Daily protocol
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An intentional daily routine is what separates the good from the elite. Too many athletes rush through their warm-ups to get to "actual" pitching, but the reality is that these deliberate, slower-tempo drills dictate the quality of your pitches. By making every rep of your warm-up count, your bullpens will be more efficient and you’ll see faster growth.
Our Daily Protocol is a methodical series of drills designed for maximum efficiency. However, the ultimate goal is for you to create and own your routine. Use our sequence as your starting point, then experiment and customize. Your warm-ups should use drills where it’s easy for you to find your timing, make you feel good, and help you be efficient.
(We highly recommend including your change up during your daily routine and alternating it with your fastball during warm ups.)
Putting it simply, your release is the most important part of your pitch. In this video, we discuss the easiest way to learn how you want the the release to feel and go over how to correctly grip the ball.
We recommend getting 80% consistency before moving on.
Once we are able to consistently find our timing and release with our K’s, it’s time to build our circle more and move back into the zombie drill where we start from reach position.
Move on when your release feels like it did during spins at least 80% of the time.
Now we're ready to build to a full circle, starting with just a step. Again, the focus is your release feeling right, but this video also gives you a couple other things to keep in mind as we continue to build our circle.
Goal is 80% consistency before moving on.
Once you get a feel for the changeup release you like, it’s time to move back into some easy arm circles. This video covers what to focus on when you move on to this step.
Move on once it feels right 80% of the time.
Once you get a good feel for your pitch with a full circle, we want to start building power. We discuss the correct way to do that here so that you can maintain your release and timing.
Again, we want to make sure we’re at about 80% consistency before moving on.
The last step before throwing your change up from the mound, start a couple feet in front of the pitching rubber working on your release, throwing hard, and feeling it be the same as your fastball.
Get 80% consistency before moving on.
Walkthroughs are a staple drill for working timing, leg drive, rhythm, or just for your warmup progression. Make sure you keep your mechanics, stay together, stay loose, and finish straight!
One of our favorite drills! It’s a great tool to teach yourself how to time up your arms and legs when you’re loading and to see if you’re in a good sprint position at load. It’s also a great diagnostic tool if something feels off and you can’t figure out what it is.
Now that you’ve put together and timed up your wind up and you know how your pitch should feel, it’s time to put it all together!
Initial goal - release feels right 80% of the time. From there, we build consistency.
The best way to master a change is to constantly mix it with other pitches. Even when you first start throwing it, mix it with your fastball to keep feeling your timing. If you've done the complete progression, you know how to release it, so it's all a matter of throwing it like normal. Here, we mix it with our fastball and talk about the key things to focus on.

This drill is great for softball pitchers to help activate their legs to get a stronger pushoff. We can’t use our legs if they’re not turned on. Once you’re done with this drill, you’ll feel it in your legs and be ready to pitch!