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.

Read more…

Jeff Bat Speed, Training research bat speed, biomechanics, research

Recently, I traveled to Europe with ISG baseball  to participate in a baseball clinic for the European Baseball Coaches Association and my first presentation was basically using video to review different elements of the swing.  I’ve always been asked a lot about what types of things I do with video and what software I use, and this was no different after speaking in Vienna.  With that, it’s about time that I put this together….

      promo code: “jalbert” at checkout for 5% off of total order

The main video software I use is called Sports Motion.  I created a page on the main site where I give a brief list of some of the features, but you can also check out Sports Motion’s myspace page which has some videos detailing features of the program. 

Because of the number of inquiries from coaches at the EBCA conference in Europe, I was able to get my own promo code for those looking to buy the software and now I can make that available to anyone.  So if this is something you are interested in, you can use the promo code “jalbert”  for a 5% discount when you check out with your order from Sports Motion.

If you have any questions related to this, feel free to ask or email

Jeff Resources analysis, biomechanics, hitting, software, video

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).

Jeff Training research baseball, bat, bat speed, biomechanics, ground reaction forces, hitting, speed, swing

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.

Jeff Training research biomechanics, Mechanics, research, strength, swing

OK I just thought I’d toss this up here real quick.  It’s from our biomechanics book – Biomechanical Basis of Human Movement:

And speaking of muscle activity in pitching, I just saw this article about Dr. Mike Marshall.  How timely.

Enjoy

Jeff Training research analysis, biomechanics, emg, Mechanics, pitching

I believe I previously mentioned a research project I have been involved in here at Tech, which involves effects of weight training on bat velocity and batted ball velocity.  Few training studies have been done over a 12-week period, and now I know why:  organization, assistants, and participation. 

Spread over 5 area high school, somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 players began, and only 29 or 30 finished.  Injuries, sickness and plenty of other weird excuses came up for those who dropped out, but there were a number of hard working kids that really made some progress. 

For the bat speed measures, we used the SETPRO sprt5-a.  I’ve had a lot of experience with this and found it to be very reliable in measuring bat-tip velocity.  Why?  Because it measues the tip in the same place, evry time (as long as you have the tee set up correctly.  I have had a hard time telling where some other bat speed units pick up the bat, and some have seemed more inconsistent.

The Speedtrac-XRQ was used to measure ball speed, and this was a bit more tricky.   Many of the players did not like that you actually have to hit the ball solidly in order to get a good reading, but that is the idea – solid contact equals higher ball velocity.  There were a few instances where a player would hit the ball solidly and not get a reading, but this seemed more due to set-up than anything (which I still don’t totally understand).  But, for the most part, when we got the unit setup so that the player could hit a line-drive directly at it, we got relatively consistent results.

Here is a look at part of our testing set-up:

And for strarting off on my own research, I again used the SPRT5-A to measure bat speed and different variances of swing quickness/reaction:

A good time was had by….well, me at least

Jeff Training research bat speed, biomechanics, power, research, training, workout

I mentioned the word efficiency in a reply under the ‘Mets BP’ post.  I wanted to provide some more information on the subject.

If you’ve been around different web sites and started looking into how the body creates optimal movement, you’ve probably come across topics such as kinetic chain or some other reference to how the different segments of the body work together.

What I am trying to do here is be objective and present information as I go through it.  With that said, I’d like to post some excerpts here from what seems to be a pretty good entry level book on the basics of human movement – The Biophysical Foundations of Human Movement (Abernathy and others)

You’ll see I highlighted areas of greatest importance/interest

I’d like to make special note of the summation of speed principle (mentioned directly above figure 11.1).  While I do think a purely “hands” focus is inaccurate and oversimplified, I also think it is unfair to say that hands do “nothing.”  The hands/arms have to “get on board” so to speak and stay connected to the larger “links,” but ideally the hands do not work independently of the body, at least not until the previous segments of the body are finished doing their “work.”  Figure 11.1 is a good representation and the highlighted statement above the figure is a good description, in my opinion. 

What’s the point?  I know it is very common for hitters, coaches, etc. to talk about using the hands.  My suggestions, or at least what I believe this information suggests is that it is much more beneficial to address how to use the body to get the hands where they need to be.  That’s about as simple as I can sum it up!

Jeff Training research biomechanics, hitting, kinetic link, summation, swing