Zoom Instruction: “Proprioceptively Accurate Power Position”
Pitching instruction is not a quick fix; it is a long-term development process!
- Starting now allows you to get on a path of continuous improvement, with a coach who can provide ongoing feedback and support for months to come.
- By making this investment in quality instruction, you gain a competitive edge.
- Pitching instruction allows you to focus on building a correct, efficient, and injury-preventative foundation.
- The instruction you receive treats your body as a complete kinetic chain, ensuring a holistic approach to your development.
Ultimately, now is the time not just to perform, but to hone your skills for sustainable success.
The motion you have vs. the motion you need.
The Motion You Currently Make
In a conventional motion, you continually adjust your hips, stride length, and arm movement as your body constantly seeks balance.
- Starting Position: Proprioception often guides a pitcher to center their weight over their back foot, which limits the ability to drive toward the plate.
- Foot Plant: To compensate for an unbalanced start, your stride makes a series of adjustments to restore the body’s balance as the front foot touches the ground.
- Throwing Action: Without doing anything to produce command, these offsetting activities put your glove arm under your armpit and bring your throwing arm forward to deliver your pitch, resulting in an inefficient, potentially stressful delivery that promotes injury.
- Kinetic Chain: With your glove arm finishing under your armpit, your kinetic chain always fails to fire.
The Motion You Need
Your proprioceptively accurate power position leads directly into your glove hand moving across your body, initiating one uncanny, regular motion that hits your target with consistent power and breaks down into one critical, fluid phase.
- The Starting Position: Your foot position gathers your weight just in front of your back foot. From here, your front leg lift gets your front knee in a specific position and has your front foot facing the target.
- Kinetic Chain: You maximize power and efficiency by sweeping your glove hand across your body, landing your stride effectively, and getting your throwing hand to fire the ball directly toward your target.
Everything points to the position of your arms, legs, glove hand, and throwing arm, and, unless your stride precedes your glove hand activity, you’ll always fire your kinetic chain.
When you train with Coach Skip, Coach Skip teaches you a “Proprioceptively Accurate Power Position” with your sessions designed to provide a clear understanding of your past and future pitching motions.
You choose to learn your skills from the comfort of your home, garage, or field, and you discover a motion that shows one fluid movement to the target.
- Initial Observation. During your first Zoom Session, you show Coach Skip 2 or more motions from the stretch, where he keenly observes your motion, paying close attention to your “Proprioceptively Accurate Power Position,” foot placement, glove work, and the seamless flow of your kinetic chain.
- Personalized Feedback. Coach Skip identifies specific areas where your motion can be improved to enhance command, boost velocity, and significantly reduce your risk of injury. This isn’t just a lecture; it’s a discussion where you’ll gain a deeper understanding of what needs to be done and why.
- Instruction Begins. Once we have a plan in place, the hands-on, Zoom instruction begins. Coach Skip guides you through adjustments designed to refine your mechanics, introduces a specific drill to help you get the ball to the target, and seamlessly integrates the principles of “Proprioceptively Accurate Power Positions” into your throw.
- Follow-Up. The support doesn’t end with the initial instruction. For 12 months after your Zoom Session, Coach Skip continues to provide guidance. You send pitching motion videos to Coach Skip, who uses these videos to help identify areas where your motion aligns with instruction and areas that require improvement, ensuring you stay on track with your development. In extreme cases, an additional Zoom session will be scheduled to correct your movements.
By starting in a “proprioceptively accurate power position” and having the glove arm move to your front hip, you allow for a consistent kinetic chain transfer of energy, resulting in uncanny regularity to the target.
Zoom Instruction is $300 $120 for a session, plus 12 months video follow-up!
- If anything is unclear or you would like to discuss your instructions further, please don’t hesitate to contact Coach Skip.
$120 ZOOM INSTRUCTION In-Person Instruction in Sicklerville, NJ 79-Page Book for Coaches
Why Missing the Starting Position Makes Things Difficult.
Suppose you “miss” your optimal starting position (e.g., balance is off, weight distribution is incorrect, hips aren’t appropriately loaded, drive leg isn’t ready to push). In that case, it disrupts the entire kinetic chain from the outset.
- Flawed Foundation: The initial energy generation from the lower body is compromised. If you can’t drive effectively from the ground up, you’re immediately trying to make up for lost power and open yourself to injury.
- Timing Issues: An inconsistent starting position throws off the timing of subsequent movements. If the leg lift is too high/low, too fast/slow, or the weight shift is off, everything else down the chain is out of sync.
Proprioceptive Instincts and Compensatory Movements.
- The Brain’s Goal: Get the Ball to the Target. A pitcher’s brain, through proprioceptive feedback, constantly receives information about the body’s position and movement. Its ultimate goal is to get the ball from the hand to the target.
- Automatic Adjustments: When the brain senses that the body is “off” from its ideal kinetic chain sequence (due to a flawed starting position, for example), it triggers subconscious compensatory movements. These are adjustments made in later stages of the delivery to “fix” the problem and still get the ball reasonably close to the target.
Why Compensation is Detrimental (Even if They Get the Ball There).
- Increased Stress/Injury Risk: Compensatory movements often involve overusing smaller, more vulnerable muscles and joints (especially in the arm and shoulder). For example, if the lower body isn’t generating enough power, the arm might try to “muscle” the ball, leading to high stress. If the front side pulls off early due to poor initial balance, the arm has to “throw around” the body, causing additional strain and potential injury.
- Inconsistency/Lack of Command: While these compensations might get the ball “close,” they rarely result in consistent, pinpoint command. The precise timing and angles are constantly changing because the body is reacting to an initial error, rather than executing a smooth, repeatable pattern. Each compensatory movement might be slightly different.
- Inefficiency/Reduced Velocity Potential: Compensations are inherently less efficient than a clean kinetic chain. Energy is wasted, leading to a reduced ceiling for velocity. The pitcher throws “hard” for their effort, but not at their absolute maximum potential.
- Difficulty Identifying the Root Cause: Because the body is so adept at compensating, a pitcher often only sees the result (e.g., arm pain, lack of command) and struggles to recognize that the root of the problem lies much earlier in the delivery, possibly in the initial “starting position.”
The Ideal Scenario.
The goal for a pitcher is to create a single, fluid, and efficient kinetic chain that starts from a consistent and powerful starting position. When that initial position is consistently achieved, and the body moves seamlessly through the subsequent phases (including the crucial glove arm going to the front hip), the need for compensatory movements is minimized. This leads to …
- Maximized Velocity: All energy is channeled efficiently.
- Optimized Command: The release point is consistent due to repeatable mechanics.
- Reduced Injury Risk: Stress is distributed appropriately across the larger, stronger muscle groups of the lower body and core.
Coach Skip’s guaranteed Zoom instruction brings the power of foundational mechanics directly to you, emphasizing the kinetic chain, proprioception, and lower-body involvement to optimize your results, wherever you are.
Discover a Much Anticipated Motion Today …
Zoom/Video Instruction | In-Person, South Jersey Pitching Instruction | A 79-Page Coach’s Supplement
