Find Your Swing
If you blindly mimic your favorite major leaguer, but don’t emphasize learning your own balance and swing, you might cheat yourself out of power and quickness. But there are some absolutes when it comes to the swing. SPARQ Master Trainer Bob Keyes and Bio-Kinetics Research & Development have analyzed 20 years of live Major League Baseball batting. Not batting practice. Not home-run derby, but two-outs, bases-loaded, down-three-runs, full-count Major League Baseball games.
They created 3-D models of these at-bats and learned the four immutable laws of batting: staying balanced, rotating in order from your feet up through your body, keeping your body in a straight line to rotate around, and then letting your bat lag until your body’s rotation fires it through the hitting zone. You must shape these immutable laws of batting to fit your body and your strengths, or as Bob Keyes says, “your bio-mechanical efficiency.”
Christian Colon trains with Keyes outside of Salt Lake City, and played for the U16 national team. Look at what he's doing, but don’t ape his swing. Find your own.
1. Dynamic Balance Dynamic balance means controlling your center of gravity — right above your belly button. Keep your posture stable with the head directly over the center of gravity. Keeping your balance as your foot strikes mean you’ll be ready to produce the greatest amount of rotational force.
KEYS:
Stable base
Head over center of gravity
Front foot turned out slightly
2. Sequential Rotation You must rotate your body in sequence — starting at your feet and ending at hands holding your bat. The order is important — do it out of order, and you’re incorrectly using the muscles involved in the swing.
KEYS:
Rotation starts at the feet
Then moves to the legs
Then to the lower torso
Then to the upper torso
Out to the arms and hands
3. Axis of Rotation Stand up tall. Rotate around as fast as you can. Now bend at your waist and do the same thing. You can’t spin as fast when you’re bent over, right? Right. If your body doesn’t rotate fast, then the bat won’t come through the hitting zone fast. So when you’re swinging, keep your posture tall. In the photo, notice a line (or axis) through the back knee, through the center of gravity, and through the head.
KEYS:
Keep your posture tall
No bending at the waist
Rotate, don’t drift or slide forward
4. Bat Lag Bat lag is the final link of the rotation sequence. The bat lags behind and is delivered by the entire body through the ball. When the belt buckle is facing the pitcher, the bat will still be coming from behind the hitter and gather speed because of the rotation of the lower body segments.
KEYS:
Rotation has reached max velocity
Hands lead the bat
5. Contact The bat, with violent action, is fired through the hitting zone as the front side becomes firm. The front leg will snap straight just before contact is made. This allows the remaining links —upper body to hands to bat — to accelerate forward at their highest potential rate of velocity.
KEYS:
Don’t try to “muscle” the bat — that slows you down
Continue to rotate around that vertical axis
Stay balanced: Avoid drifting or leaning toward the pitcher or backwards
February 21st, 2008 at 2:24 pm
If your belly button is pointed at the pitcher and the bat is still behind you, you are beat. To drive a baseball with max power you need the bat head out front and drive thru the ball, whether it be hitting the ball to right, center, or left. As a former pro player this is some of the nonsense being taught to a generation of players by people who have never played at high levels. The majority of what is written is non-sense. You have to have your weight behind the bat to drive a ball then turn thru it.
What you are teaching is what scouts refer to as spin power, see how far that takes. Its like teaching a young player to focus on the logo of the pitchers cap and then pick up the ball, by the time you have done that the ump is telling you to sit down. Whoever wrote this needs to stay out of baseball and stick to something else.