Designing Better Practice

Data wins! It’s no longer an argument about “believing in numbers” or not. Most front offices are finding ways to apply available data using models and machine learning regarding trade acquisitions, drafting, free agent signings, pitch design, biomechanics, etc. Advantage lives here. Something that hasn’t changed as much among most of these organizations? How they practice and go about acquisition of new and improving skillsets for their players.

First off, I’ll briefly share some personal experience that is relevant to the topic. I was fortunate enough to play at almost every level baseball has to offer. I played at a large high school, on bad travel teams, on elite travel teams, JUCO baseball at San Jacinto in Houston, in the SEC at the University of Missouri, minor league baseball for the Los Angeles Dodgers, the LMB in Mexico, and independent baseball. To my surprise, and probably yours as well, almost all of these stops’ practice design was much the same. How we worked on developing skills, attempting new skills, and practicing skills we were already elite at was all roughly the same no matter where my feet were. Need to work on a slider because it was ineffective last game? Go throw it in a stagnant bullpen setting with your pitching coach standing next to you telling you to get it out in front more if you are continually missing arm side. Do the same dynamic stretch every day, play catch in the outfield, pitch in the game. That was my experience from high school all the way to most of professional baseball. I wasn’t really exposed to anything different until my time with Los Angeles. I was further exposed to some of these concepts toward the end of my playing career in my own training.

It became clear to me that practice and training can be significantly better than what most athletes currently experience, no matter the level. Training environments need to be built on promoting carryover of desired skill to competition. That’s the main goal of practice, right? To get better at the game? Many coaches and trainers have gotten lost in regurgitating basic block practice techniques that are simply boring. For whatever reason, many coaches and trainers feel the need to associate non-stimulating training as necessary for player development, even in athletes with elite skill. Or that high quality training can’t be enjoyable or look different than it has in the past. These preconceived notions couldn’t be further from the truth. I also believe the way we practice in amateur sport is a main driver of burnout and negative association with physical activity after athletic careers in general. I could write a whole blog on that as well.

So how does one make practice “better”? More stimulating for the athletes? We must understand a few concepts and principles first. Ecological dynamics is the theoretical framework for understanding how movement and decision making emerge from the continuous interactions between an individual and the environment. Perception and action are inseparable. An athlete must perceive in order to act upon anything. Elite skill expression is shaped by the visual, auditory, and tactile information experienced during training and competition. Athletes improve by learning to interpret and act on external feedback rather than constantly searching for new internal processes.

We know information is abundant in the properties of an environment. Environmental constraints, task specifics, anatomical constraints and affordances of the athlete, and so on. These always need to be considered in practice. Be more creative in varying these constraints without getting lost in the sauce. When designing an environment for a desired outcome, a coach must consider the difficulty of the task based on affordances, meaning the opportunities for action provided by the environment relative to the athlete’s skill level, and the constraints placed on the athlete. There is an optimal zone where most training should occur. If too much or too little information is present, or if the task is too hard or too easy, progress slows. There is value in exposing athletes to tasks that are slightly too easy or slightly too hard in certain doses, but the sport itself is rarely too easy or too hard at the athlete’s current level.

Practice should resemble the game as closely as possible. Practice environments can look messy. The game is messy. When was the last time you watched an entire baseball game in person? The number of mistakes made by a top 25 NCAA D1 school per game is astonishing. Learn to navigate this chaos better. Most practice needs to consist of tasks with lower and moderate success rates most often. Practice environments should be designed to be rich and representative enough that the environment itself dictates the actions of the athlete. When tasks are built this way, athletes learn to attune to real information rather than relying on preconceived ideas or internal representations of what they think is happening due to lack of stimulation from the environment.

For example, earlier I mentioned practicing the slider in a basic bullpen setting after a start where the slider was ineffective. Why not take away some volume, add some intensity, and introduce a hitter into the mix on the bullpen day? It is fairly easy to flip sliders to intended zones at 80 percent in a 30 pitch pen. Why not challenge the skill in an environment that is representative of the actual game? This is a fantastic solution, as we are not only getting actual game repetitions but doing so in an environment where we can make controlled adjustments. Your pitcher spiking fastballs non-stop? Scoot the catcher back to 65 ft instead of telling him to stop spiking his fastball. Examples can be endless with the large spectrum of issues that present themselves within a population of athletes. Make the practice stimulating enough to essentially get them out of their own head and focused on the task. More external and objective feedback is a great start. Athletes need a rich environment to interact with in order to grow. A coach should be the architect of this environment rather than pushing personal opinions or preconceived notions about how the athlete should view the task. What is the desired outcome? How can we design the environment around the athlete to better accommodate skill acquisition that is going to carry over to the game? Telling your pitcher to simply get around his slider more or working on it in sub maximal bullpens isn’t going to show up when he needs a strikeout in a leverage situation.

Setting up environments with individual differences between learners can seem challenging. Obviously, as coaches, you have to ditch any sense of a “textbook technique” with skills that incorporate a system. In throwing, swimming, sprinting, swinging, etc. Even the elite sprinters in the world, like Usain Bolt, Noah Lyles, and Gout Gout, have different strategies for posting record times. Do I even need to make a case for 100 mph throwers or MLB DHs? When presented with the problem of having 100 players and wanting to carry out a better practice environment, we need to simply be more precise about the problems we present for the population of players and what that looks like in a live practice environment. Be creative in creating problems. This will attune athletes to better navigate the environment and better use their own “toolbox” to create solutions.

At the end of the day, coaches are responsible for overseeing the development of their own team. As a coach, you cannot be afraid of giving players the freedom to navigate within the parameters that you are responsible for creating. Exploration and promoting self regulation in a rich environment is a good thing. You must not be afraid to provide athletes the ability to self navigate the environment that you created.