There’s one thing I can tell you with an absolute certainty after training thousands of athletes, and that’s the idea of chasing improvement rather than chasing perfection.
The human body is an infinitely complex system, chasing perfection is never going to work.
Are you swinging the bat the BEST you possibly can?
Is your current diet and training program absolutely perfect?
These aren’t even questions worth asking yourself or anyone else.
First off, they are moving answers. Your body is not the same as it was yesterday, it’s not the same as it was last month, and it won’t be the same tomorrow. You might have a new tightness in a muscle, or maybe you’re more fatigued than normal and this is negatively impacting your technique and/or performance.
Maybe you’re more used to a certain workout or exercise than others, so it provides the illusion of better or worse performance. Maybe your life stressors are greater now so you’re not getting the same response from your training and your recovery seems slower.
The thing is…
Even if you hit “perfect” right on the head today, that “perfect” that you hit today won’t be the same “perfect” tomorrow as your physiology will have changed and so will the circumstances. Put another way, you will always be chasing an elusive goal and never reaching it – and thus ruining your self-confidence.
Beyond this, since there are an infinite number of factors to consider, many of which we aren’t even aware of yet within the scientific literature, you would have absolutely no direct pathway of reaching perfection even if you had unlimited time and resources.
Getting Real About Getting Real
Chasing perfection will lead to the maddening cycle of “paralysis by analysis”
What’s immensely more productive to consider is simply chasing improvement.
Are you improving in the direction that you want to?
Are you faster than you used to be?
Are you technically better in your skill development than you used to be?
Are you stronger than last month?
Are you leaner and/or bigger now?
Are you a more confident baseball player now then you were last year?
If you said yes to any of these things, forget about perfection. You’re already doing the right things.
If you said no to all of these things, I still want you to forget about perfection. Simply shoot for better results than you’re currently getting. You don’t need a “perfect” plan to get results, you just need the plan that’s right for you right now.
Good enough isn’t just “good enough”, it’s all you got.
Improvement gets you places. It moves you up the ranks.
If you’re making improvements in your baseball performance, assuming you’re in this game for the long haul, those improvements will start adding up in your favor over the course of the next several months, and then the next several years.
People who want perfection want everything now.
People who actually end up becoming the best baseball players understand that putting in the work and seeking any improvement they can get is the real way to the top. There’s no secret sauce here, just improvement and logical programming.
Picking the Right Parents
If you’re going to follow my advice of avoiding perfection and seeking improvement, I would highly encourage you to only worry about your results and not anyone else’s.
Don’t ever compare yourself to other people.
The human genetic potential for being big, strong, fast, athletic, coordination, conditioning, and agile varies dramatically.
Whether or not elite athletes like to admit it, in many cases they are there because they ‘chose the right parents’.
Sometimes they also added in some hard work, other times they didn’t, and it still didn’t matter – they were so gifted that it took them all the way to the top without ever coming close to “perfect” programming.
Let me ask you, are you bigger, stronger, and more athletic than 90% of the people at your gym?
This doesn’t mean you’re better than them at baseball, it also doesn’t mean you know more than them about training either.
Let me ask you another question, are you smaller and weaker than 90% of the people at your gym?
This doesn’t mean you don’t know anything and you’re doing everything wrong. There’s some correlation there, sure, but it’s almost certainly not as strong as most people like to make it seem.
If you’re making progress on whatever your current targets are (hitting power, speed, agility, throwing velocity, etc…), then you’re doing it right.
You are getting better, so forget the comparisons already.
Parting Words
The standard that you compare yourself to is what you were able to do yesterday, last month, last year, and last game – not what the other guys/girls are doing on your team, not what they’re doing in the gym, and not what some stupid “strength standards” chart your idiot gym teacher pulled out and thinks you should be able to do.
If you, today, is better than you last month – you’re on the right path.
Tune the other stuff out.
And if you’re ready to really take your baseball game to a whole new level, check out our baseball training programs and we will continue making YOU a better baseball player than you were yesterday!