Talent, Skill, & Technique: How to Mitigate Obstacles

“I don’t look for skill in art… Skill has nothing to do with technical proficiency… I’m interested in people who rethink skill, who redefine or re-imagine it: an engineer, say, who builds rockets from rocks. “ — Jerry Saltz

We have all heard the common phrases “ Well, that guy gets away with it because he’s a big leaguer” or “ Buddy, you can’t do that, he’s more gifted than you”. For the majority of my baseball career, I spent time with “instructors” who ingrained this philosophy into my development plan. I could spend ample time discussing my career and the lack of development however that’s not my motivation. I decided after my career that I would devote myself to doing what is necessary to make sure kids that trust me with their development maximize their potential. What I've found is that big leaguers and successful athletes don’t necessarily contain more talent, their success is deeply rooted in how they train.

Technique — Procedure used to complete a task. In the swing this could be “scap load” or “hip hinge”.

Skill — Skill is often mistaken for talent. It is defined as “the ability to co-coordinate the entirety of movement to achieve a task”. In baseball or softball this could be hitting the barrel of the bat or hitting the ball to left field.

Talent — Player’s genetic potential ability.

For the purpose of this post I will focus on the two things we can train: Skill and Technique.

Perhaps my favorite quote regarding technique and skill is “ Looking at technique in baseball while ignoring skill is like a body builder working on technique with an unloaded bar”. While this approach may be necessary in some instances cross training skill and technique will always expedite learning. Consider the fact that professional baseball players often see extreme variance in velocity and location but yet the still tend to hit at a high clip. This is due to their skill adaptability. They have an innate ability to find the barrel regardless of the situation. Going back to professional training you will often hear me talk about external v. internal cues. An internal cue would be keeping the forearm at 45 degrees or supinating the hand. An external cue would be “turn the barrel down the clock face” or “ keep the barrel in the pitch lane”. While both external and internal serve a purpose, using external cues will show greater improvements in a shorter period of time. This is largely due to the body’s self organization to achieve a task and internal cues being hyper-focused on one movement. In order for your player(s) to maximize development it is important that they implement technique and skill into all practice environments. If you only focus on skill you may never reach full potential while only training technique will limit adaptation to variability

Additionally, it is important to understand a players capacity to learn. For a professional the need to break down the swing into singular components may be a waste of players time. For a beginner however, allowing the to focus on one piece of the movement will drastically increase the odds of them adopting the movement. For more skilled players I also like the idea of increasing variability to determine when the technique tends to breakdown. This can be seen as a bit of “reverse engineering” but will often allow the athletes training to be much more efficient.

For the professional allowing them to self organize will certainly yield better long term results than block training. Simply giving a hitter a task that requires technique will often promote the bodies ability to self organize and will yield desired movements.

While utilizing external cues and encouraging self organization may be ideal learning is not linear and often the process will require flexibility. Going back to the last post we know that there are several constraints as it pertains to learning a new movement. Below I will discuss how to overcome those.

Strength & Flexibility — I could sit here and tell you I use “TPI” but I don’t. Typically we review film and look at how the body reacted to pitches in different locations as well as how is the body moving while trying to achieve our swing goals. Based on this we will add different drills to the hitters “movement prep”. When the player is starting his hitting programming and still having issues with strength or lack of we will use constraints to assist the hitter. Great example would be a hitter that lacks pelvic stability at impact we will place something between their feet and tell them to squeeze with their groin. This stabilizes the front hip allowing the barrel to maintain direction.

Psychological — Players often think that in order to hit the ball hard you have to swing hard. This is ….. somewhat true but it is much deeper than that. For example, bat speed does not create a higher exit velocity per se, a square collision does. So often times just telling the hitter that lets focus on a square collision and then educating them on how to foster that will assist them in achieving a desired movement.

Result(s) — This one can be tricky but often times simply removing the ball will immediately emphasize the need to focus on the movement.

A sample process for me for a hitter values results

• Execute swings at low effort without a ball with tee
• Increase effort without ball with tee
• Decrease effort again but add ball to tee
• Increase effort with ball but put net close to hitter to not allow hitter to see result off tee

Trust — Don’t start your relationship off talking about hitting, ask about school etc.. Oh and genuinely care..

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