Author Archives: Robert Riggins

Coaching A Moving Target: Hitting Development From Adolescence To Adulthood

What if we could use the awkward period of puberty to our advantage? I think puberty & maturation is an area of hitting development that is often overlooked. I won’t bore you w/ the details on how this thought experiment (more accurately, an observation & discussion) developed. Let’s just skip that part & get rightContinue reading “Coaching A Moving Target: Hitting Development From Adolescence To Adulthood”

ReThinking Ocular Dominance

Do eye patches have any application past our weird hitting experiment? It’s been almost 4 years since we researched & experimented w/ this idea of training ocular dominance in hitters at Heavy Mettle. I am still convinced that it is widely misunderstood & overlooked. This season, something peaked my curiosity to revisit this idea. IContinue reading “ReThinking Ocular Dominance”

Thought Experiment: Learning Styles

I was a teacher for 10 years & I went through college classes explaining Learning Styles in detail. I attended many of Professional Development Days explaining why we needed to “Differentiate” our instruction. Diversify our teaching methods so you could accommodate the Learning Styles of every student. I still remember filling out lesson plans explainingContinue reading “Thought Experiment: Learning Styles”

Swing Decisions Thought Experiment

I’ve thought about this one for a long time. Not only how I’d build out swing decisions protocol, but how would one get around the practicality of actually scaling it out? There’s limited time in the DSL & at an affiliate. So rolling out something that eats away at the schedule or increases workload onContinue reading “Swing Decisions Thought Experiment”

Shoes, Ankles, & Ground Reaction Force

1st of new blog posts I’m starting. 2 questions, 10 minutes, 1 thought experiment. Let’s get this out of the way. If you need a refresher on Ground Reaction Force check the following link: Bertec Course Question 1: Can the type of shoe a hitter wears affect performance? It seems intuitive, but let’s take aContinue reading “Shoes, Ankles, & Ground Reaction Force”

First Principles Thinking & Hitting

Understanding what has to be true in the act of hitting improved my ability to develop hitters. I could apply this to such a wide array of topics. For the sake of time, I will focus this post to the following areas: For the first 15 years of my coaching career, my sole focus wasContinue reading “First Principles Thinking & Hitting”

Neuroscience and Pitching: Building Better Command Training (A Thought Experiment)

I was a pitcher in high school and slated to be one in college as well. Being a pitcher comes with the universal cue of “Just Throw Strikes”, as if it were just that easy. I always had pretty decent command and on several occasions I was informed by coaches that I threw too manyContinue reading “Neuroscience and Pitching: Building Better Command Training (A Thought Experiment)”

Neuroscience and Hitting: Part 2 Ear Plugs, White Noise, and Bat Speed

Disclaimer: Some information & data has been purposely left out due to the proprietary nature of this training method. We as a staff feel comfortable sharing this information as the majority of what is explained here is publicly available knowledge. We just pieced ideas together. Our first attempt at having a hitter use ear plugsContinue reading “Neuroscience and Hitting: Part 2 Ear Plugs, White Noise, and Bat Speed”

Neuroscience and Hitting: Part 1 Vision

Key Points -Monocular occlusion training optimizes gaze performance of novices in complex skills -Monocular occlusion training improves kinetic visual acuity & binocular fusion -Having access to speed & time of a moving object improves object location predictions -Visual working memory can contaminate visual perception -Visual perception is 80% memory based -Improving visual working memory wouldContinue reading “Neuroscience and Hitting: Part 1 Vision”