CrossFit Athletic Group

There is a saying that there is hidden vulnerability in every strength. Mrs. Hana wrote a great guest post on Aaron Sexton's strengths as a mentor/role model/big brother for the young kids here; the vulnerability of this is he broke his wrist playing football in the back with Dylan and Jaxson. So for the last month and some change Aaron has been in a hard cast.

After a week I noticed Aaron was getting stagnant on his baseball stuff; he'd still go to all of his practices at Madonna to make sure he was still "part of the team" but he was losing valuable time to develop his game.

"Aaron," I said in my most calming and positively reinforcing tone, "you have been wasting your effing time this last week! You have an opportunity to practice something you normally wouldn't. I want you to spend like 2 minutes or so thinking of something you can practice."

After some time thinking Aaron went back to the turf to practice one-arm swings back on the turf, exaggerating the motion of the top hand. But a radar went off in my head telling me this was a waste of time; he could do that when he had both hands free. So I asked him to think a little harder; what is something you can practice now that you would never think to practice if you had two fully-functioning wrists.

"You know, this might sound dumb," Aaron said, "but we could practice stealing."

Aha! That's it!

So for the last month Aaron and I have been meeting up before the 3:30 session to work on stealing bases - specifically, how to look for habits and tendencies. Over the course of the sessions we added various stipulations to the reps here and there to exaggerate something Aaron saw. Here are a few:

1. I have to have a high leg kick
2. I have to slide step
3. I can't pick off
4. I have to pitch before a 4-count
5. I have to pitch after a 4-count
6. I have to look at least once
7. I'm a sucker on the mound and he wants to eff with me
8. I'm a stud on the mound and the goal is to get up one good jump out of 4 pitches
9. Aaron scouts himself and makes sure he's not being too predictable

Yesterday we went at it for a good 45 minutes and had Jaylee catch some of it on video. The first group of reps were however we wanted as long as I had a high leg kick and turned to look at least once (first segment of the video, up till around 1:45), and after that Aaron kept refining and refining until he caught a habit I was doing; the second segment of the video (starting around 1:45) was him getting 4 pitches to set up a good jump.

If all goes as planned, Aaron will get his cast off tomorrow. At that point in time he will have a really useful new weapon in his baseball arsenal (studying and manipulating pitchers) that he never would have developed if not for the good fortune of a wrist injury. Trying to do one-handed swings or incomplete ground ball fielding likely would not have delivered the same result. Plus this is way more fun.