Youth Movement & Hitting Progression
If you work with young athletes, you definitely want to try this progression out!
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- Waterball shakes
- Wide base, chest over toes, rotate a water-filled physioball back and forth as fast as possible. Turn from up top, anchor down low.
- Be a statue
- Getting to a strong position at foot strike is critical for a good swing. This is a great way to build awareness for what’s strong and what’s weak.
- Waterbag feet cement turns
- Get into the strong position you discovered from “Be a Statue” and try to make the water fast and loud.
- Add in a clap constraint to make this drill more reactionary!
- Shuffle crossbody throws (medicine ball or waterball)
- Get the feet moving and get athletic. Two shuffles, try to knock your partner over.
- Heavy bat with soccer balls (or basketballs)
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Let’s look at the last one: Heavy bat and soccer balls. There’s two different components to this drill. The first is the weight of the bat.
Kids are a population of players that really benefit from the constraint of heavier weighted bats. This is because of how they’re built: They don’t have a ton of muscle mass to rely on. While this might seem like a disadvantage on the outside (why want less muscle for a more difficult task), but it can actually become a pretty sneaky advantage.
When our body can’t rely on the muscular system to produce force, it has to go to a different system: The fascial system. When it comes to rotational rate of force development, the fascial system is key (more on this here).
When you give a youth kid a weighted bat, they can’t “muscle up” and force the bat to move a specific way. They’re at the mercy of their hardware. They need to organize into better positions of leverage where they're stronger, more stable, and they can move the bat more efficiently. If you can't find stability with a weighted bat, you're not going to swing the bat. The bat is going to swing you.
Soccer balls (or basketballs) are another tool we often use with kids because of the feedback it gives them at contact. If you aren’t strong, stable, and in a good position to transmit force, the soccer ball is going to let you know. Just because a baseball weighs five ounces doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hit it like it weighs 500 lbs. Soccer balls might not weigh 500 lbs, but they’re a lot tougher to square up than a five ounce baseball.
When striking an object with limited room for error, our body finds solutions that give us the most room for error. This is the magic behind soccer balls.
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ICYMI: "The Parallels Between Skill Acquisition & this Common Driving Mistake"
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- Why our brains work a lot like cheetahs
- We're both interested in doing one specific thing
- The double-edged sword behind our brain's "autopilot" system
- There's a reason why it exists, but this often becomes the problem when you're trying to break bad habits
- How our unconscious habits can teach us about the skill acquisition process
- What is now an unconscious habit was once a conscious decision...
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🚨 Having success at the field using drills in the 108 Way Mentorship? Share your progressions built from the portal and we can highlight you in next week’s email!
Email all submissions to 108@108performanceacademy.com.
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Thanks for being a part of the 108 Family!
- The 108 Team
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