- Take your warm-up seriously. The quality of your warm-up will often dictate the quality of your performance. It helps your prepare not only physically but mentally as well. Develop a specific warm-up routine for your workouts, your practices and your games. This will help you perform to your best!

- Quality before quantity. Working hard is important, there is no question there. Most people think that the harder you work, the more successful you are. However, it is not necessarily the case. Working smart is much more important than working hard. It's better to have 2 excellent workouts or pitching sessions than 5 lousy ones; it's better to hit or pitch with a totally focused mind for 20 minutes than going through the motions for 60 minutes. Going through the motions is a sin for the best softball players in the world. They say perfect practice makes perfect, don't they?

- Stay away from machines. Machine training is not sport-specific at all. It doesn't train the muscles the way they are used on the field. In other words, machine training doesn't prepare your body to perform on the field. Instead, focus on bodyweight, free weight and stability ball exercises. However, there are a few exceptions: the lat-pull down, the seated row and any cable exercises that involves more many muscles are good machine exercises.