Learning to fight - John Baker (MLB skills and mental coach) - Epsiode 25

Learning to Fight Podcast — Conversations in Combat Skill

After a year-long hiatus, the Primal MMA Coaching Podcast is back—Rebranded, and refocused as the Learning to Fight Podcast: Conversations in Combat Skill.

Your hosts are:

Adam Singer — Co-owner and head coach at SBG Athens, BJJ black belt, long-time MMA coach, with years of developing novice to elite level fighters. Student of Matt Thornton and SBG's philosophy of 'aliveness'.
Scott Sievewright — Co-Owner at Primal MKE, MMA skills coach and obsessive student of how humans learn to move and fight. 

Together, we dive deep into the art and science of coaching, training, and skill development in combat sports.
 Expect honest conversations about MMA, striking, grappling, practice design, contemporary research, traditional approaches, ecological dynamics, and the messy realities of learning under pressure.

No gurus. No dogma. Just two coaches trying to understand fighting a little better each week.

Same curiosity. New lens.
Learn how to learn.
Find your own style.
Thrive on the mats—and in the cage.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:06

All right, let me fight episode XX forget 1920 21. Anyway, good morning, Adam again, and welcome back to our good friend, coach John Baker. How are you, John? I'm doing well. Thank you for having me. Good to see you, Scott.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

John, did I read you got your brown belt? I have a brown belt, yeah. I don't think there were a brown belt last time I was out there. No, we were just doing no geese. That was probably my you were thinking about. You weren't wearing a brown rash card, isn't that what you have to wear?

SPEAKER_00 0:34

No, no, no. We have uh we have a nice school that's not that's not concerned about um not concerned about the proper uniform attire. Just wear whatever you want.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

All right, that's fair. How are your morning classes going over there?

SPEAKER_00 0:45

They're going, they're going great. They're going great. We have we just had um, you know, when you have, you I mean you guys run schools, you know, so you have like the serious heads that like tend to show up every night and like train super hard. And then you have that uh that weird breed of people that want to show up early for the 6 a.m. class and and get rounds in before. Like those are my people, like the real psychopaths that want to get up at 4 30 and come in and train. But sometimes like you know, you have the same training partners over and over again. So I get a little bit concerned when our guys are going in to compete. But we had a competition last weekend, every everybody won. Um, everybody, yeah, everybody just kind of got to express the stuff that like their own game that they've been practicing, and that led to quite a few people getting their next belt in class, which was really fun to be a part of. So it's going great. Yeah, we have we have fun. We got some young college athletes that are just just crossed over into blue belts, so they kind of know enough um to for the roles to be fun. And yeah, those those guys both uh they closed out the absolute division at like the adult blue belt division, they closed it out together. They were college swim teammates, big strong kids that are really into jujitsu. So that's been it's been great, man. I I I uh doesn't feel like work to wake up and go to class at seven in the morning. Feels fine. Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Is there I didn't even know there was a seven in the morning, so it's all this is news to me. Yeah, that's all I go to. Should uh should he should John John, you should introduce yourself.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

Sure. Tell us. Yeah, um, John Baker. Um, so I am uh been in I was in professional baseball for the last 24 years um in a variety of different roles. Uh first as a player that kind of grinded my way through the minor league, spent six and a half years in the minor league before I played Major League Baseball for another seven years after that. Um when I finished uh playing in 2015 that winter, I got hired by the Chicago Cubs to work in their kind of like um at the genesis of like what was a mental skills department. It was kind of more mentoring uh in the beginning, and none of us had any education. So while working for the Cubs, I went back to school, got a master's in performance psychology. I worked there for five years, uh, was embedded with our major league team the last few years, working with the players one-on-one. Uh, got hired away by the pirates to oversee all of coaching and player development. Um, did that for four years. And then my last year with the pirates, I served in it in the in the role of VP of performance. So that was managing uh strength and conditioning, which we were talking about before the show, but strength and conditioning, um, mental performance, nutrition, and then trying to bridge the gap between what we were what we're doing to prepare the players to play in the game and skill acquisition. Uh, because as as much as people like to think that the best athletes in the world know what they're doing, um the best athletes in the world are also the best generally at improving when you give them the right conditions. So we tried to figure out ways to uh make pro make practice a little bit more representative so that our guys could get better at the major league level.

SPEAKER_01 3:23

And how how did that go? What like what were the major challenges?

SPEAKER_00 3:28

What were you proud of? Oh, well, what I was what I was most that's easy. What I was most proud of was that we really got thoughtful about um strength and conditioning and what is actually required. And we started looking at the weight room not as, hey, we're gonna get the guys stronger, because what is like what is the definition of of strength anyway? That's a really hard thing to like, a really hard concept to explain, especially relative to sports performance. Um, and so we started looking at the weight room as how do we spend, how do we get our players to spend the least amount of time in here? Um, so that they can spend more time on doing things that are more like baseball and less like traditional weightlifting. Um, and watching that performance team grow and start to collaborate and work together and then creating feedback loops with our skill acquisition group, like with the hitting coaches, uh, that was really fun to see. You know, a player would come in, their lower body wouldn't be moving well, and they still that's how we really started looking at it. Like, how is this guy presenting today? What can we do to give him some more space to move and then send him into skill acquisition, like into the batting cage to do their practice? And then we would go follow up and get feedback on if what we were doing was effective that day. And I think that baseball is a game where you play a game every single day, you get beat up over time, so your body changes. You know, you don't, it's like um, it's like the bat blacksmith's blacksmith swinging the hammer, only what's what's changing it is like the little overuse injuries that happen over time. And so we started to develop systems to analyze on a day-to-day basis and then go in and make little micro adjustments or give them exercises to do that were specific to them, uh, and then yeah, and then follow up. And and that's built um even further, you know, talking to some of the guys over there this year, they're just they're just getting better at that. So I was definitely proud of that kind of collaborative, synergistic work. You know, when I was when I oversaw our minor league system, one of the things I said was like, we're all coaches in a way. And the only thing that matters is the baseball performance. You know, it doesn't matter what the kid looks like physically, like if they take it, if they take their shirt off and they look impressive for Instagram, that doesn't matter. What matters is how they play on the field. And sure, there's, I guess, some foundational things in that space that I get kind of make sense, but it's so hard to figure out because when you look at professional sports or or or elite level college sports, what you tend to see is like 150 or 200 different methodologies on how they're going to train the athletes physically. But then you also see that in those things, all those athletes improve. And I think a big part of that when you get to the highest levels of sports is that you just have the best adapters and accommodators available. Um, they respond to any stimulus. Doesn't matter if it's you know good or bad or scientifically perfect. They just they just respond and improve because they have that level of level of athleticism and the ability, I think, to kind of like learn kinesthetically faster than other people. That's that's that's I think that's a big part of elite sports.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

You know, that's where that's where that survivor bias comes in when I'm listening to some college trend ignition coach talk about you know their successes or their programs. And and I always I don't ask the question, but I I always want to know have they considered that they're starting with the best athletes in the world and almost anything they would do would would help, would they improve on. And so the questions I I asked was like, if they have all these metrics, can they point to something they really think is correlated with injury risk or injury reduction? Because that's something I'm always interested in. And the the Alabama team, who is who you know was using a tremendous amount of data, pointed to single-leg asymmetries as the biggest predictor of future injuries. And so I thought that was that was really interesting. That was a good takeaway.

SPEAKER_00 6:52

Yeah, that is interesting. I wonder how they're measuring how they're measuring it. Yeah, I think the other part that really comes into play in terms of injuries is uh you know, a lot of medical teams want to do like passive range of motion motion testing on people. Okay. So, you know, like I put you on a table and I bend your arm backwards and you tell me when it has to stop. Um, and they're there's correlations to like, oh, the passive range of motivation goes down, then the guy's more likely to be injured. But then what we realized was that the it's not it's not necessarily just a passive range of motion. Um, it's the it's like what do they actually have control over? You know, how far can they actually move themselves as a greater predictor of if there is a potential injury? And the funny part about athletes, everybody's a different size and everybody has different ranges of motion. So when you look at, if you take 13 pitchers, you can't say like, oh, it's I'll just make up a number. Oh, it's it's 90 to 120 degrees is the safe is the safe zone, because you'll have three guys that never fall into that zone that over time never get hurt. So it's really hard. And I think what what you're kind of speaking to also is one of the one of the issues that's kind of invaded all of professional sports is the hubris that we can really act, we can really objectively measure everything. Um, I think a lot of times what we see is we make up our own graphs, we make up our own measurements, we make up our own ideas because it fits the population that we're looking at, as opposed to we're not, we're not necessarily doing um science for science sake, you know, like research for research's sake, where you're just doing research not to prove your own point, which is what a lot of us do. You're just doing research to find the answer out. And there's not a lot of that at that level because so much of it is tied into I've got to show the people that pay me that we're getting better in these metrics that I created so that I can continue to have a have an opportunity to work. Um, and then again, with this population, basically whatever you do, whatever you do from a performance perspective, they tend to get better, which is circling all the way back why we looked at it like, okay, how can we keep the guys in the weight room for the least amount of time possible so that we're not just burning um nervous energy, essentially, that we're actually doing work that's propagating, like we're expanding their ability to move today, um, or we're giving them enough of a dose of resistance so that they can maintain that baseline level of strength over time and they can spend all of that energy in the scale acquisition environment, which is where the biggest gains happen.

SPEAKER_01 8:58

So something I noticed with the college weight rooms is that it starts to become an extension of how they build their culture and their team and their the cop the competitive nature of football, right? So when you broke it down, some of the teams have very complex programs, but it's it's weightlifting. I mean, like but the the they were talking about how hard their players work and the competition and the camaraderie and all that stuff. So I think that part of what they're using the weight room for is not just you know to go from a 500 squat to a 550 squat. It's to cheer each other on and it's that daily work and it's it's all that you know discipline and all those things built in.

SPEAKER_00 9:37

Yeah, I would I would agree. I think that and I think it's important to point out too, Adam, that like football and baseball are different sports. You know, football, like if you take something like an offensive lineman and you look at someone in the NFL, and um I like to think about things kind of through like the idea of uh like the kind of the conjugated idea where you kind of want to train everything all the time instead of get super phasic with stuff. Um but like take blocking, and I know that uh uh Olin Kruz, who's a uh you know, former like multiple-time pro bowler with the Chicago Cubs who played center, or Chicago Bears, he played center, um trains athletes out of um out of Chicago, and may only offensive linemen. And the way that they look at it, they go, hey, blocking itself, you know, when you get into that position, you've got to shuck somebody off of you, they consider it like a special strength. And so they look, they look kind of under the hood and they go, okay, to the average defensive lineman weighs 307 pounds in the NFL. They're on average running this fast, which means that this is the amount of force that you're gonna encounter over and over again. You have to be able, so so when it when it gets that simple, they can look at that and they go, okay, well, what does that correlate to in the weight room? And I think they say, okay, if you want to be a great NFL offensive lineman, or if you want to be a coachable NFL offensive lineman, you need to have the kind of like foundational strength to just deal with that environment. They talk about having to box squat 650 pounds and bench press 500 pounds as the as the baseline. And so they really, and they've seen guys that have been below those numbers and and have been told by, you know, these guys are on the practice squad and have been told by NFL coaches that um but he's not coachable. Like we can't coach him. Like we tell him what to do and he can't do it, which we could we can talk about information coaching later. But um, and what he does is they get him up to those levels and they send him back to training camp and the guy goes, I don't know what you guys did. This guy's this guy's coachable now. He can he can do the stuff because he has the inherent ability to now express the force that he needs to like manage that environment because it's it's you know, it's a those guys, they snap the ball on the offensive and defensive line, and it's like snap the ball car accident, snap the ball, car accident. You've got to be incredibly big and strong to be able to handle that kind of stuff. You know, baseball is much more like golf than it is like football. You know, it's it's a it's a it's a skill-heavy sport. And you know, I think the easiest way to say this is if you if an NFL offensive lineman walked into the room, like all three of us could go, well, that guy probably plays football. If a baseball player walked in the room, we'd have no idea what sport they played based on what they look like physically.

SPEAKER_01 11:44

It's funny you mentioned that about those metrics. Um there's a uh Olympic throws coach that I that I followed for a long time. His name is Dan John. And he had these numbers that they had figured out with you know with physics on if you wanted to be a world-class shot putter, then you needed to be able to XYZ in the weight room. But once you were able to hit XYZ, there was no improvement in throwing when you went past those numbers. So if you could squat, power clean, whatever, overhead press, X, Y, Z, then you could be a world-class thrower. And it's in that case, just physics, right?

SPEAKER_00 12:18

Yeah, it's it's you're trying to train people. If when we're thinking about it in terms of sports, it's never about as strong as possible. It's only about, and we saw, we see, I think they see the same things with those football players. It's just as strong as necessary. Like, do you have the, can you cross the threshold beyond that? There's there's no return on investment. And then when we get into like really heavy weightlifting, you know, that's where now you that's where you that's where you start to hit a risk, is when it gets really crazy. And now somebody, the last thing you want is somebody to get hurt in the weight room. I'll give you one example from a picture that we had. Um we had a picture in in the minor leagues. One of the things that we noticed was that um this is one of the things that all teams pay attention to now, but we noticed the drop-off of velocity over time. So if his first pitch of the game is 100 miles an hour, you know, like how fast until it's significantly below that, below that number. And so for this guy, like he'd come out in the first inning, he'd throw 98, throw 98 in the second inning, he'd throw 98 in the third inning, and then he'd go back out for the fourth inning after about 45, 50 pitches, and he'd be at like 92. And, you know, as we're looking at it, that was viewed as a um, that was viewed for some reason in general as like, oh, that's just who that person is. Like that'll never be able to be improved. And so when we looked at it from a performance perspective, we started looking at him in the weight room and incredibly freakishly strong relative to the other players. I mean, we're talking like a 550-pound SWAT, um, and he's a big six foot six guy too, uh, but big SWAT, big deadlift, um, and came up in in Texas as a wide receiver, a football player. And when we started asking him about, and there was a lot of junk volume, like he was training like he was a he was training like you would see in a college weight room, like pushing it super hard, going all the time. And what our strength coaches recognize was that you know, we can we can still give him an opportunity to touch some really heavy resistance so that psychologically he feels like he's lifting the weights, but we can start to constrain uh like the depth of the squat. So they started having him squat off the pins, they drastically constrained the number of reps that he could do with heavy weight, and the the lo and behold, the velocity started going up over time. And so this was one of the one of the examples that that we used to really really talk about a lot last year because we looked at it and we said, oh, how many more guys are in this? How many more guys are taking that Protestant work ethic and thinking that to get better, they need to train harder over and over again? And how many of them are now basically going into the game exhausted? You know, and I think that that happens a lot more than we think. If you're doing a lot of sub-maximal repetition method, like over time, you're spending an hour and 10 minutes in the weight room doing four sets of 12 on 10 exercises. By the time the game starts at 645 or 7, you're fatigued. You're like just generally fatigued when the game happens. You can get the same thing out of increasing the weight, but doing it safely and drastically, drastically constraining the rep range to something like six or seven total reps. They get that neurological drive, and they have to, they have to, you know, you have to, there has to be some synergy between neurology and biology and the neuromuscular junction for them to like really force and push against something, and it kind of activates the neurological output, and then let them go play. You know, then spend some time making sure that everything feels good and then get him out on the field and play. And so we kind of saw it's where we was one example of us um recognizing something was going wrong and then using the weight room, but not in the way most people would think. It's not he needs to throw harder, he needs to get stronger. It was no, he's already way too strong for he's got he could drop 200 pounds on his squat and be as strong as necessary. But how do we give him what he wants and needs, but keep it within the right bandwidth and see what happens? And in that example, not every example is like that, but in that example, he went from a guy whose VLO significantly dropped off really quickly. I mean, like outlier in in those regards, probably the worst in the organization, to now somebody who's pitching for the major league team that's in the upper 90s late into the game.

SPEAKER_02 15:46

It's interesting, you know, in baseball you can say you can spot his velocity over the the the course of the game. I'm I'm I'm just I'm trying to map all these things on MMA or jujitsu, uh John, and I'm I'm I don't see any similar metrics jump out. You know, we we we this is what the challenge is sometimes, right? How do we know anything we're doing that's not the actual thing, if it's having a meaningful effect? And um Adam and I have been talking for the last few episodes because I had to do a a skills assessment for my uh one of my master's assignments, and I was really struggling to like without kind of bullshitting and making and just making something up. How do we meaningfully assess skill when you talk about a sport like client? So I had a I I I put my assessment in, but it it was um we we spoke a lot about it. It's a challenge. There's a lot of guesswork and you know, assumptions that are made and and it's curious because in baseball again, you you know you can plot these things. You have the you know, is it is he able to keep up that speed over time? Uh uh fight.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

If you tried to replicate it one for one in like uh uh in any environment, like you'd have to have what you'd have to have the technology that's on every baseball field. So like they have they have cameras, like high-speed camera systems at every major league stadium. I think there's some of them have 16, and those high-speed camera systems are measuring, they're recording and measuring everything that every interaction and everything that's happening on the field. From if a ball is hit, it measures the bat path, the bat speed, the the trajectory, um, how fast the fielders are responding, like individually. It measures all of the biomechanics of the pitcher. And so I think when we when we when we can see that kind of stuff, then it becomes much, yeah, it becomes much easier or a much clearer picture of like what's happening on the field. However, and this is I think why sports are so great and why we have competitions, is that all of that information can add up and go into a predictive model to say that like this team should win. And like the error bars on those predictive models are still crazy. Uh, they're they're really, really big. Uh so you see, like, you know, I think the clip in in baseball we have one called Pakota, um, which is some sort of a model, like it's a it's a public model, just using publicly available information. And the error bars on the win-loss records for a team for a season will be like plus or minus 15, which is, you know, that means that we could go 30 games the other way, which is like those are total, those are two totally different seasons. So it's good, I think, for the kind of in some ways for like that that micro, and if you're gonna try to do it in MMA or jujitsu, you would have to have a camera system in place that essentially is measuring how fast people are moving and reacting over time, because then you could start to see, like, we all know um experientially that round seven of the day were probably not as explosive as round one of the day. But you could start to see who degrades faster, why they degrade faster. And then when we think about strength and conditioning, that now you have an opportunity to say, like, okay, this person seems to get really tired. And then the next question becomes, like, well, is it is it their approach to like how they think about uh or what they're trying to achieve while they're grappling early and they're they burn out too fast because they they use a lot of you know muscular effort in the beginning, or is it a physical characteristic that could be trained somewhere else that allows them to be better over time? But yeah, I I I feel you. That is that is not a problem that's going to be easily solved, which makes it interesting.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

Yeah, uh the UFC is trying to solve this problem, right? They're trying to get all the metrics of all their fighters and correlate it to win loss records and things like that. And I just think it's a it's an impossible task. Because if you're a striker, are your strength requirements the same as if you're a grappling? You know, your probably your cardiovascular requirements are different than you're if you're a grappling. And if you're a striker and end up in a grappling fight, you're going to look weak. If you're a grappling and end up in a striking fight, you're gonna look like you're out of shape. And so I think we have to MMA is almost a generalist activity. And so I just look at my guys and I want them to just be in the weight room, just improving anything, is probably more important than chasing anything. You know, practice the the support comes first and we practice hard and alive every session, and then use the weight room as an adjunct. Use it if nothing else, the weight room is great for protecting yourself. And so that's sort of the way we've always approached the weight room. And I think it's probably the only way we really can. And I I know professional strength and condition coaches, you know, that's what they get paid for. But as as the coach, as the coach of the whole program, I think the weight room is to improve those characteristics because if if you can move a little faster, you can respond a little faster. If you're a little stronger, you can impose that a little better. But I don't know if we have to chase specific numbers.

SPEAKER_00 20:21

Yeah, and I think the the the I think the I think your point is really accurate. And I also think that like along those lines, um however strong, quote unquote strong that you get, the higher the level that you go, if your game is built upon is your game, if your game is built upon that as the um as the key, eventually you're gonna run into somebody that's stronger. And then all of a sudden you're now all of a sudden none of it, none of it works, which I think is just an argument for why skill has to be the first thing. Uh because it's like we always, you know, they always tell you this about jujitsu, they're like, um, oh uh it's it's so that the smaller person can beat the larger person. And I'm like, for sure. It's it's so the smaller person can be the larger person if the larger person doesn't know what they're doing. You know, there's a big caveat involved in that. But if both if all things being equal and they're they both have the same amount of training and the same amount of skill, generally the larger person's going to win. For sure.

SPEAKER_02 21:14

We ask all our guess item, uh, because I I think it's poorly defined is what is skill? We talk about it. We talk about these we talk uh every week, we talk about these these throwaway words. We just throw these words around. We're it's not fucking clear to me what we even mean. What's it mean, John?

SPEAKER_00 21:33

What does skill mean?

SPEAKER_01 21:35

You've used it because you've used it. If we ran this back, you've used it in a few different ways, and you've added the term acquisition to it as well. So what does it mean?

SPEAKER_00 21:43

What does skill mean to me? Well, let me think about it. Let me talk about it first in terms of uh baseball. Right? So baseball, the most valuable interaction in baseball is the the batter pitcher interaction. That's where like 80% of the value happens in a baseball game. Is that batter pitcher interaction? So the first skill uh it would be the close skill of pitching, which is which is essentially throwing an object at a target with certain velocities and uh movement profiles. So I would say that how you define it broadly, I it's something that you didn't something that you could learn to do and get better at, I think, physically. If we're talking about like a physical skill, something you can learn to do and get better at. And hitting is more of a like a reactive um open skill. So I don't I don't I'm not in control of the conditions that are happening. Yes, there's a strike zone and the ball's got to go through that thing, but I'm trying to do an interceptive timing task and hit a ball within a hit a ball within a certain bandwidth. So I don't know if it's a good definition of the general general idea of skill, but I again I think of like is it characteristics are like kind of things that are inherent, the things that you can do without having to learn them. But I think when we when we say something like um he's got great striking skill or he's got he's he's a he's he's he's a very skilled hitter, like those are things that when we're born, like you know, we don't just learn how to do those things like we would do walking or running.

SPEAKER_01 23:01

So what is a skilled hitter then? If you say this person is a skilled hitter, what does that mean other than the fact that they their batting average is higher or their their output is like there's a performance aspect, but what does that mean beyond the numbers? What can a skilled hitter do that a less skilled hitter can't?

SPEAKER_00 23:20

So well, in using it in like baseball definitions, like a skilled hitter just tends to be the most adaptable one. The one who can the one who can deal with the most um the most variable conditions, the one who can deal with the most variable, the one who can see essentially which like the plain language would be like basically the guy who can hit anybody that's pitching. That's a skilled hitter, but what makes him skilled? Well, they're more adaptable. Um I think a good example would be, and this is an old school one, but like a really good example would be Pete Rose. Uh and there's you know, he was the all-time major league hits leader, he had 4,000 something hits, and was a switch hitter, so he hit right and left-handed. But one of the really interesting things about Pete Rose um was he would change like where he stood and what he looked at all the time based on who was pitching to try to make it as same as possible. You know, there's all of these different arm angles that guys are throwing from from both sides, and he would move around in the batter's box to try to kind of like line it up in a way. And you know, we we talked about in baseball, we were talking about how, like, oh, he was kind of like consciously um changing affordances. And he would do things like change the size of his bat, like he'd choke up or get down towards the end, he'd stand taller, stand lower. Um, and so I would say that he's a very skilled hitter because he could do, he didn't all conditions didn't have to be perfect for him to execute what he was trying to do. He kind of like was smart enough to force the conditions into his favor. And so there's some there is some thinking for him going on. I don't know that he knew any of the terms maybe that that you guys or we tend to use in the other space, which is the same space, but he was doing those things um all the time. So, yeah, a skilled hitter is the most adaptable one, the one who can deal with whatever comes their way. That's that's high skill there. I think we keep coming back to that item, right?

SPEAKER_02 25:00

Oh, the word we circle back to is uh adaptability. Say I have a I have a question. Um so I often ask if uh we'll have two strikers and someone's throwing strike near a punch, when does a punch start, right? But I'm curious because you're talking about all the analytics in baseball. Um so it's a two-part question, I think. When does the the pitch when when is that pitch initially perceived? And as batters get better more perceptually attuned, let me think about this fucking question, as they get more perceptually attuned, are they acting necessarily earlier? Are they acting later? Is there uh is there some specified information that you guys have maybe been able to parse out that this is where they're perceiving the pitch? Did that question make any fucking sense?

SPEAKER_00 25:41

Yes. Okay, so I'm gonna try to I'm gonna try to answer this a couple different ways.

SPEAKER_02 25:44

Maybe try and ask the question again in a clearer in a clearer way.

SPEAKER_01 25:47

I understood. Okay. When does the pitch start? Yeah, right. That's that's a good question. I I I would start that.

SPEAKER_00 25:54

So I would say the pitch starts the moment the pitcher moves. The moment the pitcher moves, and I'll tell you why. So um this is gonna be a meandering answer for a second. But no more meandering than the question. I'll give you I'll give you an example of a pitcher. So, okay. So if you follow if people follow baseball, one of the things that it is is absolutely apparent now is that it's never been harder for people to hit, and that's that's expressed in the statistics. Last year in 2024, only seven people in Major League Baseball hit over 300.

SPEAKER_02 26:21

Um 300 excuse me, what's 300?

SPEAKER_00 26:24

So 300 is like the is like the is like that's like the gold standard. If you hit 300 for your career, you know, it's likely if you play for 10 or 12 years and hit 300 every single year, so that's 30% success rate as a hitter, you've got to hit 30% of the time. Um only seven people did that last year. You go back 15, 20 years and the numbers are significantly higher of people that that perform that way. The reason that this has happened is when you go back to like 2011, 2012, the Astros figured out that you could put basically a radar system behind a pitcher, and they were trying to figure, they were trying to figure out why they had drafted a guy that threw really hard first overall, and he was just getting destroyed in the game, even though he's throwing 100 miles an hour. They were to what about this guy's fastball is wrong? So they got a track man, uh, which they also use in golf, which is a portable radar system that goes behind the mound, and there's a sensor back behind the catcher, and it gives you real-time feedback on all of these different characteristics of the ball flight. And so they were looking at it and they were saying, okay, the way his fastball moves, and we're gonna get really weird and technical, but it very low-induced vertical break, which is the appearance of the ball rising to the hitter and kind of where his arm angle was. Essentially, he was just throwing like a bowling ball straight down a lane. You could see it, you could see it all the way. What they started to figure out with all of the data that they were collecting was that, okay, we can start to, now we can, now we can assess the pitchers that are really good, and we can look at what their fastball profile looks like, and we can start to figure out what kind of bandwidth performs because they have they can compare it against the performance information. That process expanded to all of the different pitches. And so now in coaching, you can a guy can throw a bullpen and you can look at the track man and go, that is objectively, that has never worked at the major league level. Like that combination of where he's releasing it and how it's moving, even though it looks good from a velocity standpoint, it's it's going to be ineffective. And so guys are making changes because now those changes just become like finger pressure on a baseball, throw it exactly the same way, and they're making the ball move in different ways. And you can just give them this task. You can say, okay, I need this ball to move right now, it moves 12 inches horizontally. I need you to figure out a way to make it move 17 inches horizontally. And then you let the pitcher just kind of explore the different possibilities, and then they get one, you go, what was that? That was that, because you're just looking at the uh, you know, the knowledge of performance or excuse me, the knowledge of result. You're going, that was it. What did you do? Oh, I pressed down harder on my middle finger. Okay, go and do that. Then you watch that guy go into the game and immediately go and do that. Now, here's why I'm saying, I know this is again, this is meandering. So pitching has gotten so good because the um the feedback loop is so fast on their improvements. And like you'll see a guy pitch on, he'll pitch on Monday and then he'll go pitch on Saturday, and he'll have all of a sudden the breaking balls are different. And it's like hard to prepare for these things that keep changing, which is why adaptability is so important. However, what we saw, what we see a lot, especially with younger players, is they'll say, okay, I need to make that ball move more this way. And then that movement now starts by like the moment they pick their leg up in their delivery to move, and you'll see them counter-rotate a bunch, like you'll see their whole name on their back. And then what you get back from the hitters is, you know, they'll hit a ball and they'll hit a double and they'll come back and then hey, what pitch did you see? Oh, he threw me a slider. And that slider is, it's got the metrics that we're looking for. And then you ask the hitter, like, well, how well did you see it? And they go, I felt like I knew it was coming. And because something changed in the pre-pitch kinematics that gave away what was happening, but it's it's it's happening too fast for the guy that's hitting to actually intellectually process it, but he knows something is different. So you hear that a lot. And I had that experience myself where standing on second base after hitting a double and not really knowing what the pitch was, but knew, but having this sense or feeling that I knew what was coming and where it was going to be. Um, so that's part one to the answer is it starts when they pick up their leg because people will do different stuff in the delivery to give away the thing that they're doing. Um, but it's happening again in that really small uh space of time, like a second or two. So it's happening too fast for the guy to go, oh, he turned his back, he's throwing a slider. No, they just something happens, their their focus of attention goes to where the ball needs, the window of the ball needs to go through. They hit it and they have no idea why they why they did that. They just kind of perceived it or picked it up. Um that's the I think that's that's that's where it starts. But then the second thing is we did a lot of um, and the Red Sox have done this as well, but we did a lot of gaze tracking. So we put glasses, um, gaze tracking glasses on the players, and then we had like infrared infrared things that stood up like around an L screen, and then we had a coach throw mixed batting practice, and we've kind of started to see like what the gaze behavior was, like how do these eyes work? And the best players tend to um smoothly kind of get ahead of where the ball is and look slightly like right below where it is. Now, this again, this is none of this is consciously directed. This is just us taking like observational research and looking at all of these different gaze behaviors. Um, and then we also figured out though that if you start cutting that information off, so we put like occlusion glasses on them where it would cut off at a certain point. If you had guys that were really jumpy with their vision, this there's no talking involved in any of this. It's just like, oh, Scott's Scott really on these cicades, he really jumps and it's jarring or he's not looking at the right thing. We can start cutting off the information halfway through, forcing the gaze behavior to happen where the information is. And then after four or five weeks of training like that, it never that that now never went away with the player. So we would say two, I guess, two things. One, it depends on the gaze behavior of the player, of the hitter, where the delivery starts. And it also depends on what the pitcher is trying to do. The best guys in the world, and you'll see him sometimes on like those Twitter reels, you'll see like it looks like he's doing the exact same thing and he lets go with the ball and they do an overlay and it goes like all these different directions. Like those are the hardest, those are the hardest people to hit because what happens is everything looks the same beyond where you would have to make a decision, and then it moves into a different direction, which is again easy for us to figure out um in coaching with the pitching, and really, really challenging for the hitters to be able to pick up. And and that's played out in the outcomes over the last I would say five years in the big leagues.

SPEAKER_01 31:51

Okay, so it leads me perfectly to my next question. So I I came and spent a day with you uh last year just watching from the when they entered the facility to the end of the game and beyond. And I have not seen anything as dogmatic as baseball in my life. Um watching major league hitters hit off a team was jarring to me. Now, I know we've spoken about that at one time, but the question is not about that. The question is your understanding of how to develop skills and how to make some mistakes or whatever we want to call them, improve is drastically different than the dogma of baseball and skill development. How are you able to bridge that gap? Were you able to bridge that gap? And if you were able, if you had been able to continue in your job, how would you have continued to push that forward?

SPEAKER_00 32:49

Great question. So the the the thing I think that's important to like frame this answer is that like, and it took us a couple of years to figure out that we had to ask this question in the first place. So if we if we remind all the way back to 2021, um when I came into the minor league system after a year of missed minor league baseball, it was pretty easy for us to explain to everybody why practice needed to be really representative. So traditional baseball practice, to Adam's point, like traditional baseball practice is like you have uh we're gonna tell you exactly what's gonna happen ahead of time, and you're and we're gonna hit the ball where we're telling you we're gonna hit the ball. So, you know, uh to your glove side on infield defense is your forehand, to the to your arm side is your backhand. And like a lot of infield practice would be a coach on their knees hitting really slow ground balls to the guy's left and to the right, and then take a couple steps back and then move forward. And my point is that it it misses all of the kind of like time where you would have to react in a game. Um, it's removed from that. The same thing with the T. If hitting is an interceptive timing task and the ball is not moving, we're not intercepting anything with any timing now. We're just doing a trick over and over again off of the T. So when we came back in 2021, these kids hadn't played in a year. And so it was really easy for us to express to them that, like, look, you've missed a season. You've missed all that information that you would have gotten from playing last year. So we're gonna try to give as much of that as possible to you in practice to get you as ready as possible. And so that was that was easy because they're minor leaguers trying to work their way up and play in the major leagues, and we're the people that are the kind of authority figures in the environment. Essentially, we could tell them what to do and they would have to do it. Like that that was the practice that was offered. You we would have to do that. It really, and this is a um, I don't know how much this extends to some of the other major sports, but then you get to the major leagues. Um, and now people have more experience in games. Like in the past, minor league baseball was the only, if you really think about it, that was the only real training for major league baseball. You were literally playing baseball games all the time. That's as as representative as it can possibly be. What do you do? I mean, we would play when I was in AAA sometimes, we play, we'd play 34, 35 games in a row with no days off. So we're just showing up every day to the baseball field and we're playing a game. Um, that is the best possible way to get ready to play Major League Baseball. But then you get to the major leagues and the preparation for the game itself looks like it did when people were like 12 years old. It's like the same, it's like nothing has changed. And so I thought a lot about it. I think at the so the question that we started having to ask ourselves is like, are we training these players to improve? Or are we or are we training them to maintain like the skill set that they have, or are we are we trying to get them ready to compete today? And so those those different buckets all require like a different approach to that particular person. So when you get to Major League Baseball and these guys have had 4,000 at bats, um they don't want to, they don't want to take on the stress of like very representative practice hitting in particular. They just want to go be psychologically soothed, make sure that they connect to this thing that they feel, and then go out and compete. And and the more I thought about it, you know, spending my spending my time I did with our major league team last year, the more I was kind of okay with it in that the really good players were getting all of that perceptual information. They're playing every day, they're getting all that information. Like, dude, is adding more of that to them actually going to necessarily make them better today? Or like the weight room, is it just gonna make them tired and frustrated and pissed off? And then we've got kind of a negative slant like moving into the game. Whereas the minor league level, when they're moving up, it's critical. Like, how do we give them the most at bats possible to do that? To your point about dogma, the other part about Major League Baseball is that, and I can just really speak to our experience with Pittsburgh, was that we invested heavily in developing our coaches. So I remember in 2021, the the book that we had everybody read during our like we have a thing called Instructional League that happens in the fall. It's six weeks of very, very focused practice with no games. Um we had them all read How We Learn to Move, the entire coaching staff. That was the that was the first book that we handed out because we wanted to really challenge what most of baseball practice is, which is just the same stuff that people were doing for us 30 years ago when we were kids. It hasn't evolved or changed. And we listen a lot to the experts, um, but the experts also fall to survivorship bias. Like they don't necessarily know how to explain their experience really well or what actually made them good. So they talk about the things that they did to prepare, and the things that they did to prepare were the same things as the previous generation did to prepare, and like it never really evolved or adapted or changed. So when you get to the major league level, there's there's only a couple examples of people really pushing on uh training and making it better and seeing measurable results. The the, I think the biggest one that's easy to find is the Arizona Diamondbacks. So uh the Arizona Diamondbacks have a director of uh, I think it's director of either skill development or skill acquisition um named Vaughn Robinson. And so Vaughn, they brought him in in 2021, the Diamondbacks had the worst infield defense in baseball. And they brought him in and they said, Hey, we need to um, we need to improve our defense. Like, what ideas do you have? And so then he said, Okay, well, he's like the first thing he did is he went around and he asked all the coaches, like the infield coaches, what what do you think the problem is? Oh, our routes are too shallow, or like we don't, we we don't do the we we're not good at the routine play. And he was like, you know, Adam, it kind of sounds like you. He's like, Well, what's the routine play? And I go, that's the, you know, so he had to kind of go do some data. Okay, routine play is any ground ball hit between 60 and 100 miles an hour, um, kind of like within a certain uh bandwidth left and right from the player. Those plays should be made 100% of the time. How many of those plays actually happen in a game? And when they looked at that, they realized, oh, like if there's 27 ounce, routine ground balls happen two and a half times two and a half times a day on average. So those plays are really not as routine necessarily as you as you would think they would be. What does the game actually look like? How have we actually taught defense? And basically all they did is they significantly reduced the amount of time that they did practice and they made the practice much more like an actual ground ball of the game, meaning that they didn't tell them that we were gonna hit it to their left or their right. They put the whole infield out on the field. They had somebody throw a ball to somebody hitting and they trained the reactions. And in a year, with less time spent playing practicing infield defense, they went from one of the worst teams in baseball to back-to-back-to-back years. They were the best defensive team in baseball. And again, practice went down. It's just that they thought about it more in terms of the information that they were giving the players versus how the players were fielding the ball. Because we figure if they're in the major leagues, they already know how to field the ground ball anyway. Why are we constantly putting them on their knees or telling them what's coming? Like that's not doing anything other again than either making them feel good about themselves or getting them tired. And those are not uh reliable under pressure.

SPEAKER_01 39:08

Then why was a guy who's been in the major leagues 20 years and played the night before hitting off a T, hitting off underhanded, hitting off this before the game? Why not just hang rest and do some yoga and get a massage?

SPEAKER_00 39:22

I I think you're I think now we're now now you're crossing over though into like the psychology of it. You know, it's like it's it's like a um those routines, those preparatory routines, are almost like a psychological blanket. It's like I've done well in the past doing this, I have to do this. And this was like I can tell you, the when I signed my contract in 2002, uh, I got lucky enough to go to the Oakland, I got drafted by the A's. I went to the Oakland Coliseum, and this was the first piece of advice I got in baseball, in professional baseball. So I'm out there shagging in the outfield, getting ready for my group to hit, just wide-eyed as hell, because I grew up watching that team. They're my favorite team. They draft me. I get to sign at the plate. Last time I was there, we lost our high school championship game on that field.

SPEAKER_02 40:00

Sorry, John, shagging in the outfield has a whole different meaning in Scotland. So that's why it's not a while since I've shagged in the outfield. This is this is way worse.

SPEAKER_00 40:08

This is baseballs. So yeah, but he said to me, he said, Hey, let me give you a piece of advice. He's like, figure out what you need to do in terms of your hitting routine. And what you should do is you just do that same thing every day. It doesn't matter if you're out until four in the morning or if you got a great night's sleep, you just show up and you just do it over and over again, and that's how you get better. And that was the general message across the board. And everybody, from the time they got into professional baseball, was indoctrinated with like, you know, you need to be the guy that practices one kick a thousand times. Um, which, as much as I love Bruce Lee, like my argument is not that is not to fear the guy who's practiced practiced one kick a thousand times or the or the guy who's practiced a thousand kicks one time, it's fear the guy who's kicked a thousand people in the head. Um we don't, you know, like baseball is still hyper resistant um to that. And and I the last thing I'll say on this is that what you're talking about, the the hitting space specifically, the other spaces are more advanced. The hitting space specifically is slow because all of those guys, again, are all really good by the time they get there. And I, you know, when I worked for the Cubs, for example, we had in every time the team didn't perform really well, and there was high expectations, there were a really big payroll. Every time they didn't perform, they would fire the hitting coaches. There was two of them. And so in five years working there, I saw six different guys as hitting coach in five years. So three combinations of two. And it wasn't until I was in grad school and going through the course in grad school on motor learning that I went out that I kind of really hit me that, like, man, we keep firing these coaches, but nothing about the practice changes. So, like, why would we expect anybody to do any different? They're just gonna fall victim to this aging curve that everybody experiences over time unless we do something with how we're preparing, there's no reason to expect anybody would be better. And the coaches are so beholden to kind of like the how the players feel about them. Because, you know, the the the way the modern game works now is like if I don't have a good season as a player and the GM comes to do like kind of the postseason interview with me, I'm just gonna tell him, well, the hitting coach didn't help me. Which usually means the hitting coach, I had a bad year, but the hitting coach did whatever I'm whatever I wanted him to do the entire year. Uh and that's the that's the trend throughout the entire league. You look around and it's just constantly recycled, recycling the same people and everybody doing the same uh drills and practice, which is you know, like why we're talking and I'm not working at a field anymore.

SPEAKER_01 42:25

Okay, well that's here we go. So wait, Scotty.

SPEAKER_02 42:28

Yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 42:29

Yeah, I because I I want part of the reason I wanted to have John on is you've you worked with a couple of my fighters. I know that you have left Major League Baseball, but now you are almost gone full circle with mental skills. But what I'd love you to talk about what you're doing now and how you're using an ecological approach to to bridge that mental skills gap.

SPEAKER_00 42:49

Well, yeah, thanks. Um so yeah, no, I'm working one-on-one with people now. Um so I was uh after my career, the first job, and for me like the most fulfilling work was working one-on-one with the with the players when I was doing mental performance stuff. So when we and I think, again, we're gonna go back to skills again, because it's funny that you guys asked me what a skill is. And I I never actually define it with anybody, but I just say we call it a skill because we can practice and improve. That's why we call it a skill. It's not a trait, it's just it's something that can, that can, we can get maybe not objectively better, but like qualitatively better, or we can we can have a different perspective of our experience when we understand um that we prepared for it in a different way. So yeah, I work with people and a lot of this comes from like what we were seeing in terms of like the tactical approach from the younger players um in baseball and like their ability to focus and pay attention over time. Um, I think it's probably obvious to everybody that the human attention span's been shrinking. And it's not anybody's fault. Um, it's just that the technology that we have to interact through now, like it does something to our ability to focus. You know, people are people are more distracted. And those aren't my that's not my like supposition or something. That's like what you know, Gloria Mark at UC Hervine is the number one researcher on the human attention span. And like she, and again, we have to extrapolate out because She worked with knowledge workers. But 2004, knowledge worker single screen focus of attention was like two and a half minutes. By 2020, it was down to 47 seconds. And so some of that stuff is leaking. And when you think about what we try to do or what I try to do with people is help them to be more mentally tough. That has a very specific definition from Gucci Ardi and from the research on mental toughness, which means too, can I pay attention to the right thing at the right time, regardless of circumstances? And so now, what are the right things in the right time? Well, this is where this is where skill coaching comes in effectively, because I've always thought of coaching as can I train the people that I'm coaching to focus their attention on the right cue or on the right approach in the moment over and over again. How good are you as a coach at directing a focus of attention? And how good are you at setting up practice so that that focus of attention is directed to the right thing without you actually having to physically tell them what the right thing is? Can you show them where to look, but not tell them what to see? And that was, we had that actually written on the on the wall with the pirates. Um so how I work with people when I think about the quote unquote mental skills is there's a couple things. You know, you have things like goals, right? Everybody knows that that goals are, we should set goals. They give us something to have direction to. I'm not gonna go deeper into goal architecture, but it's not what most people think it is. It's not I'm gonna be in the UFC or so. That's not the that's not that's not a goal that we have any control over necessarily. Um visualization is another one. Uh, but then like mindfulness and attention training is one that's huge. And then the and then the final part, when we think about what it takes to accomplish something over a long period of time, you've got to be driven internally. It can't only be about those external rewards. And so, how do we set up our internal conditions for intrinsic long-term uh motivation? And that's generally through helping people acquire their own personal values, the real ones, the things that matter to them. And then that's where we start to shift and line goals up. Once I know that these are the things that you value, this is why you're doing the thing. And so, in talking to some of the guys from uh SPG, for example, one of the things that stands out, and this is because I've spoken with more than one MMA fighter. One of the things that continues to come around when we have these values conversations is there is this kind of like um dovetailing idea of both seeking challenge and pursuing mastery, is why they kind of ended up in the place that they were doing the thing that they were doing. It scared them enough and it was hard enough that they figured it was gonna take a long time for them to do it. So now going to MMA practice does not is not necessarily just about the outcome and winning the fight, but I know that I'm expressing these things that are deeply a part of who I am when I'm going and doing that, that's going to give me the fuel over time, or at least this is what the data has to say, to be able to do that for a long enough time to actually accomplish the goal. Um, so yeah, I mean, my system that I run with people is is pretty simple, but it's uh it's it's not even a system necessarily. I would more call it a strategy. It's like here's where you have to have things in place, but everybody's values are different. Everybody's approach to how they want to train their attention is different, everybody's approach to how they want to prepare for something is different. Um, everybody's kind of number of arousal that we learn how to check in with over time and point ourselves in the right direction, that falls all over the spectrum for different people. And then how we learn from that experience, and that's kind of the final part is we set we set this up so that every day we're taking values-aligned steps. Um, answers a lot of questions for us too. Like I'll give you an example of how this answers a question. So if you're if your value is discipline, which is oftentimes to do something hard, it's it's a requirement, you're not you're not necessarily even having to make a choice anymore. Because the question that you have to ask is what would somebody who values discipline do in this situation? Then you just do that. What would somebody who values joy in this situation do? And then that's just what that makes the it it eliminates some of the decision fatigue that we all have. Um but how do you prepare? How do you regulate? And then how do you learn from your experience and close, actually physically close the day? How do I write down, you know, like the military does this great with after action stuff? And then the final part about those three things is now how do I compress those into the simplest things that have the least that take up the least amount of time? Because uh simple and short beat complex under pressure uh every single time. So that's the I don't know Adam where Adam with, but that's the system that I use.

SPEAKER_02 47:52

And have you with the higher level athletes you've worked with, have you ever have you have you met many that are not intrinsically motivated? I'm sure some are better than others, but most, most of them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:02

The the the trap that I tend to see, um, especially when you get to the highest levels where guys have made a lot of money, um, is that on the other side of a big contract, like that was always we kind of figure out that that was always the goal. The goal was like, how do I get $150 million out of my body, basically? And then they get it, and then they're on the other side of it, and nothing has changed. You know, sure, there's extra zeros in the bank account, but nothing has changed. Um, because goals are terminal. Goals are terminal. And once you've accomplished it, it becomes okay, well, if and you hear all you hear the if-then fallacy a lot, like, well, if I if I get to the big leagues, then I'll be happy. Then well, if I make an all-star team, then I'll be happy. If I get a contract, then I'll be happy. And then those things happen for people and they get to the other side of it, and they're like, why am I why am I like unsatisfied and why do I not like this thing that I'm why do I not like this thing that I'm doing? And I think I I saw that quite a lot in the past. People that were really good at doing something, that when you really started talking to them more and more about it, you realize pretty quickly like they just they don't like this. Like this necessarily isn't, this isn't like some autonomous choice that they made. This was just that when they were eight years old, they hit the ball over everybody's head and it never stopped. And now they're getting paid a lot of money for it and they hate showing up to work every single day. Um, and I think you that's more common in that's more common in baseball, I think, than many people would expect. And so then, you know, if you're working with somebody like that, then the real direction becomes like, how do we help this person find balance? Like, what do you like doing outside of what you do? Because again, go look at go look at some of the research from like Nobel Prizes, you know. Some of the scientists play trumpet, some of them do other stuff. Some scientists like Adam teach MMA. You can't be just, you can't be so uh you can't have your identity so wrapped up in the one thing you do because then it gets tied to the outcome, and that's that's not a path to that's not a path to balance or fulfillment, which is the that's what the what that population is generally working on. So yeah, mental performance coaching, Adam, that's the buzzer.

SPEAKER_02 49:55

So this is all this is all kind of coming together to make my next question. You talk a little bit about attention, we talked a little bit about uh intrinsic motivation and being engaged. How would you characterize excuse me, how would you characterize flow? Flow state? Is it just a buzzword or is it something you're feeling about? And uh how does that uh how does that interact with the idea of the like our attentional capacity?

SPEAKER_00 50:14

Okay, so like like trick set mahales, flow. Um as I understand, I I think it's you know there's words that are that follow um the the definition, but I think about what are the requirements, it's just being present and convicted uh and in kind of like the optimal level of arousal for what you need to do. And that's a simple explanation, but it's absolutely something that's attainable, um, I think for people. So when we a component of that is attention. And if we if we can all agree that what the data has to say is that our ability to pay attention, like not our capacity, but our ability is lessened based on our interaction with modern technology, then spending some time, and and I think it's important too to say what does that actually mean? Like what how like what is attention training actually doing? All attention training is doing is helping people practice, or it's it's teaching people to practice, recognizing when they're off task, and then returning their attention back to the task without judging themselves. You know, like mindfulness itself means paying attention in a particular way on purpose in the present moment without judgment. So that is a component of being in flow. But then the other one is like what level of effort does the situation require for us to express, and can I do that naturally without thinking about it? Um, but if you're if you're focused and you're and you're present, you're giving yourself the best possible chance to have like full immersion and enjoyment of the experience, which is what how I kind of understand the idea of like what a flow state is. And I think too, I think the last thing is that a lot of times when you hear about that, um when you hear about flow state, it always comes after somebody has like dominated something or won something. And so I think there also is some sort of like unmeasurable momentum that that helps us kind of just flow naturally. Like we we get ahead early enough in the thing that we're doing or we find the thing early enough, and that just reduces our our worry and fear about continuing to do it. And so it just we just kind of like let it happen. And I think that's what we're always trying to do in uh the the conditions that we're always trying to set for our competition for the athletes is can you just express the stuff that was practiced without thinking about it? And that that's I think that's that is being in a flow state.

SPEAKER_01 52:23

So what what would we consider like strengths and slumps?

SPEAKER_00 52:30

Um okay, good question. The well there, I mean those these are outcomes. You know, like the this happens a lot in hitting in baseball. Um I'll do this the right thing. You can do the right thing, which is just to hit the ball hard, like off the ground, basically, over and over again and continually hitting it, hit it right to somebody. And in baseball, the natural reaction there for the athletes is when they don't when the ball doesn't fall in the grass and they don't receive the dopamine from doing the thing right, the general impulse is to go back and say something about what I'm doing is wrong and I need to fix it. Uh usually that's not the case. Um usually it's generally just bad luck. And I think that one of one of the great things about baseball is that there is 162 games. So it gives it gives the streak and slump enough time to kind of average out over time. Um I think what's more interesting is that people think that there's an idea of uh clutch performance that like people rise to you know bigger moments and and bigger occasions. And like what we what we actually find is that and again, very specifically using baseball, the behaviors that are expressed for the players that we call clutch are just consistent. It doesn't matter if it's the spring training game or a world series game, they're just kind of the same player, and everybody else gets sped up by the moment and gets jumpy and jerky and and and kind of like makes the over-effort mistakes that we see uh when the pressure comes on.

SPEAKER_01 53:50

Then why does someone like Andrew Judge have this view that he doesn't perform in the off-season? I mean, his numbers he doesn't perform in the off-season. What do you mean? Like he doesn't historically and judge in the postseason. Yeah, in the postseason, which is right, that's important.

SPEAKER_00 54:07

So Well, again, like you have a and I'd be interested to know more about like how well he does against the good pitching during the season. But a lot of that it can probably be explained by when you get to postseason baseball, the teams that are there, it is the best pitching. That's generally what like that's a requirement of getting into the um playoffs. It is the best pitching. And then yeah, I think that the other part of that is I wonder, you know, I'll I'll frame it in like how I would talk about arousal level with like an athlete that I was working with. Like what I would say is we would ask the question to somebody like on a scale of one to 10, 10 being my hair's on fire, one being I'm super chill, like, where do you need to be to perform at your best? And start, if you don't know, like start checking in in the middle of games and saying, like, okay, where what is my level of intensity right now? Um, and and what what do I think would be most effective for where where would be most effective for me? And then and then once you kind of have a number, you know, like the number's arbitrary, honestly, because getting better is only pointing yourself in the other direction, either up or down, based on what's needed. But once you have that number, then the next question is like, well, what is the environment doing to that number? You know, if I'm if I want to be a five and I'm playing in the postseason and it's at Yankee Stadium, and there's 40,000 people and people in the parking lot, and it's louder, and the moment itself feels bigger, then that's probably adding to my number. That's a plus five environment. So now I'm a 10. So what do I need? Where do I really need to be to play well in this game? Like, I need to be a one. I need to I need to learn how to try less hard, which is a common phrase in baseball. I need to be a one. I need to be way more relaxed, knowing that and way more trusting in the ability that things can come out. And I think that that's the that is the other part of it. Those guys like Aaron Judge, when when he does well, it's the it's the paradox of elite performance. When Aaron Judge goes out and it's 57 home runs, we just go, it's Aaron Judge. When Aaron Judge has a small sample where he really struggles, it's like the world's on fire. And so that just builds over time into whatever narrative is in his head. And that narrative is another thing that kind of escalates the expectation and pressure on himself as he goes in a place. So I would argue that if Aaron Judge is has struggles in the playoffs, it is a synergy of better competition and like higher internal expectations and pressure. And that's that's how you see somebody as talented as that struggle when it quote unquote matters most.

SPEAKER_01 56:16

So how do we how do we work in practice so that when our fighters end up in the cage in front of people, they are not putting these extra expectations. I want my f I want my fighters to just see the fight almost as just another sparring session, another practice, but that's not realistic because there are thousands of people screaming and they're in the back room and there's all kinds of things I can't control for. And how do we what how do we help them with that?

SPEAKER_00 56:39

Well, I think that see that that that's that sport um is already so you know, like it's a fight. So you you have to be in you have to be in the sympathetic nervous system, I think, to be effective in that environment. Um, which is why like I, you know, it's why we you guys are where you are in terms of like training and developing. Like it can't be, like you can't be in the middle of the fight and having to think about how to throw a punch, you know, like it's just a it's just a reaction and a response, and it's happening really quickly. Um but I think that every this is gonna be a crappy answer, but I think that every person is every person is different in how uh in what they need, leading into those moments where if we want to get scientific with it, it's like this is where I'm crossing from rest and relax into fight or flight. And so like part one would be like, how long can we withhold that cross over into like that really excited state that's required um uh required to fight? But I mean, it's I don't know, I've never done an MMA fight. I've only done jujitsu tournaments. And while the first one was really exciting, the rest of them after that weren't necessarily really scary. Um so uh part one is an awareness and understanding that the environment is going to change and that what that environment is doing to me is making me better. Because if you if you talk about it from a very like rational uh physiological perspective, what's happening to me? Well, my my vision is focusing. Yes, my thoughts may be getting louder, but my vision is narrowing and focusing. My heart's beating faster, so I'm pumping more blood through my body. I'm breathing probably a little bit quicker, so I'm getting more oxygen. And these are the conditions that set up the, you know, we've all heard of the proverbial mom who deadlifts the car off of her kid. Like essentially what you're doing is you're you're transitioning into a superhero version of yourself. Like you have you're gonna hit harder in that state than you would in an incredibly relaxed state. So a lot of times, uh, and my point here is that a lot of times people are trained to try to avoid or push away that experience or view it as something negative, like it's like it's threatening, because we don't want to talk about it generally when we're in that state. Um if it can be viewed as a challenge and it can be framed in a positive way, sometimes that perspective shift in itself can really help people just perform when it matters. And again, my only experience with this is like, you know, I'm as a catcher, when the guy would come in the game as a pitcher and it was like his major league debut, and we're again we're at Dodger Stadium and there's 54,000 people, and he's never seen that kind of crowd before. My direction when I would go meet him on the mound was never about like what he had to do, but like I'd be like, dude, just take a second here, take a deep breath and look around. Like, this is fucking awesome. Like you feel all those things that you're feeling right now, you feel your heart beating faster, you feel your palm sweating, you know, you feel like you feel your breathing speed up and all those thoughts, and they go, yeah, I go, you are you have never been more fucking alive in your life right now. Just enjoy it and embrace it because this is why we do this in the first place. And that sometimes would help them go, like, oh yeah, dude, this is awesome. And then if you have your kind of little physical routine that you have to do to get ready to throw a pitch or swing the bat, then that can kind of remind you that you're just playing a game in the first place. And this is again why I think it's very different from fighting, because I don't know how often you guys tell me, I don't know how often fighters think about going into an MMA fight as playing a game, or if they think about it in terms of like being in a fight. Because I think those two things are, you know, we play games to replace that. You know, we replace uh punches and kicks with balls and bats or something, right? Like we're we're mock. We're like playing. It's like a mock, it's a mock thing.

SPEAKER_01 59:58

I think that's a I think that that's a difference in for some of the guys. Like I have I have a professional fighter who's he's two and oh now. I I really think he can go somewhere. And part of it is because the the situation's never too big for him. He just it is fun. He'll say, like, this is what I love. This is like just he wants the flight, he wants to get bloodied, he wants to get hit. Like it's what he wants to do. And then I have other fighters, you know, spoken to some of them who are just they're contemplative about the whole thing. And I don't think it's it's the same for everyone. I want them to think of the flight as just another day. They love this. It's the same way we practice Tuesday night, we fight on Saturday night. And every fighter I've ever walked to the cage, I've said the same thing before they stepped in. I said, just enjoy this and have fun. But I, you know, we all have had a divorce coming in. First time fighters, they all gas out because of the moment, like the adrenaline jump. There's nothing you can do about that. And then with experience, some of that gets mitigated. And I think experience is probably one of the biggest things between a fighter's first fight and his, you know, his tenth fight. It's just like everything else, it's it's putting them in that moment and experiencing it and understanding it and learning. The first time I ever did something in front of a crowd, all I could focus on was the crowd, even while it was going bad for me. I'm like, these people are watching me.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:25

Yeah. I mean, you know, it's funny. I remember I talked to my a good friend of mine, um, who he's a jiu-jitsu coach in Arizona now. Um, but he fought, he fought a couple times in Bellator. And um, I actually had worked with his daughter, who was a college golfer. And we were having a conversation like this, and he was talking about his last fight that he had and how he wished, he wished that his the earlier part of his career would have been like in that in the same kind of like mind state that he was in in the last fight. Because he knew it what he knew it was like, okay, this is the last time I'm gonna do this. And he's like, when I walk, he said when he walked out, it wasn't the feeling that he had wasn't what he had had in the past, which was like, oh shit, you know, like all these thoughts running through his head, like what he's gonna do? Can he get the guy down? Like all he's like playing all these scenarios out as he's going out, he's breathing, and he's you know he's getting tired as he gets out there. But his last one, because it was the last one, he was like, he walked, he said he said he walked out of the tunnel and he was like, looked around and he was like, How cool is this? Like, how like look at my name is like going on this banner around the stadium and like all this work that I've put in, the fact that like I get to be a part of something like this, like that was and he had a good performance, and that was like good enough for him at the moment. So I think that that's the other thing that's that's important to point out is that the reason that the the adrenaline dump happens is like what you would call that in performance psychology is that just like the side effects of performance anxiety. Like we're worried about what's going to happen, and we're so worried that we're hyper-focused on that, that we want to like make everything happen right away and we move too fast and then we get tired. And the and and our our system's not used to dealing with that. But you can be both anxious and grateful, but it is very hard to have anxiety and gratitude exist at the exact same time. And so, like, if the direction is more towards like, how fucking cool is this all the time? How awesome is this that we get to, this is what we get to do, that may help a little bit. But I think your other point is absolutely accurate, is that like you you don't know what it's like until you do it. And then you can, if you can objectively, if you have a learning process in place where you can kind of go through and non not without judging yourself for the shitty performance that you just had, kind of like really look at like how that whole, how the whole day went up and how we got in, and these are the things that this is what I wanted to do, this is how I prepared. If you can look at that and you can kind of like uh relive or kind of like revisualize the experience, but then you know, this is how power of our imagination and like another mental skill, but then like seeing yourself correcting when you get into that same place because what that experience tells you is just information. You know the same thing is going to happen. Like this is another really um a thing I talk about a lot in mental performance with people is that we're not in control of our thinking. We're we're not in control. We have 30,000 thoughts a day. If it was if we were in control, it would all be whatever, you know, like unicorns and rainbows all the time. But we're not, we observe the things that pop up. Mine would not be. Mine would be screaming and and hellscapes. That's if you want to. Well, no, I'm saying you're like you got to choose. Yeah, that's that's what it would be. Your yours is like a more like a Rob Zombie horror movie. Yeah, it's not good. That's good. Um my point is we're not in charge. Yeah, sure. And so um cultivating the ability to recognize a thought for what it actually is, which is just a temporary arising in your field of awareness, recognizing that that's happening and being able to reorient yourself to what you what you choose to focus your attention on. Um, that to me is a skill. And you can, you can, you can actually cultivate that skill. And that's why the shoot man, you look at what they're doing at the war college or what they're doing in special forces now, and uh, you look at the studies with like shooting accuracy under pressure and and and mindfulness training, it's become part of the fabric of special forces is making sure that people are saying, okay, here's here's a way to train something that they have. Amishi ja at the University of Miami, she has tested people under pressure and like tested cognitive resilience, tested reaction time, and with soldiers, tested shooting accuracy under pressure or under duress and when they're tired, and seen that something as minimal as listening to audio for 12 minutes four times a week and trying to do, trying to follow the instructions has these massive benefits for all of the stuff that happens to us under pressure. And my my supposition from what that research is, it's it's just that I now have practice going, oh, I didn't want to think about that. I wanted to be focused on this. You know, because when all those waves come on when somebody's walking out, if they just have a little practice of going, oh, look at that, like why? And this is one of the things I've talked about too with those guys, but it's like, why do I feel this way? Oh, I feel this way because I care. Oh, how cool. Like I care about something so much that it's freaking me out. I must really love this thing. I'm getting to do this thing that I love. It's just a different kind of view and perspective than the constant idea of like, I'm gonna resist it and I'm super tough, you know, like mental tough. Is not David Goggett's. It's not waking up at four in the morning and doing 100 burpees and running 10 miles. That's not mental toughness. That's like that's like sadomasochism plus um discipline, uh just kind of some psycho shit. That's not, I don't think that that's necessarily to me, mental toughness is very specifically in sports, that Gucci Ardi definition. Can I pay attention to the right thing at the right time, regardless of what's happening internally and externally? If I can do that, I am way more robust under pressure.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:26

And that's interesting because I'm not sure this completely maps on to like our ideas of ecology and changing that relationship over time through the environment through becoming used to, you know, like with with my fighters, I'll start them in uh no head contact um MMA, and then I'll you know, I'll make sure they're getting the right fights as I develop them because I'm trying to develop this uh cultivate this relationship over time. Um so I'm not saying I'm skeptical or there's nothing there, it's I'm unclear how um to navigate the self-talk thing. I'm sure there's something really powerful there. I mean but I'm not sure, but but I'm not sure it maps on neatly to perception action, but it might.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:02

I don't I think the person who's done probably the most in like the overlap is um uh Gabriel Wolfe. Because she's she's she's done a lot about what is the like optimal Gabriel Wolf's optimal theory, yeah. Um and I think one of the interesting things about optimal theory is uh expectancy, which I always I always found curious when I read through it, was that like, oh, if the coach expects you to win, and then you start to talk to people about it, and they're like, well, sometimes the thing that people don't want to hear is like, hey, you got this. You know, like we try so hard as people to like Lord knows I swallow the radio, but we we try so hard with people to like fill the space when sometimes like that's not the like the space doesn't need to be filled with words. Like we need to we need to get them to get stuff out as opposed to us trying trying to, I guess, try trying to plant stuff in. Um but I will address self-talk. So self-talk is a big part of mental performance. And the the fascinating thing is that everybody has a different voice. Everybody has a different voice. And one of the most helpful things that I've seen in working with people is when they can when they can kind of like, and we talk about this a lot. So you could have the, I have a whole list of them, but like uh the comparer, uh, the scoreboard watcher. Like there's so many different kinds of patterns. And when we people look back at their own experience, they start to notice that the same things um tend to come up over and over again. Like I'm I'm working with a young kid in California, and we recognized after like three weeks that the biggest issue that he would have is that he would go to like uh, you know, like these baseball trials or something, and he would start thinking about like, well, am I better than that guy? Am I better than that guy? What does the coach think about me? I'm like, oh, interesting. It's you've got the comparer. And so what we would talk about was how quickly can you identify when he's talking to you and go, oh, there he is again. And sometimes that's enough. Just providing a label to be able to create some intellectual separation from a thing. That's not me. That's just the tendency of the like the flavor of my thinking when I'm in an environment that I'm stressful. And again, why does the comparer show up? Well, our mind wants um comfort and safety. And the most comfortable and safe thing to do is to never try because then I don't have to worry about losing. Um, but that's not really fun at all. Um so when I'm in that space and I can start to put a label on it, then I can they call it cognitive defusion. I can start to defuse from like self-identity inside of the thinking thing. It's the difference between saying um I'm anxious or I'm noticing that I'm having thoughts that feel like they're anxiety. Like if I if I take that one step away from it and I'm I'm noticing this versus I am this, uh, sometimes that's all it takes just to shift people back to where they need to be. And so again, like these are all these internal processes. And again, there's a million different voices. Everybody's is unique because every person thinks their own way and thinks differently. And rarely are they, rarely do they map to like the 30 labels that I gave them. But when we talk through them, what we tend to see for every single person is that the pattern's the same. It's their own kind of proverbial devil on their shoulder, you know, that wants to talk shit right before you go and do the hard thing and tell you that you suck and that you're terrible, that you're gonna fail. And it's just doing that because it loves you and it doesn't want you to, it doesn't want you to get hurt, so it's trying to get ahead of it for you. When you start to see it in in that way and notice when it comes in, then you can take that stance and go, like, oh, how interesting, you know, and this goes, it's funny because it goes all the way back to um what Victor Frankl has to say in Man Search for Meaning about there's a space between stimulus and response. And so if you do mindfulness practice or you start to um look or observe your thinking, then you can just try to extend that space a little bit before your body starts to go from thought to feeling to emotion to, you know, just kind of spiral out of control. Can we put a little bit of space in between that? Can we meet that anxiety with gratitude? Can we know that the compare person that's in my head is only doing it because it cares about me and it only shows up when I'm doing shit that I care about, which is awesome in the first place because so many people are just floating through life anyway. Like anybody that chooses to take a professional MMA fight or an amateur MMA fight, like they're exposing themselves to like a temporary state of stress that 99.9% of the population, short of people in the military shooting guns or something, or first responders, is ever going to come close to. Like they'll never come close to that. Their MMA fight is honking and flipping the guy off at the stoplight. You know, like that's when that's when they get the most uh that's when they they feel the most kind of physiological stress. Um, so yeah, like that's my answer to it's not an answer to self-talk, but it's about can you give it a name so that you can make some space from it and recognize again that that's not you, you're not your thoughts, which is philosophical.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:20

These these different kind of self-talk archetypes that you're talking about. Uh and I I I can almost recognize this expressed in the training room. And I I can't see this. Adam, you'll see it. You'll see it in baseball too, right? This there's a there's this avoidance, this failure avoidance mechanism that that so many athletes have. And it's just holding them back so much. And I have to have the talk constantly about, you know, because it's tough because we play the games, right? Because we think the games induce a few things. Engagement. So we're almost having by definition, we're competitive in a game, so we're gonna have to kind of get engaged. So we're kind of fostering this flow state, whatever we want to call that. There's a there's a competitive competitiveness built in, but at the same time, we run the risk of if someone comes along and they're only they're only they either don't want to lose it or they're just trying to win, then they don't get the actual the some of the rich learning experience, which is a failure, which is a losing sometimes. Sometimes you're gonna get more out of the game by losing the fucking thing. And I see this a lot in early uh Adam, you'll see there's like shootboxing and stuff. There's this avoidance of shooting because I'm gonna fail, or there's avoidance of getting shot on because they don't want to get taken down. So they end up not shooting and and and operating at a range where no one's getting in and out of the fucking game. So the guys who are developing the quickest, guys and girls, are the ones that seem to be very they're not avoiding it. They're they're they're just they've got a good balance of trial and error, and again, I think that's just like a form of life, it's kind of a psychological architect.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:39

I constrain our shoot box girls so they stop running away from each other. You think it right? Yeah, because if I could put them in a if I could put them in a small friggin' area, I would do it.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:50

And if we come back to experience and someone's like a more novice, they're taking five extra shots per round, uh, ten rounds per session, with a shoot box over over a week, we think of the volume of of trials, and this might be a little bit comes down to.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:04

I had I had a fighter the other night, and it's funny because I have a coach and and a fighter. Hey, come on, get get off. I have a and he had a second pro fight the other night, and in the second round, there's a sequence where the his opponent starts throwing a spinning wheel kick, and my guy shoots under it and grabs the leg. And it's just beautiful. It's almost like an action sequence. And my my fighter, who is who's also one of my coaches and understands all this stuff, he coaches kids wrestling using this approach, said I was just lucky. And I'm like, why, after everything you believe, everything we talk about, everything we train, would you see that as luck and not see it for what it was? A perfect moment of perception action. And it's like, well, there are there are other worlds where that kick lands and I'm unconscious. I said, sure, if you were a little more fatigued, maybe it doesn't work as well, or or you missed it a little bit. I mean, of course, there are all kinds of ways that could go wrong, but why can't you see what this was? And it's just so funny how we want to still people that understand what we're doing still want to go back to luck or muscle memory or or these things. Because it's easier to explain what's going on using those ideas. And I'm like, we s we play games all the time where people are spinning at you. It does not, you know, it's not like this is the first time someone's ever spun on you. But it's hard to convince people that that they can be lock into their attention and perception and action.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:40

Yeah, well, I mean, it's funny, it's funny you bring it up like he comes at it with like, because that just sounds to me like somebody that has some humility, you know, it's like doesn't want to say no. He does.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:50

He's one of the most humble guys in the world.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:52

He just doesn't want to say that, like, no, yeah, this is because this is what we practice. And like we practice this way, and so my body just did it. That's that that's like the uh you I I guess you could say like the practice, the the practice style makes you more lucky, right? Based on the definition of luck. Um but it's funny because in the environment that I came from, everybody is wanting to explain that the way that they got to something was through some sort of like intellectual outsmarting or uh a knowing of something that is why they were well, I knew like I I saw this, so I did this, you know. And and I laugh sometimes because I see it in, and I don't know if it's just like a a blue belt thing necessarily, you know, but like we've all kind of seen the the the white belt, the new white belt comes in, and then the blue belt's explaining to him what happened after they were rolling. Well, I saw that you did this, so I like then I then I thought I would, you know, I pushed your arm here because this is how you go like that. And then I did that thing, and I'm I'm watching it going like, no, you no, you didn't. You just fucking they that you you probably perceived that their weight was slightly off balance, so you got your hips out and took their back. Like that's the that's what actually happened. It wasn't some sort of like preordained set of moves that you had put together that you did, you know. But I think there's a um, for a lot of people, it's usually the other direction. There's a there's a desire to say that the reason that they did it was not because some sort of physical gift or attribute. I mean, think about the major league level, right? Everybody is incredibly physically gifted, incredibly physically gifted, specifically for baseball. And when you're coming up through the minor leagues, you're always asking questions, trying to figure out like the thing, like how do I figure, how do I do this better? How do how am I more effective? How can I be more consistent? So you're asking people stuff. And then it's really funny, and I had this experience myself where you go one day, you're in the minor leagues, and then the next day you're in the major leagues, and then like you haven't figured shit out, but like four days later, somebody's asking you questions and you're answering like you know everything. You're answering people everything, and then that's the environment that you live in and that those major league players are living in, that they know it all. Like they're they got here for a reason, which I think, as we all know, is because of an extreme amount of physicality and just physical talent and adaptability and ability to learn things pretty quickly. They again Jesus and now they got to explain it. Yeah, Jesus, but Jesus is a big part. Um, you don't have to worry about anything. Think about that for a second. I I would never dissuade my Christian teammates away from their beliefs because they were the best guys I've ever seen at just letting go of some terrible performance.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:06

I I think that has to be an element in fighting. I think it has if you've got the you know the strongest of faiths and convictions and about this life and where you're going next, and that whoever's uh up there's got your back, I think that could probably have a tremendous effect on confidence and performance.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:22

I'll tell you it worked for it worked for Penn State University Wrestling. Because when you I don't know if you guys watched the NCAAs this year, but when you listen to those guys post like winning the, you know, setting the points record for NCAA wrestling, that was the that's the first thing that came out every single time. And it's it can be incredibly um it's it's an incredibly powerful way of thinking.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:45

You told me I didn't know anything about baseball when you and I first started like working together a bit, and you said to me that there were I I think this is right, you said to me that there were two types of very successful baseball players either a amazing self-delusion or Jesus, yeah, which sounds like it's the same thing to me, but yeah. And I bet that carries on to a lot of sports. Absolutely. I mean, I'm sorry, that's my daughter. That's my banner in my room. She looks fantastic. I'm gonna I'm gonna blur that out. She'll kill me.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:17

She is gonna kill you. Yeah. She wrestled, she'll take you down. Um probably uh well, I think Scott brought it up, which is like what does it actually lead to? And it's conviction, like full conviction. Like I, you know, there's so much game theory about which pitch should be thrown in baseball. And what it tends to miss is that the the only thing that matters is it really is execution. You can throw whatever the major league pitcher, all the pitches are good. You can throw whatever pitch you wanted. Um, if you can execute it, 95% of the time you're gonna be successful. And I always thought that the thing that leads most to execution is conviction. Like, do I believe that I can do this? And that full can like it's just those guys tend to be the best. And in in hitting where like the odds suggest, again, like 30% is elite levels of success. There has to be something wrong with you. Like from the like a regular reasonable um person that's that understands math and statistics, can't look at that and constantly expect to be successful. It goes, it goes back to that. There's a there's a great Michael Jordan quote where he missed the first 17 shots from the field in the game, and then he hit the 18th shot to win the game. Like, and they asked him after why he took the shot, and he said, Well, I missed 17 in a row. I figured the 18th was going in. And like that's the but that I think it speaks to exactly what you're talking about, which is like the people that are delusionally convicted that they're gonna be successful are gonna be more successful than the people that don't have that same level of uh conviction. All right, I'm taking that tip to Vegas with me next week.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:39

There you go. We're gonna wait in a second.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:40

It's interesting you said interesting about baseball, which you had said to me when when we were there that day, is that like people talk about, especially in the ecological space, challenge point, right? And and you know, 70% success rate and things like that. But uh representative design of in baseball success is 30%. And then so how do you design activities where there are gonna fail? So I guess it makes sense that before the game, they would not use one of those batting machines that throws the pitcher they're gonna hit against and fails 70% of the time and then go out on the field.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:17

So it's almost a ch it's a challenge that you don't necessarily want right before a game. So it seems like you're working against some really difficult constraints there.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:28

Yeah. And I think that what player what a hitter needs, I heard this explained. The guy named Dustin Linds, the assistant hitting coach for the Phillies, he's really good. One of the things that he said about what somebody needs before a game to get like a major league hitter to get ready, they need something psychologically soothing to start. And that's generally like their warm-up. So that's when you came in, you saw them like unfortunately, most of the practice is that way right now. You know, it's under hand flips or somebody hitting off a T. Well, they need something because they all heard when they were 18 that you've got to do the same thing every single day. So like let them do that. But his perspective is absolutely no coaching when that's happening. Just don't sit, just talk to them about their day and put the ball in the T until they're done with it. And don't even consider it training. Just that's just he's getting ready to train. He's getting his mind ready to train by kind of going through these motions physically. But then he said you needed something um representative of what you're gonna see that day so that they feel like they're kind of their sights are tuned in. So uh every team now has these traject machines, and yes, it's 2D, but it has a little it has the pre-pitch kinematics, like the 2D screen is moving and it's replicating what they're gonna see exactly. And the stakes aren't as high because the balls are lighter weight. So um, even though they move exactly the same, kind of like speed and movement, you hit it wrong, you don't get the negative feedback that you would like don't break your bat or something, or hit a ball off your shin or break your leg, which can happen. Um, they need something mixed where they're in a reactive state. And then his perspective that I thought was interesting is that every day he's like, we need to somehow turn up the pressure so that they feel a little bit just a little bit of stress before the game. And that's the work leading up to the batting practice. And then after batting practice, right before they go in the game, he reverts back into just whatever the hell they want to do right now to go get ready to play. Like let's not get in, let's not have an argument here about why this isn't representative design or why they're not learning anything from this, because they're in there not to learn, they're in there just to get their focus turned on so that they can go out, um, they can go out and compete. Makes sense. And I my hope with baseball is that that's where it gets. I think that the some of the really successful teams, like the Phillies being one of them, like you know, when you hear about somebody like Bryce Harper, how he prepares for the game, um, it is what I've learned about him now, like later in his career, is that like this this is a guy who shows up early to like lift weights or like do his workout and then leaves and then comes back later in the day, like puts his uniform on, goes in, has the has the pitching machine guy take whatever pitches the guy is throwing in the day and make them more challenging. And then he lets himself just kind of get beat up on that machine, and then he goes and plays the game. He feels like everything's slower in the game for him because he's just faced, like, he's just faced the Street Fighter II turbo version of the pitcher. And so now that pitcher is like, he's got more time um to be able to hit. And that seems like a way more effective usage of time. Like separate the training, you know, 11 o'clock, do some training, give yourself six hours to recover, come back six hours later, strap the uniform on, have some food, go get ready, go play the game. That that to me is an ideal way of training. And I mean, Bryce Harper is one of the most talented. Um it wouldn't matter, I don't think, for him if he was doing the T routine and the flips and all the stuff before the game anyway, because he is so talented. But I do think that the way that he's approaching it now is going to it'll it'll add he'll he'll stay at a higher level for a longer period of time because he's about as ecological as you can be in that environment.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:34

Well, the last thing I have to say on my end is that I've been coming to the conclusion more recently. I realize it's six years since I started this podcast and me talking about it, and it's it just occurs to me how fucking absurd absurdly complex it is. And there's I've got to be honest, there's a slight cynicism creeping in. I'm a little cynical about anything we talk about because I'm like, well, there's this and there's that, and we think about it, and there's there's so many variables, it's so complex, and and everyone's so different, and yeah, I'm not sure I'm getting any closer out of those, I and it's and it's I've got conviction in some of the research and whatnot and and ideas of ecological psychology and dynamics, but I'm I'm no no better off than I was six years ago and and getting closer to where where like understanding it.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:15

How much has your practice changed in six years?

SPEAKER_02 1:24:20

I think it's uh uh I think because it's always been it's always been live, um, and when it started six years ago, it's not mean being some that much meaningful change. I think how I interact with students on individual levels is changing most. I see them truly always being like individuals where perhaps when I was trying this, it were more kind of the the blank slate kind of thing. I see I I see the characters coming through, especially in before fights and getting warm-ups and uh and just dealing with them off the mats and stuff. This that's what's interesting me in coaching right now, the relational side of it, the relationship side. Because I think anyone can teach martial arts to be quite honest. You can watch videos and show people moves. Um what's what's been more meaningful to me is becoming a coach. And I can only I can only do that with a few people, you know. It's it's a it's a real um personal committed relationship, but I'm enjoying that side of things. I'm enjoying the and and the the management of the team and making them tight and the conflict resolution and and just building that trust. That for me is where all the all the richness in coaching comes from. Less about the moves and the techniques. Bit softy to follow to finish off there, but that's what I enjoy.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:17

It's it's it's heartwarming to hear, Scott, because the professional space, like we were talking about earlier, is like taking the um I think it's one of the philosophers, maybe Voltaire, was talking about looking out looking out his window and seeing everybody walk around and they're like robots. And I think that that's the with the the the empiricist slant on everything in professional sports, it's lost a lot of the reason. Um it's it's lost a lot of like the the humanity or like the ontology of what it actually means, what they're going through and what they're experiencing, which is a huge part of like my personal pivot in life, was away from fighting a battle of saying that like no, all of our batting practice should be mixed and it should be closer to what the guys are going to see in the game. Um and more to back to like what motivates these people over a long period of time, what are the environmental conditions that need to be set in place in their team environment for them to for them to continue to be motivated? Because at the end of the day, it is the way to improve is just to send it like you were talking about earlier. It's to just, is to shoot over and over again until you figure out what works for you, you know, is to try it over and over again until you figure out what works for you. And like the best coaches are the best ones that like just helping you kind of move your attention over towards an area or an out or a an outcome that you're trying to achieve and like making it a little bit easier to get there by designing practice so that you can do that. I think that's the at the same time, to your to your point about personal relationships, if you have a deep and trusting relationship with somebody, then that's the separator. Because now when that person pushes their attention towards that object, um, they're more convicted. And the more convicted they are, and they're convicted because of the trust in the relationship, the more likely that outcome is to occur, in my person, in my opinion, from what I've seen over time. Coaching is supposed to inspire conviction. And like if you're for somebody to go out and do something that you know, like they've been coached one specific way their entire life, and they go out and fail over and over again, like that is not that is not fun. That is not fun. And now there's not that same trust and relationship between athlete and coach, and then the whole thing just starts to fall apart. And you know, where we've where we see this most in the United States is in use sports. Like 70% of kids quit sports at 13. And the number one reason is it's it's not fun anymore. Right. And that's me a failure of the adults. That's a lot of girls.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:36

That's it. Where can John, where can people find you if they want to work with you?

SPEAKER_00 1:27:39

Uh baker-hq.com is the website I've got set up. Um, I've got basically just two things on there. One of them is to like book a call if you're interested in doing like one-on-one work, and the other one is for like athletes 10 to 18. I I spent a lot of time with Claude Code uh building some stuff on HTML. And like you can buy basically a five-week self-directed program that's It's a lot of introspective questions. It's paired with mindfulness exercises. And then it puts you in a pretty good place to kind of like understand where you are and know what to do about it yourself. Because that's always my goal as somebody working in a metal in the mental performance space is to work myself out of necessity. Like I want to show you a strategy. You learn that strategy. You're your own person. As long as you have things in place to prepare, to regulate yourself and to learn, you understand what's sapping your motivation and you know who you are as a person, you have a much greater chance of achieving whatever goal it is that you want to achieve. How about Instagram? Don't you have an Instagram I've been following? Yes, C John Learn. See me learn. See me learn stupid stuff. Lately it's been a lot of me uh changing workouts again.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:42

Yeah, there's a little, there's a little too much weightlifting in a garage for me, but you know, whatever.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:46

Hey, and hold on, I gotta say this one thing because you brought it up about weightlifting. Um as a as a guy who teaches mindfulness to people, um, that's a that's a yoga. Let's take yoga for example. Yoga is not going to make you better at sports, but it is, but it is because when you are really focused on holding some sort of a position, essentially what yoga is teaching you how to do is to have single-pointed focus on something while you're trying to move. The weight room can be the same thing. Um if you look at uh Schoenfeld's research on bicep tissue, he showed something incredibly powerful. There were two groups. One group focused on getting the weight from their hip to their shoulder in the bicep curl. The other group took their focus of attention and pointed it directly at the muscle tissue. At the end of the study, the group that went from hip to shoulder lifted significantly more weight. The group that focused on the bicep tissue grew one and a half times the amount of muscle mass. So my point with that is that number one, attention is important. But number two, the weight room itself, you can think about it as like going to church for your attention. Because if you are locked in, whatever it is that you enjoy doing in that space, if you're fully focused on it, you're getting an hour and a half of focused attention practice or 90 or an hour of focused attention practice. All you have to do is be intentional about going in and doing it. And that's where that's for me. That's my uh the stuff that I post online like that, that's my mental skills practice. Excellent. Thank you very much for talking to us this morning, John.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:13

I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:14

You know, what's uh what's are we off yet? Are we still on?

SPEAKER_02 1:30:17

No, we're not off yet. We're um and Adam and I are heading up to the last thing I want to say before I round off. It's it still blows my mind. Adam and I are up to the skills movement conference this week in Minnesota, um, whether we NFL, NBA, coaches in in there. It blows my mind with all the money and resources in sports, where it still seems to be maybe a little behind in the skill acquisition. And so that says two things, that says two things to me, though. Either, well, maybe maybe we we think we know better, but we don't, or that's just the human condition. The big thing forward slowly.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:47

I asked every director of the of the sports performance that I met last week, do you have a skill acquisition guy? Do you have a motor guy? Do you have any of those? And and none of them. It was a little piece of what some guy did, but nobody had a and they realize that there's a gap there. But I don't know if they'll ever work to fix it, but I think there's a place for people to fill that gap.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:11

You guys both next year in January should go to the skill acquisition summit at the Florida baseball ranch.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:17

So he's gonna one of those guys I think is gonna be there tomorrow this weekend. Kyle? Is that his name?

unknown 1:31:22

Kyle.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:22

Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna round off here. So anyway, we'll we'll we'll talk and I'll see you up there. I'm gonna uh I'll see you tomorrow. Okay, we'll see you tomorrow. Yeah, and how have a shave. You look like a fucking hobo.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:32

All right I'm going to I gotta I gotta go pack and shit.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:34

I gotta go do some shit.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:36

Come on, it was great.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:37

Yeah.