Sometimes a hitting slump has nothing to do with skill. And that was exactly the case with this baseball player.
Roughly 10 games into the season and all he had mustered was 3 weak hits.
Lot’s of strikeouts, popped balls, and weak grounders for outs.
I mentioned to his mom that it might have something to do with his eye tracking and if it did, I could fix that.
He came in the next day and I was astonished at what I found.
I have helped several baseball/softball players with this problem over the years, but this case was rather unique.
Usually the culprit is something in the head/neck area, but this one was different.
I start with checking the neurological integrity of the eye tracking.
With his eyes looking straight left, up and left, and down and left, his body became weak (neurologically inhibited).
Since he is a right handed batter, this is a big problem since he looks out of the left field of view to see the ball coming to the plate.
So I started hunting.
I’m looking for what changes the eye pattern from a weakness to a strength.
I searched all over.
Nothing.
So I kept searching moving down into the torso, then into the legs. And that is where I found the problem.
5 months prior he had a hip labrum surgery on the left. Football injury where he was yanked down.
One of the three scars was active and creating a problem in his nervous system.
Scars are amazing. We think nothing of them, but I have found them to be profoundly problematic.
Your skin is full of nerves. And when these nerves are cut, they can grow back in strange ways essentially short circuiting the nervous system.
They must be fixed.
But now I was curious if there were other things in his body that were being affected by this scar.
Here is what I found weak (inhibited):
- Eye tracking to left, up and left, down and left
- Left Sternocleidomastoid (both divisions)
- Left side all 4 divisions of Vastus Lateralis
- Left side all divisions of Peroneus Longus and Peroneus Brevis
- Left Peroneus Tertius
- Left Posterior Tibialis
- Left Anterior Tibialis
*** I didn’t dive deeper into the shoulder/arm muscles, but I’m assuming I would have found more if I did.
On top of the all these weaknesses in general, with the foot muscles being weak on the left, every time he put his foot down to hit, his entire body shut down.
His brain was sensing the instability in the ankle and shutting off EVERYTHING.
You lose all sense of timing and power when this happens.
I looked at him and said…
“You don’t stand a chance of hitting a baseball like this! No wonder you are struggling.”
And all from a silly little scar on the front side of his hip.
So I got to work fixing the scar.
Within a minute all the muscles were functioning as they were supposed to.
I told him, “alright, it’s go-time now”
The very next game his first at bat he bombed one down the left field line, just foul. His dad told me he hadn’t pulled a ball all year.
He ended up with 2 hard fly balls to the outfield for outs, one double and 3 RBI’s.
All hard hit balls. Two of them just happened to be right at an outfielder.
Again, all the struggles for the previous 9 or 10 games was because of a SCAR ON HIS HIP.
It had nothing to do with him mentally being in a slump.
Now what if I hadn’t reintegrated his scar and fixed it?
No, he most likely wouldn’t go the rest of his career in a slump. However, his nervous system would adapt. It would figure out a way to make his eyes and muscles work.
Adaptation is good, but there is always a long-term sacrifice.
It’s like having road construction detours. Yes, you get to your final destination, but at a price. Longer route, more fuel, more of a headache with all the twists and turns, etc.
And the more detours you make without fixing the original problem, the more you run out of room to make detours.
Same thing in the human body.
We want to operate how we were intended, not by detour.