By guest author: Nick Dixon
Being a successful batter in today's game of baseball requires four things; strength, skill, confidence, and a proper approach. To improve your game, you must improve your level of proficiency in one of these three areas. This article explains each of these prerequisites and how each is a key to baseball hitting success.
Strength - Strength in hitting can be described by two words, "BAT SPEED". If you want to be a more powerful and more dominating batter, you have got to improve your strength to increase the speed of your bat. The harder that you hit the baseball, the more success you will have at the plate. Improving strength can come from workouts and growing mass. You need to do your research and fine specific workouts drills that will improve the strength of your arms, uppers body and lower body.
Skill - Hand and eye coordination is not something that a player is born with. Practice repetition of hitting a baseball is the absolute best way to improve hand and eye coordination. The earlier a child begins swinging the bat, the better. Many people believe in hitting small balls and using smaller diameter baseball bats. Regardless of your philosophy and beliefs, the key is to practice regularly and to make sure that your techniques practiced are fundamentally sound and proper.
Confidence - It is hard to complete when you feel like you are incapable of competing. Players must have confidence in their skill, ability and knowledge of the game. They must be ready to play and ready to accept the challenges that the game offers. Practice repetition, game-like practice conditions, and pressure during practice, all serve to increase confidence levels. The player must experience success in practice and be praised for it, if he is going to have a high level of confidence. My personal belief is that practice should be so disciplined, so challenging, and so organized with game like stress situations, that when the players gets in the game, the stress level is reduced or less than it was during the practice drill.
Proper Approach - Having an approach is basically having a plan when you step into the batter's box. The players knows the number of outs, the base runner locations, the time of the game, the tendencies of the opposing pitcher, and the capabilities of one's own self. The player will put that plan into action when he steps into the batter's box. He will do whatever his team needs at that moment to improve their chances of winning the game. He will not put himself before his team. He may bunt, hit and run, be patience and try to draw a walk, try to draw at a base on as a hit batter, move deeper in the box to aid a runner, or whatever else needs to be done to help his team. The best way to learn to have an approach is to improve one's knowledge of every situation that arises in a game. Knowledge of the game and how it flows is a must for having a great approach. A great approach really requires the first three things discussed in this article, strength, skill and confidence.
I hope that this article was useful to you. Thanks for reading it. Have a great day, Nick.
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Nick Dixon is the President and founder of Nedco Sports, a sports training company established in 1999. Dixon is also an active and full time high school baseball coach with over 25 years experience. Coach Dixon is better known as the inventor of the BatAction Hitting Machine, the SKLZ Derek Jeter Hurricane Hitting Machine, the SKLZ Target Trainer, the SKLZ Derek Jeter ZipnHit Pro, and the SKLZ Strikeback Trainer. Dixon is also a contributing writer for BaseballCoachingDigest, the Youth Baseball Digest, the Baseball Parent Guide, the Baseball 2Day Coaches Journal, and Blog4Coaches.
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