Swingtraining.net has joined with Perfect Competition sports performance facility in order to provide comprehensive strength, speed, and hitting specific workout programs in the Southeast Florida area. Perfect Competition already has a well established reputation for their MLB Performance Enhancement program, and now Swingtraining.net will add the most specific hitting training available.
I am trying to use my larger muscles more when I swing and I thought perhaps you had some type of specific drill with a medicine ball or some weight that would help develop my rotational strength.
Check out this post I made on Resistance Training for Batspeed. The article in there covers a lot of basics about general, special and specific training for bat speed. Each of the protocols referenced there were used successfully with high school and college athletes.
I’ve been meaning to do this (start some quick reviews) for a while and I thought this would be a good way to start….
A few years ago, I was directed to an article entitled: The Holy Grail in Speed Training by author Barry Ross.
I found the article very interesting, contacted Mr. Ross and got going on the workout. I was “retired” at the time and figured I’d give it a shot…..what I found (my personal experience) was quite interesting. Within a couple of months, my deadlift improved from the mid-200’s to near 420 pounds while my body weight stayed the same. For sprint work, I did 10 yard starts from a base-stealing position using an electronic timer. Over that winter, I decreased my 10 yard time by .2 seconds. And on the first 40 that I had timed, which was the first sprint I had run over 10 yards, my time was over .2 seconds faster than I had ever run. Pretty cool.
It didn’t take long for Barry Ross, who is a seasoned track & field and strength coach, to open his own site and release his book: Underground Secrets to Faster Running
The book outlines the concept of mass specific force, and sites some nice research studies to back up the claims. The workout is incredibly easy from an equipment, execution and planning standpoint, but not so easy in terms of the load/intensity used! Basically you have to lift heavy! With all the talk of fast and slow twitch muscle fibers, this method gets right to the point of muscle fiber recruitment and training for strength. It is a fast, simple read that goes through mass specific force, physiology, exercise selection and workout design in a logical fashion. Theory and application.
In addition to the lifting and running, I was hitting and throwing with a pair of minor league players and I noticed that my bat speed and throwing velocity were improving above what I had achieved in college. Also pretty cool. Although not excatly common-place, strength training for the posterior chain and specific swing/throw training appeared to be a great combination.
Check out Barry’s web site for more information — Bearpowered.com
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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