Baseball players have a tough task: maintaining their performance and health throughout a long season. It’s crucial for success.

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To achieve this, it’s essential to track certain health metrics daily. This allows you to optimize your routines, performance, and recovery– and helps you hold yourself accountable (a very underrated component).

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Here, we highlight 4 metrics that you should be tracking every day– whether you’re a high school, college, or professional player. It’s worth noting that now, towards the start of the season, is the most important time to start tracking. It allows you to establish your Readiness baselines which can be used to help you power through the end of the season.

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Metric tracking is your competitive advantage…

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1. Body Weight

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Maintaining and tracking body weight in-season is extremely important since muscle mass is correlated to both pitch velocity and bat speed. If your weight drops throughout the season, you can expect to see your numbers drop as well.

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Here’s how you should track it: every morning, before eating or drinking anything, weigh yourself and record the number.

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Pro-tip: instead of picking apart your daily weight, focus on weekly trends as daily fluctuations can vary greatly.

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2. Sleep

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Sleep is the best and most important recovery tool in the world. It’s also an incredible performance tool. Yet most don’t sleep enough…

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Don’t let this be you! Tracking your sleep is a great first step. It allows you to evaluate where you’re at, and track the effectiveness of changes you make to your sleep habits and your progress.

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Here’s how you should track it: subjectively score your sleep on a scale of 1-5 every morning. Luckily, we make it really easy to track all 4 of these metrics with the Daily Health Tracker in our app.

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To take it a step further, you can log the times you get into bed and wake up in the morning. This will give you a rough sense of how many hours of sleep you got. If you want to learn more about the different levels of sleep tracking that exist, check out this post!

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3. Nutrition

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If you don’t eat right, your performance will suffer and your health will deteriorate over the course of the season. It’s that simple. Try cleaning up your diet and watch how good you start to feel. We’ve written a lot on the subject. Here is one of our Twitter threads about carb consumption:

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Thus, tracking your nutrition can give you a huge edge over your competition.

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Here’s how you should track it: subjectively score your nutrition on a scale of 1-5 every day. If you want to get more specific, track your macros! Use an app like MyFitnessPal. They make it really easy with their large user-input libraries of food.

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4. Vertical Jump Height

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Vertical jump height holds a special place in this list because it’s the only “performance” metric– and a versatile one at that! Your vertical jump height corresponds to both your lower body’s ability to generate power and your Central Nervous System’s (CNS) readiness. Therefore it helps you evaluate your ability to perform and your recovery.

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Here’s how you should track it: stand next to a wall with a post-it or tape on the hand closest to the wall. Perform a vertical jump, placing the post-it as high as possible. Record your height (iPhones have a built-in measurement app).

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Bringing it all together…

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Daily data collection is the future of baseball. Athletes that do it will experience an improvement in their health and performance metrics, and their accountability. Athletes that don’t do it will be left behind. 

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We believe this, and empowering athletes to take control of their careers is our mission. That’s why we built a Daily Health Tracker in our app. It makes it really easy to record all of these metrics and more, every day, for free.

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If you’re a baseball player looking to make the most out of your career, and give yourself every competitive edge you can on the field, this is something you don’t want to miss.

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Check out “4APP Sports” on the App Store.

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Follow us on Instagram or Twitter @4app_sports for more baseball content that will help you play better. 

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Feel free to send us any questions tech@4appsports.com — we’re happy to help.