Post 2: Gross Motor Skill Development/Teaching through physical progression.
The next few posts will be about teaching gross motor skills. The best athletes do not always make the best baseball players. How can we get the best out of our athletes. In future posts I will discuss letting the players be athletes, but in this one I want to focus on practice design for teams and parents.
When attempting to develop gross motor skills one of the best big ideas to to progress from simple to more challenging tasks. For an example moving from tee work, to front toss, to batting practice, and finishing with hitting live off a pitcher. Hitting, fielding, pitching, and throwing should all be done progressively in practice. Unfortunately, there is only so much time in a session so you can’t do them all in the same practice. However, by building routines and procedures into your practice you can have an efficient way to develop the gross motor skills and warm up at the same time.
This is a fun game that you can use to loosen up players in the beginning of practice after dynamic stretching. Please keep it to a designated amount of time so it doesn’t become the main part of practice. Another variation of this is to put all your players on the bases but the two on the bases. Have the two in the bases play catch. Have the runners go back and forth. If they are tagged they are out. The last two get to play catch. If players stay out on the base you can give them a five count to leave for the next base. You could also reward the runners who get to the most bases.