Today we’re starting the new year with something a little different.

Recently Rick Pauly of Pauly Girl Fastpitch and the High Performance Pitching certification program and I got together for a video discussion about several topics related to fastpitch pitching. The driving topic behind it was the difference between absolutes and core principles in athletic movement generally, and how we view each relative to fastpitch pitching.

The discussion then branched out to a few other related topics, including the importance of posture, the effect of motor preferences when determining what’s optimal for performance, and the often-overlooked significance of deceleration as part of the overall kinetic chain.

So what are absolutes v core principles? We go into it more in detail in the video but briefly it’s the idea of whether there’s one “correct” way to do things – basically a hard line – or if there is a more of a range into which good pitching mechanics can fall.

In other words, do you want your pitchers doing certain things exactly the same way or does fastpitch pitching allow more room for deviation based on a number of factors? And even within that are there exceptions, i.e., pitchers who don’t necessarily do things the way they “should” but are successful anyway?

Which ultimately leads to when do you make corrections/changes and when do you just let them do what they do?

I think you’ll find it to be a pretty interesting discussion that covers a lot of ground. To check it out, follow this link to the Pauly Girl Fastpitch blog.

Happy new year to all! Or happy whatever holiday is close if you’re reading this sometime in the future.