Now that the baseball season is over or near over for most college and high school players, it’s either time to relax or time to start travel ball right? Well, it’s definitely travel ball season, but if you are a serious player it’s never time to relax! It’s time to start setting goals and action-planning for next season.
If you desire to achieve anything worthwhile in baseball (and life) of course setting goals is a given, this is your destination. But how do you reach a destination you’ve never been? With a roadmap or GPS. This is exactly what an action plan is for a goal. Now as the high school and college seasons draw to an end, it’s the perfect time to begin training for next year, but train with purpose, train with a plan. Your training ought to start with a goal and an action plan if you actually want to achieve it. As writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery famously said “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
A good action plan will lay out all the things you’ll be doing daily and weekly to work towards your goal. Your focus should be on your action plan about 90 percent of the time if you are a serious athlete. By developing a solid action plan and consistently following it, you will continuously move closer to accomplishing your goals. Your action plan should cover each area of training and life that will help or hurt you as a baseball player – position-specific skill drills, hitting, base-running, strength, power, conditioning, mindset, nutrition, rest/recovery, sleep, etc. When developing your plan, it’s helpful to focus on your strengths and weaknesses (areas of improvement). For example – if you’re best attribute at the plate is hitting lefties and your worst is your base running, these are areas you should focus on in your action plan for developing your offensive skills. Turn your weaknesses into strengths and make your strengths stronger – make them freaky!
The more specific your action plan is the better – you don’t want to leave yourself any room to make excuses. This means you will write down the exact drills and exercises you will do along with how much time you will spend per week working on them. You can even take it a step further and plan out the specific times and days of your workouts each week. To hold yourself accountable to the plan, you can make it into a checklist that you complete each week, and post it somewhere that you will see it every day. Your plan should change when your schedule does (main season, summer season, when school starts in the fall, etc.). A good action plan will include extra work to set you apart from the competition. If you have high goals you’re serious about achieving you’ll have to train harder AND smarter than the best of the competition.
Aim high when it comes to your goals and develop a specific action plan to achieve them!
* If you need help developing an action plan or sticking to it, a Baseball Mindset coach can help. Checkout zwinningmindset.com to schedule a free trial mindset training session.