Below is another bat speed training research abstract.  This really was one of the best, if not the best, controlled research study that has been published regarding overload & underload training and its effects on bat swing velocity – and it was done all the way back in 1995! 

The basics are that 3 groups of 20 college players were trained 4 times per week for 12 weeks under the following conditions: batting practice group, dry swing group, control group.  The BP and dry swing group followed this swing training protocol using varied heavy and light weighted bats while the control group just dry swung with a regular weighted bat.

The results say that each group significantly imrpoved bat speed, but that’s a little misleading if you don’t read the whole study.  The batting practice group improved 10%, the dry swing group imroved 6%, and the control group improved 1%. 

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Pasted below is the abstract from a bat speed training article published by Chester Sergo and Douglas Boatwright in 1993.  The italics and red text are emphasis added by me.  Read the abstract, but I’ll summarize and make a few points:

 - 24 subjects averaged 19-20 years old and were college students practicing in the off-season

- All the training was done with just dry swings, during practice.  100 swings in sets of 20 performed 3x/week for 6 weeks

- Group 1 (regular bat only), Group 2 (62 oz. bat), Group 3 (alternated sets with 62 oz. & fungo bat)

- Each group improved bat speed 8-9%, with no statistically significant difference.  Group 1 (8.8%, highest), Group 2 (8.0% lowest), Group 3 (8.2 %)

- FYI the average bat speeds reported for these players began in the low 90’s and ended around 100 mph, measured by some light timing device made by the school’s engineering department

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A couple of years ago, I made a post about resistance training for bat speed that outlined a weight lifting program that has been demonstrated through research to improve strength for high school baseball players.  It’s basic multi-joint movements and progressive overload principle provide exellent results.

Something I think that was overlooked there was that the original NSCA article by Dr. David Szymanski also includes a simple protocol for increasing bat speed using overload/underload weighted implement training:

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What bat should you use in the on-deck circle while getting loose?  Light bat, heavy bat, regular bat?  Is a donut really that bad?

This isn’t a new topic, but an article in Scientific America brings up the issue again with a new study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research:

Warming up with 5 swings of a light or normal bat appears to increase post warm-up velocity of the normal bat when compared with warming up with a heavy bat after a rest period of 30 seconds. Within the bat weight spectrum of this study, it is suggested that when preparing to hit, 5 warm-up swings with either a light or normal bat will allow a player to achieve the greatest velocity of their normal bat.

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Here is a tidy little article summarizing info related to over/under training for baseball – click here

Roger M. Enoka best sums it up in his textbook “Neuromechanical Basis of Kinesiology”

“Training adaptations are specific to the cells and their structural and functional elements that are overload.

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This is a very interesting article from Mike Boyle on flexibilty and range or motion regarding rotation.

Any athlete competing in a sport that required rotation, like baseball, hockey or golf, was blindly urged to develop more flexibility in rotation.

Is Rotation Training Hurting Your Performance?

There is a part in there that I think can be useful as a teaching point…..see if you can figure out what it is.

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Here is another study that I was a part of at La Tech – this one was done to see if adding weight to the forearms while training (taking swings) would help improve bat speed and batted ball velocity.

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First, a long overdue congratulations to the Louisiana Tech Softball team, who won their first ever WAC conference championship back in May.  What a great group of hard-workers who pulled off multiple wins against ranked opponents to bring home the title. 

Along with another assistant, I got involved in directing the team’s strength and conditioning program for the 2007-2008 season.  What we were very fortunate to be able to do was measure/test all kinds of physical and performance variables at the beginning and end our training.

I made a previous post about presenting a conference poster about our intial findings regarding the relationship of the players’ physiological characteristics to the performance characteristics.  So after all this time, here is the actual poster that I presented:

Relationship between physiological characteristics and softball-specific variables of NCAA division I softball players

Big surprise, the girls who were bigger and stronger hit the ball harder!  It was nice to find some relationship between the variables, but the correlations are not great, with the highest r-squared value being .25

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This Friday, February 22nd, I will be giving a brief poster presentation at the LSU-Shreveport campus for their 6th Annual National Conference on Girls’ & Women’s Health, Physical Activity, and Sport.

The abstract and poster is based on research I did with the Tech softball team for my independent research study.  What we basically tried to do was look for any and all relationships between physiological and performance variables in division I softball players.  For example, we tested for hang clean, squat, bench press, grip, bat velocity, throwing velocity, speed, agility, etc.  19 variables all together.
Title of the abstract/poster is:
Relationship between physiological characteristics and softball-specific variables of NCAA division I softball players
What I may do is post my abstract after the conference…
If you happen to be interested in attending, here is the information that I have been provided – LSU-S Conference

Special thanks to the Tech Softball team and coaches, s&c staff and all of the people who helped during the testing!

Jeff Training research

I mentioned last spring that we (myself and a couple classmates) were doing a biomechanics project on the difference between GRF in expert and novice batters, and at the time I didn’t want to bother putting up our results.  The main reason was that it was our first time using the equipment - a force plate and Peak Motus 2-D analysis system – but it is a little more interesting now that I look back at it.  I will be the first to say, however, that this is not something I’d believe to be publishable or anything to that degree.  Just a class project designed to get us familar with the equipment.  Moral of the story:

don’t read into it too much!

OK here goes:

1.) This first graph shows the amount of VERTICAL GRF created by both expert and novice grouns under two conditions – stride and no stride.  The only significant difference was in the stride condition where the novice group, 3 college students in our department, had a much higher vertical GRF.

What threw me off a little was that the expert group, three college hitters, actually had a lower GRF in the no-stride condition.  My only explanation for that, from an observational standpoint, is that their no-stride condition swings seemed closer to what their natural swings would be.  For example, in the stride condition, I literally had to remind them that they needed to lift their front foot off the ground.

2.) The second one simply shows the correlation of bat velocity to GRF.  In both conditions, the novice group showed a high correlation to GRF produced and bat velocity.  Simply put, the more GRF they had, the more bat speed they had.

This was not the case in the expert group.  They showed minimal correlation in both conditions.  What this suggests is that they are relying much less on weight shift in the direction of the pitcher for bat speed production.  I believe the golf study I have (left it at home today, unfortunately) attributed just 10% of club head speed in experts to weight shift, and this would agree with the results here.  In other words, the experts are relying on other means, namely summation of forces from the sequential rotation of body parts – aka kinetic link – to develop bat velocity.

Steve Englishbey got me going a few weeks ago on the topic of Ground Reaction Forces in batting.  While there isn’t a ton of stuff directly pertaining to baseball, I have managed to dig up a couple of studies specifically directed at baseball/softball batting, and there are others as well that deal with other sports (like golf).

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From: Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology Jul2007 Supplement, Vol. 29, pS92

In baseball hitting, a powerful bat swing needs to be produced by utilizing ground reaction force (GRF) and it should also be temporally coordinated relative to the flight of a pitch. Therefore, organizing a hitting movement to meet these task requirements is a key for a successful hitting performance. This leads to a presumption that a front-foot stepping motion adopted for utilizing GRF to produce power for a bat-swing motion should be temporally coordinated with respect to an oncoming pitch. The present study investigated the temporal organization of hitting movements by focusing on the timing of the stepping motion relative to the flight of pitches. Six participants hit pitches projected by a pitching machine with following task conditions: 1) hitting pitches traveling at a consistent speed and 2) hitting pitches traveling at fast/slow speeds, which were randomly delivered. The second condition was aimed at eliciting movement modulation to the difference in the pitches’ speeds. Ground reaction forces exerted by left and right feet during hitting movements was recorded by two force plates to measure the timing of the front-foot take-off and landing in the stepping motion. Hitting motions were also recorded by a high-speed camera for interpreting the change of GRF profile relative to the hitting movement. The comparison between the GRF profiles in the two task conditions revealed that the timing of the stepping motion and shifting weight forward for initiating the bat swing was modulated relative to the pitch’s speed. Temporal relation between successive motion phases was compensatory such that the early timing of landing the front foot relative to an oncoming pitch was followed by the late initiation of shifting weight onto the landed front foot, and vice versa. The timing variability in the successive motion phases progressively reduced up to the ball-bat contact. These results demonstrated the coordinative structure of the hitting movement for timing the bat swing relative to the pitch’s flight.

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Kinetic Link

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