It’s Not Practice
    • Warm up isn’t practice so make sure your players are actually warming up their bodies, their minds and their pitches.
    • Don’t waste time doing something that won’t improve one of these 3 things: warm up your body, better increase your focus, and improve your pitch.
    • Stay on task and keep the practicing in practice and not in warm ups.
    Drill it Right
    • If you’re going to do drills during warm-ups then make them as game-like as possible. This means the pitcher, while doing any of these warm up drills, needs to be in the same pitching position during the drill that she’s in during that same position in her pitching motion.
    • Too many pitchers do all these crazy things during warm ups that have way more to do with practicing pitching than with warming up.
    • The following pictures shows the 3 most common drills done during pitching warm ups – some type of close-up snaps, a K position and usually some type of Crane or Stork Drill.


    If we look at these 3 drills and where they actually occur during the pitching motion we can see if these drills done in this fashion will actually be helpful for a pitcher and improve her motion, or not. Remember, your pitcher isn’t trying to warm up in order to win a drill-off, she’s trying to warm up to win a game! So make sure that if you’re using drills in warm ups (or at any time) that the drills are done in as close to the correct pitching motion position as possible.

    Wrist Snaps:


    • This drill is designed to work on the release of the ball and as you can see from the comparison picture, when a pitcher releases the ball (by snapping her wrist) her feet certainly aren’t next to each other nor is her entire body facing forward with her feet together and flat.
    • So if you’re going to do wrist snaps then do them with your body in the same position it’s in when you actually let go of the ball (or as close as possible).
    K Position:


    • This is a really popular drill that I’ve never really understood.
    • As you can see from the drill position on the left side of the picture above, that this is not even close to the position the pitcher is in during this part of her motion.
    • The pitcher does not have both feet flat on the ground but instead has her weight on her back foot transferring to her front foot.
    • And the pitcher’s glove is not up making the top leg of the letter K but instead is forward and ready to move down.
    Crane or Stork:


    • Again we can see how very different the drill position is from the actual position within the pitching motion.
    • In this drill the pitcher is very stiff and upright while in the real motion the pitcher is far more forward and explosive.
    The Role of SLOW
    • There is HUGE value to the body when learning a skill in going slow. Doing so (and this means really, really slow) can anchor the correct motion in a pitcher’s brain, but also makes the pitcher start to feel and control all of her body parts. (to learn more about this concept of Slow read a Fantastic book: The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle)
    • Going slow also creates a great warm up routine that not only helps the pitcher master the details of the motion but it also helps keep that pitcher’s arm fresher for the game and the end of the season.
    • For a great warm up, try this:
      • Start about ½ way and pitch ½ speed (half speed is REALLY half speed and not pitching as fast as you can as close as possible)
      • Move back to ¾ distance and pitch ¾ speed
      • Then move back beyond the rubber and throw full speed using the regular motion (not the walk-through as this gives the pitcher a false sense of speed and power) but using her regular motion.
      • The pitcher then stands on the rubber and works on her locations. This same routine can be used for all of her pitches.
    Set a Limit
    • The final piece of the warm up picture is to set a limit on how long a pitcher will stay at a certain point in her warm up before moving on.
    • Typically, if you ask a pitcher how long they do their wrist snaps or the Crane or the K position or the Leg Swings and they’ll all tell you – “until it feels good”, or “until I’m comfortable”. Well, on some days, that could be forever and you don’t have forever to warm up.
    • So, the better way to do it is to say I’ll do this particular thing for 10 pitches, so after 3 if you’re not getting it right or it doesn’t feel good then you better hurry up and make an adjustment because you’re running out of pitches.
    • This forces the pitcher to make an adjustment and do it quickly instead of just pitching until things randomly get better.
    • This also makes it much easier to know how long your warm up will take since each aspect has a definite limit. But, the most important benefit to having a certain limit on each part of your warm up is that it puts the pitcher into the game adjustment mode where the pitcher must make the adjustment since she can’t stand out there pitching “until it feels good” because she’ll probably be sitting next to you on the bench by then.

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