The Driveline Method to Throw Harder and Hurt Less with Kyle Boddy

Because if the only time they ever throw or experience peak force, like here, is in games, then all of the training is underpreparing them. And then telling the athlete like, hey, these things are good, these things are correlated to success at the NBA level, those things are really important to give them awareness.

And through that alone, through awareness alone, like, they learn to manipulate the environment on their own. So much of mental and psychological success in baseball is knowing that you're prepared. Have I done everything I need to do? To compete on the field against the best.

And that's true about all sports, right?

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Transforming Basketball Podcast. Today we have Kyle Bodie. Kyle went on to find Driveline Baseball, one of the most innovative and progressive pitcher development programs in the world. He's currently a special advisor to the Boston Red Sox, and his company Driveline works with multiple MLB teams and is at the forefront of efforts to help pitchers throw harder while reducing injuries.

And the interesting thing about Kyle is that he and Alex met last October, I think it was, in Cleveland when Kyle went to visit Alex while Alex was working out some of the Cleveland players. And it was just fascinating to hear some of the stories from Alex's side about how that was like.

And now we get to have Kyle. So Kyle, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

It's good to be on.

So tell me, you were first a data scientist. You read Moneyball and it kind of inspired you to go all in on this data-driven approaches for player development. What made you get into data and the evidence and how did you start applying it initially?

A lot of it was I started coaching Little League and just read a bunch of— I wanted to be a good coach, just wanted players to stay healthy. And I just was reading a lot of research and I just realized there weren't a lot of answers in it.

So I figured we would have to collect a lot of First-party data, to be honest. It's kind of how it started when I realized it's like there's just not a lot of research done on competitive baseball players. It's mostly like academic research.

What were some of the first things you remember going through that kind of helped you jump the gun, I guess?

Yeah, honestly, weighted ball stuff was really early, like, just the very early beginnings of very constraint-led training. And the concept of not overcoaching players was a really big thing. How can we do a better job by empowering them? Using tools rather than just talking at them over and over and over again.

Amazing. What I want to get into with this episode is your methods and how you make your athletes more adaptable, more durable, and have more fitness, which is a term you used. Can I ask you to walk us through maybe what you guys do at Driveline and then maybe segment it into the overloading phase on your high velocity days?

Yeah, we'll start with the assessment. So basically everything starts with an assessment. We've kind of got it boiled down there. So you're a Minor league pitcher, you come in through the doors. We have a two-day assessment period, and we have a battery of tests over two days.

So we kind of split it like right down the middle, where we have like sport-specific training and sport agnostic testing. So sport agnostic would be like jumps on a force plate, isometric pulls, these types of like athletic expression. And then the sport-specific stuff, of course, is like throwing or swinging, right?

If you're a position player versus pitcher, then you measure your kinetics, kinematics, mechanics, and those all go into. You know, machine learning models to help predict where you should be compared to our population. It does Z-scores and stuff like that. But then additionally, it's like, where can we improve?

Where's the lowest hanging fruit? And that's kind of how we started with those guys at the pro level. Not everyone goes through that from youth to pro. On the pro side, it's much more like surgical, like these few things. On the youth side, it's more long-term athletic development.

Like, hey, how do we do these over the next 8 years? So it's the same assessment process. Just different on how we approach the beginning.

And then in terms of the overloading phase, what does that involve?

As you know, with sport, it's difficult, right? Because in-season, offseason, what is in-season these days, right? So many sports are played year-round. That's not just baseball. It's not just basketball, soccer. I think first, honestly, with soccer and tennis were the 2 big offenders.

So just trying to find how do we fit it in with the competitive schedule and being able to find these reloading phases where we're going to have undulation, where we're going to have periods of lower fitness. How do we kind of responsibly do that in those offseason periods?

That's a big thing where we identify and then plan it out. That can be, you know, overloading with weighted baseballs. It could be more spring training. It could be some sort of area on the force-velocity curves depending on where they're at. And that's just kind of how— that's, I think that's the big value of our machine learning models is being able to pick and choose where specifically we need to target these efforts.

And with the overloading, to simplify it, you basically take a heavy ball and you give it to your athletes. And you ask them to throw it as hard as possible. Why?

Sometimes it's more like putting them in constrained positions, doing those types of constrained drills. And it's more just like they've been throwing a baseball, especially the older we get, for as long as they've lived. And it becomes really hard to make a change to their motor patterns without some sort of change to the stimulus.

And that can be environmental, that can be constrained methods, or it can be, you know, more localized thing with like a heavy ball, a light ball, things that are going to make them repattern their movements, hopefully unconsciously. And so that's just one of the better ways to get— it's just, I wouldn't say a more effective way of coaching.

It's just a different way that requires less verbal processing.

You talked about the constraints. How do you coach the constraints? And you said without them realizing it. So obviously you give them, I know you have your plyo balls, which are supposed to not feel like a baseball so that they throw it a little bit differently, but how do you give them constraints or ask them to explore their environment without actually

Yeah, that's a big part is we don't want to have too much contextual interference, right?

So if people are like, oh, we have a plowball, it has seams, it's more like a baseball, it's like, we don't want it to be. We want it to be different, you know, on purpose. So that's a big one that you touched on, which is not really well understood.

I mean, people, you understand it, you're experts, but people are like, we want it to be like a baseball. It's like, yeah, it's kind of not the point. Or it's actually specifically the point, but it's not. And then as far as like changing the environment, it's like, hey, these constrained positions, like a counter-rotated position, something that's The box aren't familiar to them, causes them to reorganize somewhat autonomously, we hope, in some cases.

And then that's the, I think, the value of our motion capture laboratory, which is just being able to measure these things and being able to reassess and having high-speed video at all times really makes it an objective matter. Like, do these things change?

Are these things changing? Can we tag them? How do they change over the years? Right? Not just in one time, but how do they change over time?

And do you have specific, like, if you see that they're changing, you want it to change to a certain For it to look a certain way after a certain time? Is that what the data informs you?

It's like, okay, if this person's assessment, they throw 88 miles an hour, we think they can throw 92. What kinematic parameters have to change? And are these drills fostering them? And sometimes it has nothing to do with their motor patterns, honestly, or like their sport-specific.

It's more just about like, hey, if there was more strength in these areas, if they lifted more weight, which could cause them to jump higher, which we know is correlated with this, you know, and sometimes, and a lot of times actually, it's the sport diagnostic stuff that is more relevant for their improvement.

Than it is like, hey, throw the ball differently, express yourself mechanically differently. And a lot of times it's more about how, what can we do in the weight room? What can we do in the training room better or different that actually causes the expression around the movement to be better?

Right. Because you also spoke about like adding that heavier ball also increases their range of motion, but it also, as well as increasing the range of motion, you can add force to the range of motion. I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, but it just allows them to produce force From a— now they have, instead of freezing their degrees of freedom, you're freeing their degrees of freedom.

And now they're able to have more functional solutions because of this, right?

Yeah, totally. And then the opposite is true. So, you know, when we want to go like lighter, a ball that's lighter than a regular baseball, because now it's harder for them to gain that range of motion. Yeah, it's like the lighter ball is almost testing.

It's like the test. And then the heavier ball is almost like the training, right? So having the continuum is really valuable to us.

And I know with us, like, we do DL shooting on the court and I always like give different balls and the players are like— and it's funny because with some players you can really go wild. Like, I'll make them shoot with a tennis ball.

All right. But then with other players, like, you can hardly even give them a size 6 to shoot because they're like, like, what? Just give me a 7. I'm going to shoot with a 7 anyway. Like you said, it's— that's the point, right?

It's to get them moving in different ways or give them to experiment with different weighted balls, things like that.

Totally. I think we're lucky in baseball because basketball is such a, you know, so we're shooting a basketball to who, right? It's like a very specific pattern. Whereas yeah, baseball, we're throwing a baseball to target what sometimes it's the catcher when we're pitching.

Sometimes it's from shortstop to first fielder. But every kid grew up throwing rocks. They grew up throwing other objects, right? Throwing is part of what we do. So getting them to throw a tennis ball, right? Getting them to throw a large ball, a heavy ball, something like that.

That's not as big of an ask, right? Because it's, we're just throwing something.

Yeah.

And so like kids have thrown all sorts of stuff their whole life. So it's a little bit easier. It's cheating in that way.

It's an interesting perspective. I remember reading something about the reason why basketball hoops are 10 feet in the air is so that the sport wouldn't be so physical. Because obviously when you throw something, there's a lot of force. But then with a basketball, you have— it's the opposite.

You don't need force to get the job done. You need, I guess, skill, for lack of a better word.

I never thought about that. I guess it's always been 10 feet, huh?

Yeah. And peak force, you spoke about it when you give the lighter ball. What else does that do? Like if you're training for velocity and you're going as hard as the most intensity, 100%, what does that do when you give them a lighter ball?

Yeah, their peak force tends to be higher. Total force under the curve tends to be lower. And more importantly, I think, is players almost never throw as hard as they're going to throw in training as they will in the game. When you're playing in front of 45,000 fans, 7 PM, and adrenaline's way up, you gotta win.

Yeah, your body is tuned to produce its, the highest force it's going to. If it's noon on a Tuesday in the winter in Seattle, there's no light. It's hard for you to throw to express force at the highest thing. So by using lighter balls, we can kind of get them to throw 100 miles an hour when they might throw 100 in a game.

They never throw 100 in training. But then we have this tool that allows them to build up capacity because if the only time they ever throw or experience peak force like here, is in games, then all of the training is underpreparing them for that load in the game.

So it's really important to be able to have some sort of stimulus that gets them to that peak force expression, despite the fact that their adrenaline isn't going.

I read one of your blogs and one of the things was fitness, the level of fitness. And I think, stop me if I'm paraphrasing here, but it was like the total force output, the adaption of this total force output is equal to your fitness level.

Can you just elaborate on that?

There's 2 things, right? Like, let's talk about injuries specifically, right? So like the elbow injuries, basketball, ACL, UCL tears are functionally the same. They're functionally the same type of joint and injury that happens. But in baseball, there are collisions that cause elbow ruptures.

That does happen. But more importantly, it's more typically chronic exposure to throwing. But there's 2 reasons, right? Like, very rarely does someone like tear their ligament like over several million pitches and it like degrades and then that's it. Like almost everyone experiences one pitch that tears the ligament, right?

Yeah. Of course, for millions of pitches prior to that, there is degradation of the ligament, right? But there still is an acute event. And so a big part of the total fitness is how do we build up this chronic workload that's protective throughout the season, right?

Can we build this workload that protects the elbow and the shoulder and just like systemically fitness of the body here, knowing in season that we're probably going to lose it over time because it's hard to maintain that. It's just, can we lose it slower?

That'd be great. And so being able to expose ourselves to a wide variety of stressors, not just the same stressor, because your body at the end of the season is not the same as the body at the beginning of the season, right? It's such a big part of it.

So hopefully that kind of being able to explore not only all the ranges of motion, but the withstanding peak forces and withstanding total time under tension and building yourself up a chronic base of fitness is the most protective thing we can do heading into the season.

What I'm hearing you say is instead of like If you're in the offseason, for example, instead of shielding the athlete from using that peak force all the time, because they're going to be using that during season so much, you almost want to replicate that so that they're more used to it when they use it in the real game environment.

Yeah, exactly. What research is pretty clear on is that chronic loading over time is protective of like in-season performance. And there is time off and there's these things that are necessary. There's no doubt about that. Baseball's not special in that regard. And there's tons of sports science research showing like the best way to train and how to protect people.

And most of it comes from sprinting, of course, because that's where a lot of the research has been done and where most money has been made in the past. And it shows pretty, pretty clearly what you should do. And avoiding top speed sprinting for long periods of time is really, really indicative of lower body muscle injuries in elite sprinters.

That's so interesting. So the next question I have then, how do you apply all that? So just going back to the training a little bit, overloading, the plyo balls. And then after you get all that in the training environment, how do you apply all that to the game environment, especially if it's during the offseason?

What kind of things do you do so that it's more relevant when they actually step out on the pitch instead of, oh, it's practice. No, it's now it's the game, but it feels like I've been here before.

Yeah, that's a big part of the offseason, right? The first, it's a gradient, right? When you first show up, we do nothing related to the game. A lot of it's mental, psychological, but let's get away from that. There is some physical part of it, but then as we get closer, spring training's in February or March, right?

So as the players get closer to January, February, they're going to start throwing bullpens. They're going to start throwing live at-bats. They're going to do way more— not the game simulation, but really face hitters, like really facing our motion capture lab. We're lucky because our motion capture lab also doubles as our live at-bat environment.

So you're getting high-speed video and force plate data of you, so an assessment, but you're facing a real hitter with a catcher, umpire, TrackMan, everything's young. And so then that mimics it. So when they go to spring training and they're face hitters, It's nothing to them.

So that's that gradient. That's something we're coaching. Yeah, we have our AI systems and machine learning that help plan that, but nothing's going to replace a human being like, this guy's ready. How do we expose him to these things? And that's why we have expert coaches.

Yeah, I think I remember hearing something. I think it was Doug Limov, and I think I read an excerpt from one of his books and it was like the brain makes like a picture. The pitch arrives at the catcher's glove in like 0.4 seconds.

And then the brain makes a decision. I don't know the exact time, but let's say 0.7 seconds. So it's kind of like, how do they make a decision in less time than they have? And it's all about anticipating the movement. So hence why working with the actual people instead of versus robots, it can obviously help in that regard as well.

Same with basketball too. I mean, if you ask some of the best catch-and-release shooters, you guys know way more about it than me, but so much of it is unconscious, right? And it's pattern recognition. They can't even explain a lot sometimes. So in baseball, Better a homer, you know, a home run.

He'll come into the dugout and the hitter's like, oh, you know, what, what was that? What pitch was that? And they'll very confidently tell you the wrong thing.

Yeah.

They'll be like, oh, it was a fastball away. And then you look at the video and it was a slider in. Like, they very confidently don't remember what they see, which is funny because that just shows them it's this huge neural network in your brain.

That's why repetition is so important and why varied repetition is important, right? Because if all you do is practice a hitter, Especially as a hitter, you're facing the same pitch at the same speed, the same location. It doesn't matter. That's not the game, right?

And so being able to vary it and have face stuff in the gym that is equal to, or ideally tougher than what you're going to face on the field, that's what's going to prepare you. And that's where we've done a great job on the hitting side.

Yeah, the Boston Red Sox have had really good results with that. Obviously the hitters have been really good with Boston lately, but that's definitely the same model that they've been using a ton.

Let's hope it continues throughout the season as well, right? I'll be rooting for them this season.

We're good at the beginning of the season. We've done this, but the pitchers adapt, right? It's constantly now. Are we adapted? Are we adaptable? Right? The great debate. So we'll see halfway through the season.

That's amazing. So now let's just move on forward from this. What are one or two low-tech drills or methods a coach can use to help athletes train? Like, what is one of the lowest hanging fruit? You spoke about obviously the mental psychological when they first come in.

What are some of the lowest hanging fruits if the offseason and a coach is working with an athlete or athletes? And they're just on the pitch, they don't have a lot of resources. What are some, maybe 2 drills, 2 games that you would recommend?

What's old is new again, you know, they say. So one of the biggest ones in baseball is just long toss, just being able to throw. Like, you have a partner and you just go and go as long as possible with no predefined, oh, I'm going to throw 30 balls, I'm going to throw 35, right?

No number, right? We just go until we feel we've reached our extension phase. And then at the end of the extension phase, which is we're throwing the ball in a big loop, right? We're going out and out and out. Then after that, we compress it and then we bring the— bring a deep throw on a line as hard as possible and we bring it in.

Right. And so what this is promoting is different arm angles to throw the ball and it'll be 300 feet really far is much different than it is to throw a ball 100 feet as fast as possible on a line. Right. So now we're promoting different strategies and we're not measuring it, which is good.

It's for fun. Right. And it's the best players in the world that are 30 years old and big leaguers do this. And kids that are 8 should do this. Right. So it's just a free expression of throwing. And it's one of the best ways to just build fitness from throwing.

And it's fun. Something that really doesn't get old. So that's, that's probably one of the biggest ones. The other thing that I think is really important is game. So you guys, I've seen a lot of the small-sided games.

Mm-hmm.

Some of the videos I've done. And when something that happens in pitchers is that they don't, when they become pitcher only, as we call them, like they don't Hits, they don't play a position, they just tend to be a pitcher. We take them off the field.

We don't let them take ground balls. We don't let them take fly balls. Keep them on the field. Let pitchers take ground balls, you know, have them read shortstop, have them, you know, have them do varied reaction stuff. It's really important for pitcher fielding practice, which is important, but more importantly, they learn to throw on the run.

They learn to throw with constraint. They learn to do things so that, that really leaks into their pitching. And so making sure that you still treat those pitchers as fielders is, I think, a really good low-tech way to make sure we Keep a long-term athletic development cycle going.

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What I'm hearing you say is it's just giving them different constraints to throwing, throwing on the run, throwing longer distances, throwing shorter distances. And it's just manipulating the constraints for the pitchers so that they can have their best results when they're pitching.

And especially when they're young, you know, like they love this. This is fun. It's easy. It's easier to start when they're younger.

All right. So you're introducing a new pitch to an athlete. How do you balance mechanics, feel, and performance, especially for younger or less experienced throwers? The reason I ask this, I'm interested, like shooting's a big thing in basketball. And I think that's the one part of the game where I'd say out of all the other parts, as far as passing, rebounding, tactical, strategic, maybe it's kind of like, how do we teach shooting with the CLA?

So I really want to understand from your perspective how you would teach the correct pitch, not necessarily the correct pitch, but how to pitch without— let's take away what doesn't work and let's kind of focus in on what does work. So how do you go about that when you're working with pitchers?

Yeah, like basketball, baseball has a system like NOAH, right, where we have TrackMan. And that's probably one of the best things, having that live feedback and being able to see spin rate, direction. And then our models can say, you know, they process in real time.

So you throw a pitch and it's like, oh, this pitch is 5% better than the big league average, right? Like you're getting graded all the time. And so just having that alone within then an expert coach, like even if you didn't have a coach, right?

Just having that alone allows you to experiment. Oh, well, what if I do this? What if I do this? Or my hand is in this position, or I try this cue, or I think about this. Obviously this is made better by with an expert coach next to you that's giving you minimal feedback, right?

Like that's the whole point is we don't want to give a lot of feedback, especially, you know, internal cueing. But we do have like a set of things like that coach is recognizing, oh, this type of pattern I've seen before, this type of pitch, he's not developing this.

What can we do? What kind of cues or what kind of constraints can I apply? And most of that is just with those standard 5-ounce baseball, which is the regulation weight. But we do also throw underload and overload baseballs off the mound to a target to kind of vary the stimulus there, but just having that measurement of what's going on.

So for like for NILA or for other systems, right, just that You know, I talk to Alex about this a lot, just being able to track where the ball is, like where the misses and makes are, which I know Noah doesn't always do all that, but like just being able to say like, hey, the trajectory of the ball is this, here's this.

That's huge because just having that knowledge, I think helps the athletes and then telling the athlete like, hey, these things are good. These things are correlated to success at the NBA level. Those things are really important to give them awareness. And through that alone, through awareness alone, like they learn to manipulate the environment on their own.

Yep. And then as far as like you steering them, I don't know if it's so similar. Whereas like in shooting, there's obviously specific things you want the ball to have. Like you want the ball to spin the same, you know, more or less the same way every time.

You want it to go in a straight line. So like a couple constraints that I've used that I found very effective, like external cues for the players, have been like, so one player struggled with his offhand on the basketball. Like his thumb would flip the ball and it would cause some sidespin.

So then it was, my cue was like, have your hand on the wall. So like pretend there's a wall there when you're holding the ball. And your hand is always to be on the wall. You can't break the wall, right? So that was the first cue.

And then the other, he actually came back to me. He was like, oh, coach, you know, my shot's gotten a lot better. I would really like to add more consistent spin to it. So now it's always spinning in the same direction, but the spin would be inconsistent sometimes.

So we tried some different things. And one thing I found really worked was like, I call it the fishing, like the fishing rod. So I'm in Portugal, so everything's in Portuguese, but like in English, the fishing rod. And it would basically be like a constraint I put is as soon as you shoot, you take that hand back almost like a fishing rod.

You're pulling it back super quickly. And I found that those were super effective in kind of getting him to, you know, have more spin on the ball and have that kind of appropriate spin on the ball. I'm just wondering, is it similar to baseball?

Do you use any of those things to kind of get the pitcher to, you know, hold the ball a certain way or?

Yeah, definitely. We're trying to stay As far away from the distal point as possible, right? Like the closer we can be proximal, the easier it is to control. But sometimes, I mean, you do have to make some noise at points further down the chain.

We have a set of kind of cues that we are standard, and that's the value of being a coach that have seen tens and hundreds of thousands of pitches and coached a lot of people. As you have this library internal, like what would work.

But then that's also kind of where our AI systems are huge because there's not that we're lucky in baseball. We don't pitch on the run, right? There's a million different types of— there's catch and shoot, there's shoot on the run, there's dribble, one dribble shoot, two dribble shoots, right?

There's, there's so many different shots you need to have at so many different ranges to be effective as a shooter. As in, to be pitching, there's many types of pitches in baseball. So there's not many, you know, so there's that, but it's still all from 60 feet, 6 inches.

There's this, you have this much time, it's very consistent. So our manipulation is, is more fine, like in the types of spin that we want, because we want different types of spin.

Yeah.

And so being able to have cues on that is pretty valuable. But we're lucky that we can be pretty consistent as far as like our set position is the same. And then this allows for much more freedom of expression later on in the delivery.

Awesome. I listened to a podcast of yours recently and you talked about toggling between the strengths and weaknesses of players in skill development. So can you just elaborate for us what it looks like? I have an idea in my head, but I just kind of like want to hear you talk about how you can like pair even in season, I think would make sense.

But if you're working on skill development. How would you kind of pair that certain player's weaknesses to another player's strengths to get results?

Yeah, well, there's even within one person, because no one like, yeah, it'd be great if you just worked on your weaknesses, but there's a human psychological aspect to this. People don't want to just be bad every day, right? They want, they want to do something fun.

And so for batting practice, for example, being able to show like, hey, we're going to start with these things are really tough. We're going to hit off 100-mile-an-hour fastball machine, slider, we're going to swing and miss a lot, but At the end of it, we're going to finish with easy home runs, whatever, right?

So they have a blended— so they don't go home feeling like it was just terrible. But then, like, when a pitcher is facing a hitter, we do have that where it's like, okay, these guys will pair pitchers or machines. Like, these guys are good at throwing these pitches, these guys are bad at doing these types of things, right?

And so these pitchers are at an advantage today, but then maybe in the next population, it's flipped, right? The hitters are more advantageous. And so it's just constantly keeping them on their toes. And that's the nice value in the offseason of having A large population of diverse players with strengths and weaknesses and being able to pair them up and have competition, right?

And that's the beautiful thing in basketball and the other sports. Competition becomes, I think it's like very natural to have these small-sided games and games and play, compete. In baseball, it's like, oh, I'm going to throw to a catcher. There's not going to be an error there.

I'm going to hit off a machine. We get away from competition too much in baseball. So really just getting towards that and pairing those strengths and weaknesses the best we can creates a better learning environment for sure.

No, absolutely. And I think, do you guys measure that as well? So do you measure like if that player's weakness to hit the certain type of balls thrown, they're getting better, like they're hitting more and more of these. So you measure that and keep all that information?

Yeah. The best example of that was the first overall draft pick last year. He trained with us for years. He's Australian and he was a really good player. College sophomore year was really good in the Cape, but his swing needed to change to be really elite.

We're like, oh, he's weak to fastballs that are above 95 miles an hour at like high in the zone. Like we could tell from his bat plane path, we could see how his bat moves. Like we just know that he's going to be weak to this pitch.

And that's a big pitch at the major league level. Like he's going to have to be able to hit that pitch to be an effective big leaguer. So we use the motion capture laboratory to change some kinematic expression, you know, do some constraint training, different types of bats, you know, different wear.

And then his junior year, he was one of the best players in the country. He was drafted first overall. And a lot of it was being able to handle that pitch without sacrificing, you know, he had to make some sacrifices in his Thanks to be able to handle that, but not too many.

And that was a huge thing. So that's a great example of using the technology and coaching and identifying a weakness of the player. And mostly the fact that he was willing to work on that kind of thing, it really speaks more to the athlete than it does to us, as you know.

So you essentially took this player, put him in the environment, obviously with the DL, the constraints, and you did minimal feedback, but you just allowed him to explore his environment and kind of develop Into a point where he could hit those fastballs and become the player he is?

Extremely minimal feedback, almost none. It's just like, hey, here's a piece of paper, here's what we have to do, here's the evidence, right? You're gonna wear this sensor, do these things. And he's one of those guys— our facility was 5 hours from his college.

He would drive 5 hours on a weekend, hit, and then go back same day. That's the kind of guy. So when you're going with that, like, that's pretty dedicated. And then he was working on stuff on his own. So yeah, that was really what it was, and it's huge.

Because not only is it like, A, we both know, and I think more and more people are realizing that it's one of the best ways to coach, but more importantly, it gives the power to the athlete because you're not going to be there the whole time as the coach.

Right. So when he's on his own, you're giving him a plan, you're empowering him, you're making yourself less important, which ironically makes you a better coach. Right. And so like, that's why it's so valuable to have that.

You can't make decisions for the athletes. You really have to put them in situations where they can make as many decisions as possible. And, you know, so that they can adapt into the game. Like I remember we had an overtime game and I think it's one thing to make a decision when you have the energy, but it's another thing completely to make it when you're tired.

It's like late in the game, you've been playing for 2+ hours. So we really have to do our best to prepare them for sure.

Yeah, it's just automatic. It can't be a thought.

Yeah. So you mentioned earlier some mental and psychological things that you would do even before starting practice. Can you share some of that with us?

One of it is structure, is just being sure. Like, so much of mental and psychological success in baseball is Knowing that you're prepared. Have I done everything I need to do to compete on the field against the best? And that's true about all sports, right?

But baseball is so much analytical and logistical and like, do I have all the information? Did I have all? So when I go on the field, I'm very prepared. And that's how I really, that's how we start approaching it is like, we need to prove to the athlete that we have the best information, you know, that we're preparing them so they can put their trust in our facility, their trust in our coaching.

That's where it really starts from and being able to have the habits and build on that. We're starting to explore things like readiness with Oura rings, Whoop straps, stuff like that. And just being able to be like, hey, these things have a huge effect on your daily performance.

Because the big leagues is 162 games. It's a lot of games. Plus all spring training. So you play 20 games of spring training. And if you reach the postseason, you can easily play 200 games in a year. Yeah, it's crazy. But I mean, basketball's no different, right?

100 games of basketball in a year, counting the preseason or whatever it is. And postseason in the NBA is nuts.

But it's double for baseball. I mean, it's literally, it's Crazy number to think about.

Yeah, it's a game of attrition in many ways, but it is less physical than basketball, right? And the pitchers don't work that hard, but staying in a routine for that many games is huge. Nick Saban, you know, famous football, college football coach here in the States, talks a lot about, oh, you don't learn discipline in the games.

Oh, I do everything right between the lines. It's like, well, it's learned. You don't learn strength on the field. You learn in the weight room, right? So discipline and mental preparedness comes from Like, how do I feel mentally confident? Well, not necessarily seeing a psychologist.

It's not necessarily going through these routines. It's in how you do everything else, right? And if I'm prepared and I do everything, I wake up at the same time, eat the same food, have my diet style, this, this, this, there's very little room to not be prepared in other areas of your life.

No, agreed. Absolutely. So just a couple more questions before I let you get out of here. One is, what are some resources, blogs, podcasts, anything that you listen to that has really helped you? Be who you are and get to where you are.

I mean, really, the constraint-led stuff is huge. Obviously, I've known— not Alex for a long time, but I've been exploring parallel things at the same time. Franz Bosch's work is always really interesting because he now specializes in baseball too. But a lot of Soviet research from decades ago is really still valuable, especially in track and field.

Honestly, a lot of what I draw inspiration from comes from track and field, throwing and javelin. And how they've been doing it because they've been doing overload, underload for decades. And that's probably one of the biggest things. And sports science in terms of like technology and research where we're doing a lot of research, we're really the only company in the world doing that and publishing.

So it's hard to draw inspiration from other areas of baseball because there's just not a lot going on. So I really look to track and field, especially the throwing sports. So javelin, hammer, you know, shot and sprinting. Like sprinting is really, really interesting because it's so optimized, right?

To run below 10 seconds requires everything to go right. And so the littlest things matter. So those guys are maximizing every little thing. And I really like to read a lot of that.

Fascinating. Thank you for that. So just before I ask you this last question, I just want to thank you for your time. It's been a really insightful conversation. I hope it had some practical takeaways that coaches can go away and kind of start applying it to their day-to-day and how they interact with their athletes.

So thank you. Last question, transformative tip. What is one piece of advice that you could give to the coaches listening that can instantly improve Their coaching environments or just their lives?

Coach less, you'll be happier. Like, say less. How can you say more at the beginning of when you have players? Like, your verbal, written, whatever you give them, prepare that extremely well, your plans. And then as the season, practice season goes on, whatever, like, how can you say 50% less in the everyday coaching?

Like, how can we front-load them at the beginning with as much information as possible, test them, get them ready, and then really Just let the environment be what it is. Some of the, one of the most informative college practices I ever went, I went to Dallas Baptist University.

They're a mid-major, they're perennially powerhouse in the United States. And that coach has a master's in kinesiology. He's brilliant. And we visited his campus, watched a practice. Both he and the assistant coaches were not there because one had a medical emergency, one was recruiting, and the entire practice ran by the athletes completely by themselves and with volunteers.

Is it like all the pitchers were working under a strength coach intern who like just was supervising? We all knew what to do that day. We go out in the field, there's a bunting station, there's a hitting station, there's this, there's running. Like every station is set up, the players are doing it on their own.

They're wheeling out the pitching machine, they know what to do. And I was like, that's what it should look like, right? Because the players, they have a system. They're obviously extremely well trained and educated early. That obviously took a lot of work, right?

Yeah.

But then once we get into the practice seasons, They almost don't need the coaches, right? The practices operate by themselves because, okay, I hit the ball this far and then they would record it, right? I hit the ball, maximum velocity was this, or I threw the ball, this was this.

And then they recorded it in a book. Everyone had a notebook, like they would just keep a, like a literally a written notebook and they would keep that. And then that was their practice. They didn't need a coach to tell them, oh, that was a good rep or not.

No, they just, you know, write it down, data system. And that was like, not only, not only is that effective because they really win, they're a great team, But imagine being a coach. Being coaching is so much easier then that way.

And to know that like your team is, you know, they're self-automating essentially.

Right. Like not only they're having fun, they're bought into it. If they're doing all that on their own, that means they believe in it.

Right.

They're having fun and it's competition. So getting to that point didn't take, you know, that took many years for Dan Heath, our other coach there, to develop that system. But it's just one thing every year. Like one thing can I automate? One thing can I step away from?

And then you find out over 5, 6 years that you've largely automated practice. The kids are, they're going to get better. You're going to win more. You're going to be less stressed. And more importantly, like it's going to just be a better environment.

Amazing. Kyle, thank you so much once again.

Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Transforming Basketball Podcast. If you'd like to learn more about the work that we do, head to transformingbball.com to access our free resources and spread these ideas throughout the basketball world.

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