A Question About Getting Better Faster
Anyone who has spent real time in a batting cage knows the feeling. You take fifty swings, you are tired, and you have no idea if you are better than when you started. I grew up playing baseball, and I spent a lot of hours chasing the feeling of improvement without actually checking if it was real. It took me longer than I would like to admit to figure out which shortcuts in practice actually work and which ones just feel productive.
The Shortcut People Reach for First
The first shortcut almost everyone tries is more reps. More swings, more ground balls, more pitches. It feels like the obvious answer because effort and improvement are supposed to be connected. If you are not getting better, the logic goes, you must not be working hard enough.
The problem is that reps without a target just groove whatever you are already doing, good or bad. I have watched plenty of guys take two hundred swings in a cage and walk out with the exact same flaw they walked in with, just more practiced. Volume is not nothing, but volume by itself is a shortcut that does not actually shortcut anything. It takes time and gives you very little back.
Why Volume Alone Does Not Move the Needle
The reason is simple once you see it. A swing has a lot of moving parts: hands, hips, timing, weight transfer. If you are not watching for one specific thing, your brain cannot fix what it is not paying attention to. You end up practicing consistency, not correction. You get very good at repeating the same swing, flaws included.
The Shortcut That Actually Works
The shortcut that actually works is narrowing what you are working on down to one piece at a time, and then getting a way to check if that one piece changed.
Narrow the Focus
Instead of “get better at hitting,” pick something specific. Maybe it is keeping your hands back a beat longer. Maybe it is staying balanced through the swing instead of lunging. One cue, not five. Trying to fix everything at once is how you end up fixing nothing. I learned to pick a single thought before I ever stepped in, and ignore everything else for that session.
Get Feedback You Can Use
The second half of the shortcut is feedback that tells you the truth. Memory lies. You can feel like you made an adjustment and have film show you did not move at all. A phone propped on a fence does more for improvement than an extra hundred swings, because it turns “I think that felt different” into “I can actually see that it was different.” Without that step, you are guessing.
Put those two things together, narrow focus and honest feedback, and twenty swings with a purpose will beat two hundred without one. That is the actual shortcut. It is not about doing less work. It is about not wasting the work you are already doing.
How I Think About It Now
What I would tell anyone picking up a bat or a glove and trying to get better quickly is this: resist the urge to measure progress by how tired you are afterward. Tired is not the same as improved. Pick one thing. Check if it actually changed. Then move to the next thing.
It is a slower feeling in the moment. You take fewer swings, you spend more time thinking between them, and it does not feel like the all-out effort that more reps gives you. But a season later, the guy who practiced with a single focus and real feedback is further along than the guy who just logged more hours in the cage. The shortcut that works is not about cutting corners. It is about cutting out the part of practice that was never actually helping in the first place.
