This is the tweet that got me to realize that producing content is much more important than always consuming information. Up until this point, I had always been looking to the people above me in baseball for “new ideas” to apply to our practices. I realized that this method wasn’t working well because I didn’t have the passion behind the ideas in the first place. The first original idea that I had was condensing our movement assessment to only two exercises while performing them every single day. The reason that I went to this method was because I wasn’t confident in being able to make change with many exercises outside the overhead squat and single leg squat. I am a one man show when it comes to S&C for Maryville College, and the more exercises I use to see improvement, the more it clouds my judgement. I saw some instant success and made adjustments to our players that I didn’t see coming. I had been thinking about movement as mechanics but this made me shift to only thinking about movement. If you follow me on social media, then you can see the importance that I put into movement for all of our players. 

The world of social media really ate at me when I started getting into coaching because of how much importance I put into knowing everything. There would be some great coaches that would put out information and I didn’t understand it. I would get frustrated at times and give up because I didn’t understand some of the content. I can look back and laugh at this now, because I now know that this is a ridiculous thought process. The guys that I’m learning from on these social platforms have accumulated that information over years of trial and error. I was a typical millennial and thought I could learn something in ONE TWEET. Once I started coming to this realization I started writing my blogs. I realized that we can convey a message well in a tweet, but to have full “buy-in” on a topic- we have to know much more about the subject. I was writing about myself and it all just started to fall into place. Then, I started writing about subjects that the majority of the baseball network already knows about. Lastly, I thought I needed to take a dive into the unknown and figure some stuff out on my own. 

Another reason why posting original ideas is a great plan is that you’ll start seeing all  the dots connect. An example of this is the progression that I’ve gone through with the “poor man’s ice bath.” Here is a video of our guys at Maryville performing this drill.

I learned this recovery protocol from Ian Kadish while interning under him at the Performance Compound in Tampa, FL. I loved the idea of getting some of the same benefits from an ice bath while it being 100 times more convenient. I thought about this drill in the same manner for years and used it less and less. I am now learning about the benefits of breathing and meditation, this has led me to see the drill in a different light. Not only are we getting the original benefits, but we are in a great position to work on some meditation. 

Back to the original tweet at the beginning of this blog, I want to touch on the no shoes method. When I started to think about having our players do some work barefoot, it was because I knew the quality of their shoes was probably not the best. This was another drill that caused a lot of dots to be connected for me. After I posted about it, the amount of positive feedback I received was overwhelming. The biggest thing I took away from this approach, is that I didn’t know nearly enough about our feet and how they interact with the ground. What I’m getting at here is that I had a suspicion that this idea was good but wasn’t sure- and just put it out there for the world to see. I can talk about the benefits from walking barefoot on grass for days on end. It has led me down to narrow down my coaching philosophy. This is the good side of producing more content than you consume. The bad side is that there are going to be ideas that you think are brilliant but they gain no traction amongst your peers. This can mean one of two things. You are either way ahead of everyone when it comes to the idea, or it really just is a bad idea that probably won’t work. A good way to think about this would be an entrepreneur. If you want to be one of the best coaches in the world, then you have to push the limits of what you know. You will fail and that is what’s going to make you a better coach/person. Every successful person fails but they get right back up and produce information that makes the world a better place.