to drink 7-10 ounces of water every 10-20 minutes during exercise? If you are working hard, you need to hydrate.  Line up at the water cooler and make them go through one by one until everyone has had their fill.

My college athletic trainer told me that my that hydrating can increase performance by 20-30%.  It not only helps you perform at a higher level for longer, but it helps your brain concentrate and stay focused on the task at hand.

Here is short article about The Importance of Good Hydration.

Want to improve your game, drink more water.

Athletes: The Importance of Good Hydration

If you have 10 minutes to watch this video, it will give you a whole new understanding of what it takes to be at the next level.

This is one of the most motivational interviews I have ever seen and I want you to keep this in mind this winter as you begin your baseball batting workouts.

But this year I want you to take it a step further and really challenge yourself!  Here’s why.

Statistically speaking, about 14 days after the first of the year most people will have given up on their New Year’s Resolutions and fall back into their same old routine.   It’s your fault, I promise!  It’s simply how people are wired.  Let me explain.

In theory, if you were committed to your change for just 30 days you would accomplish your goals and put a check mark to your resolutions. After those 30 days are up, you would feel like you have been living that way your whole life.  So why do most people never make it past 14 days?

Most people know this time period as the “Learning Curve”. The first 14-15 days are the toughest two weeks you will ever experience!  Believe or not, you brain operates on habitual behavior more than even you might realize.  Just like physically training your body, you must train your brain to react the way that you want it too.  After all you are trying to teach yourself a brand new way to live.

The easiest example to relate to is the time you go to bed at night and wake up in the morning.  Even waking up just 15 minutes earlier than you are used to is enough to through anyone off for an entire day!  For you adults out there, try cutting back on your morning cup of Joe?  Imagine two weeks without a cup of coffee in the morning? But, if you stuck it out for 30 days, you will wonder why you ever started drinking coffee in the first place!

This whole cycle of habit creation is what brought you the term “muscle memory” with regards to sports training.  When swinging a baseball bat, your brain naturally wants you body to work in a certain way.  To improve you swing, you must teach your brain an entirely different way of hitting a baseball.  So do you have 30 baseball swings in you right now that will change the way you hit?

I don’t think so!

Unlike getting up in the morning or simply not drinking coffee, improving your mechanics can be much more difficult.  It requires patience and understanding of the goals you need to accomplish each and every swing.  This is why I want you to step up your New Year’s Resolutions and take them one step further onto something I call the Daily Player Contract.

Daily Player Contract

This Daily Player Contract is a commitment to your baseball batting training session that will happen that very day!  Instead of focusing on your goals once a year, why not focus on what your goals should be that day and that swing!  I think you would all agree that if you were able to get better even just a little bit every day or understand your batting mechanics a little better on every swing, by the end of the year you would be a completely different player! A better player!

So this year I want to challenge you to fill out this contract every single day.  What do you want to improve upon? How do you intend to improve?  The baseball swing has a lot of moving parts to focus on, what is going to make you improve right now.

Humor me and try it out for just 30 days and see if your batting skills don’t improve dramatically.

Call or email me with any questions.

Happy New Year!

By definition it means the principle that hard work is intrinsically virtuous or worthy of reward.

Those are some pretty powerful words.   Good work ethic means you take it upon yourself to work hard with no short cuts and that you are worthy of any rewards that come your way as a result.

When I was 14 years old I was asked what my goals were as a baseball player.  Like most kids that age, I wanted to take it as far as I could and possibly play in the pros.  Then I was asked what I was going to do to get there?  I gave the generic answer, “Work hard in practice, listen to my coaches, and always give 100%.”

My coach answered, “That’s a good start.”  A good start I thought?

“What are you doing that separates you from the other 95% of baseball players?” my coached asked.

My answer was surprising shocking considering I was always considered one of the hardest workers at practice, “Nothing.”  I was doing just as much as the guy next to me but nothing that I would consider worthy of reward.

Work Ethic – The principle that hard work is intrinsically virtuous or worthy of reward.

I don’t like the term good work ethic because I believe you either have work ethic or you don’t.

As 2011 comes to a close I want you to reflect on what you did to stand out among the other players or coaches.  If you can confidently say I had work ethic this past year then keep on doing your thing.

This up coming year should be your year to have the principle that your hard work is intrinsically virtuous and you reap any rewards that you are worthy of.

The answer is both.

It all comes down to perspective, or lack their of.   When Thomas Edison was working towards the invention of the light bulb, he “failed” to succeed over a thousand times.  As Edison continued to purse his quest he was interviewed by a local reporter who simply wanted to know how long he would pursue his quest for light and how he felt about failing over a thousand times.  Edison responded, “We haven’t failed at all.  We now know 1000 ways not to build a light bulb.”  Edison had always felt that, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

There is one simple key to mental toughness, persistence.  Every second of every day you have the opportunity to learn either what will work for you or what will not work for you.  The key is taking the time to reflect and learn.  Simply going through life will never bring the results you are looking for, just frustration and dissatisfaction. You must learn and allow yourself to try a different way of attaining the result you desire.

To become great at baseball hitting, you must take the time to learn and understand.  Wanting to become a better hitter and putting in the practice time is only step one.   But I think you would agree that practice without purpose or understanding will only bring the same results.  Nothing different means nothing gained or nothing lost.

If you lack the knowledge to assess your batting swing, take the time to learn different theories that are out there to broaden your perspective.  You can’t make a batting adjustment that you simply don’t know about.   The only way to get better is to continually progress.  The only way to continually progress is to have the desire to be better than you were one second ago.

Mentally tough players are meticulous and progressive.  They are not faced with any more or any less opportunity than the next guy, they have just figured out how to take advantage of the opportunities that the next guy missed.

What opportunities have you been missing?

In 2011 Jonathan Papelbon, appeared in 63 games and pitched in 64.1 innings during the regular season.    For you statistics majors out there, that is just 39% of games played and 4.4% of innings pitched during the regular season.

I think the world of closers and the have an extremely important role in helping a team win a baseball game.  However, saving the game for a win is a product of the 8 innings leading up to the 9^th.

The better a team can play the first 8 innings, the better chance they have to close out a win in the 9^th.   50 million is a lot of money and time to spend on a player who can only help you win when you’re ahead in the game.

Wouldn’t you rather spend your time and money on players who can help you get ahead?

I only ask this question because today is about spending major time on major things.  As your off-season baseball workouts slowly begin to pick up over the next few months, what are the major things you need to focus on?

Seriously, what is going to help you improve or keep performance at a high level?

The correct answer is the fundamentals and the basics.  What do you hear every time a player goes into a batting slump?  “Time to get back to the basics.”

Why leave the baseball batting basics in the first place?

During this past season, my first year coaching staff raised the team batting average by .50 points and set the single season wins record.  To compliment that, the team also stroked 11 more doubles and 11 more triples than the year before and scored 105 more runs!

This was all done without a home field and only taking live batting practice once or twice a week because of limited facilities.  In fact, most of batting practice was done with wiffle balls because of funding issues.

The majority of our time was spent on the same 5-7 batting drills that would create success today, success tomorrow, and success next year.

If you want to find out what a few of those drills look like, go to the homepage HotStreakHitting.com and enter you name and email address. You will find a couple of baseball batting videos that will truly help you out during this upcoming season. Why?  Because you will be focusing your energy on the batting movements that will create a sound mechanical swing that will help you drive the ball to all fields.

As you begin you off-seasons workouts take the time to work on the batting basics.

If you have questions, send me an email at Jim@HotStreakHitting.com.  I would be happy to help.

Can it really be as simple as the old cliché we believe?

For you Yankees fans out there, I want to turn to the face of your franchise.  Derek Jeter.  I was watching a special a few months back where several players had made a special note that Derek Jeter was the most confident player they have ever played with.  With all the great players in the game today, that is really something to say.  It’s no surprise that under his leadership they Yankees have gone on to win five championships.

There are two things that you need tin order to have the heart of a champion.  One, you need to believe you will get the job done no matter the circumstances.  It’s not your opinion that you will succeed it’s a fact.  Two, there are no excuses.  You don’t blame the umpire for taking the bat out of your hands or the fact that the baseball got caught in the lights and you didn’t see it.   It’s about getting the job done.

A good friend of mine once told me that Michael Jordon would not stop practicing until he felt he had won.  A simple game of Horse would not end until the series was in his favor.  Ie. You cannot beat me and I will keep going until I prove it.  If I’m not as talented as you I will out last you.

Imagine what that type of mindset would do for your baseball careerImagine what that type of mindset would do in your life?

If you don’t have the heart of a champion already, take five minutes to reflect on what you need to do to raise your game to that level.

Congratulations to the St. Louis Cardinal’s on winning the 2011 World Series Championship!

After a great day at the plate in early summer, Albert was asked what makes him such a great hitter and what he attributes to his great success.  Without missing a beat, he responded by telling the reporter that he thinks about hitting the baseball to all fields.  He followed it up by talking about the consistency in which he approaches his at bat.

For the younger players out there, keep it simple.  Chances are that you have a decent swing already and you only need to make a couple tweaks to really succeed as a player.  Unfortunately, players go crazy searching for the right answers and often end up worse off then when they started.   Did you know that the difference between a .250 hitter and a .300 hitter is one more rollover ground ball through the hole a week?  One extra hit a week!  That’s it!

If you don’t know what mechanical adjustments you need to make to improve, don’t make any at all!  Educate yourself first before you go with the shotgun approach and test anything and everything when it comes your batting mechanics.

Work your visual skills.  Work on recognizing pitches in the right sections of the plate and hitting the baseball to all fields.   Tell yourself L for Left, C for Center, or R for Right after every pitch.  If your taking BP, have your BP pitcher confirm that you recognized the pitch correctly.  Considering that when your hitting the baseball well, you are usually “seeing the ball well”, you might as well work on what is going to get you the hits.

Enjoy the clip of Albert Pujols setting a baseball record!

If you want to be successful as a ball club, you have to have a manger that has the fortitude manage strong personalities to victory.

When you think of Pedro Martinez, you have a vision of a dominating player who has the swagger of champion.  His confidence is through the roof and his ability to meet a challenge head on is second to none.  His focus was always on being the best.

Given that 90% of managing a successful ball club is creating an atmosphere of confidence in the ability to get things done, I can’t think of anyone better to lead a team to their next championship.

Imagine the preconference everyday?  I for one hope the Sox reach out to Pedro and he accepts the offer.

Given that today’s focus was on mental aspect of the game, I want to take the time to review the first video in the Ultimate Baseball Training Program.

Thoughts?

Psychology Behind Hitting:

The real question is why?

For that I like to refer to a simple question.  What do you do to win?

The short answer is pitch, hit, and play defense.  Every coach has said it and it never works because although it is that simple, it’s not that easy.

The answer is deeper, but not much.

For instance, the college team I coach will win when the stay focused on what will make them successful, and then constantly remind themselves what they need to work on.  Here is the hitting and fielding list our coaching staff always has in the forefront of our mind, and instill in our players every single day.

Hitting:

-Smooth and soft load
-Let the ball get deep
-Stay above the baseball
-Extend towards the field you want to hit the ball

Fielding:

-Think ahead of the play
-Attack the baseball
-Field up through baseball
-Throw the ball hard across the diamond
-Keep moving your legs

The second half of this equation is player specific reminders before every single pitch that keep you focused and successful.  Winning is a by product of doing the right things correct.  This is precisely why we tripled the single seasons wins record in our first season as a coaching staff.

If all that you are trying to do is win, you will end up loosing guaranteed.

If you stay true to this simple task, you will never be faced with a such a drastic slump for the rest of your career.