Ichiro's Performance Secret

Even though the Mariners are suffering through a season in the cellar of the American League west, they still have a bright spot at the top of their lineup. This season, Ichiro continues to be a magician at the plate, batting .304 and ranking third in the AL in runs scored despite playing for the Mariners who haven’t exactly been an offensive juggernaut this season. In only six plus seasons, Ichiro has racked up an incredible 1,715 hits. Add that to his 1,278 hits in six Japanese League seasons and Ichiro is nearing 3,000 hits for his major league career.
What makes Ichiro so incredible is his ability to use his hands to serve the pitch to all fields on a consistent basis. Even when Ichiro is fooled by a pitch, he maintains the ability to put the pitch in play with his quick hands. This allows him to see the pitch longer which is part of the explanation for his .346 batting average against lefties over the past three years.
The amazing thing about the hands is that the cerebral cortex in the brain devotes much more space to the hands, meaning that they are more sensitive to brain commands than any other part of the body. Using electroencephalography, or EEG techniques, neurologists have found that the part of the brain that controls the hands is as big as the arm and chest combined. This means that by learning to utilize the hands to work the way in which they are capable could be extremely advantageous, especially in a sport like baseball and golf.
While many athletes work at adding speed and strength, the key to mastering sports may lie in the only thing that makes contact with the ball. Yet it is rare to hear about people doing exercises to develop their hand coordination. Everything the body does is a natural reaction to how the hands are behaving.
The next time you watch the Mariners notice the way Ichiro’s hands handle the bat through the strike zone. His hands lead the way and his coordination allows him to make adjustments while the pitch is in his wheelhouse. His hands respond to the pitch in the same way Tiger Woods’ hands handle the downswing. Since the hands are so sensitive to triggers from the brain, it doesn’t take much for the hands to be manipulated during the swing.
If athletes learn to train their hands in ways that respond to the brain, they could quickly become better at whatever they are playing. As Ichiro has proven, training the hands to respond the way you want will lead to performance that is much higher than the average athlete.

The death and birth of Josh Hamilton

On Monday night in Yankee Stadium, Josh Hamilton made yet another gigantic statement to the rest of the world with his record-breaking first round in the Home Run Derby. After being the first overall selection in the 1999 MLB draft by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, Hamilton succumbed to a drug and alcohol problem that sent his life spiraling in the wrong direction. Over a four year period, Hamilton was suspended four times for drug violations and eventually was suspended for good by Commissioner Bud Selig. After cleaning up his life, Hamilton was reinstated in 2006 and has shocked many baseball experts with his meteoric rise to the top.
After a great 2007 for the Cincinnati Reds which included constant ribbing from opposing fans about his past drug use, Hamilton is the leading MVP candidate in the American League for the Texas Rangers. With 95 RBIs at the all-star break, Hamilton is on pace for one of the best seasons of the past 10 years. With his unbelievable performance on Monday Night in New York, Hamilton told the world that he was on top of the baseball world to stay. What surprised many viewers was the fact that Hamilton appeared to be a light-hearted kid that could have been the neighbor boy next door, not the drug-riddled thug that many critics labeled him during his years fighting his addiction. The thing that people don’t realize is that drug addictions, especially those to stimulants like cocaine and heroin, take over a person’s brain and often leaves the person helpless. Understanding what cocaine and heroin do to the brain will make a person better understand how incredible Josh Hamilton’s comeback has been.
In a normally functioning human brain, neurotransmitters are constantly firing to keep the brain on even grounds and to allow people’s cognitive abilities to function on a normal level. The main pleasure pathway in the brain contains large levels of dopamine transporters that, when triggered, provide people with a feeling of euphoria throughout their body. When cocaine is introduced into the brain, it binds with the dopamine transporters causing the transporter to stop functioning and creates a build-up of dopamine in the synaptic cleft where the reward circuit exists. Using cocaine results in extreme pleasure that people can’t normally feel when the brain is working properly.
Prolonged exposure to cocaine causes the need for more dopamine in the synaptic cleft in order for the person to simply feel normal. The answer to the need for more dopamine in the brain is either for the person to use even more cocaine or to suffer the consequences of withdrawal. When an addict cuts free from cocaine, the brain is so deregulated that it often results in severe depression and research has shown that the brain’s reward center may never be the same after the use of cocaine. All of this seems to occur as a natural reaction from the body which gives you a sense of how difficult it would be to quit using. With other addictions such as cigarettes and marijuana, people can often will themselves to quit because the brain isn’t being altered. With cocaine, the brain becomes so deregulated that addicts are pulled toward cocaine by their natural instincts to fulfill the reward center, which makes it that much tougher to quit.
Not only was Josh Hamilton not fulfilling his baseball dreams, his addiction was causing his brain to react in ways that likely made his life a living hell. Once a person reaches that point in an addiction where they are no longer able to understand pleasure, death usually becomes the next destination. Now, Josh Hamilton is clean and fulfilling everyone’s dream of what he would be when he was the top pick in 1999.