Baseball Swing Mechanics Experiment: Squash The Bug Ineffective?
This post discusses youth hitting fundamentals of why squishing the bug is bad for baseball and softball players in 2022? Learn basic how to hit the ball in a certain direction beginner swing tips experiment. This information is great for 10-year old’s and younger.
Question: Do “Squish the Bug” Baseball Swing Mechanics Depress Bat Speed?
Here are the two test swings from my intern for the summer, redshirt college Frosh, Tyler Doerner…
Using the Zepp (Labs) Baseball app, I wanted to use the Scientific Method to analyze if the baseball swing mechanics “squishing/squashing the bug”, during the turn, increases or decreases bat speed. The term “squishing the bug” means rotating the back foot, on the ground, during the turn. Like you’re squishing a bug.
This can be a very sore subject, and hotly debated with a passion, in the Church of Baseball. Surprisingly, it’s still widely taught throughout the lower levels. Although a few images off the internet of effective swingers like Cano, Bautista, McCutchen, etc. will reveal “squishing the bug” isn’t what the best are doing.
So we wanted to test it…
My intern for the summer, redshirt college freshman Tyler Doerner did this experiment. This post is for you Joe (you know who you are ;-)…
Background Research
One of the main objectives of whether to skip the foot, or keep it on the ground, has to do with transferring linear momentum, better known as un-weighting or forward momentum. Check out these four HPL posts for a baseball swing mechanics background on this:
Now, for you academics, CLICK HERE to watch a short 2-minute PBS video on Circus Physics and the Conservation of Linear Momentum.
So, after reading/watching the above videos and posts, we should be at a common understanding of Forward Momentum.
The next objective of “squishing the bug” versus “skipping the back foot” during the turn, boils down to allowing the body to transfer energy effectively. This has to do with springy fascia in the body…
In Thomas Myers’s book Anatomy Trains, he talks about a cotton candy like springy material that the bones and muscles float it, and what gives muscles their shape called fascia.
Specifically in the book, he talks about the Front & Back Functional Lines. CLICK HERE for a post I did on this, featuring Ted Williams and Matt Kemp.
In the following video, Thomas Myers explains this idea of Tensegrity, or Tension-Integrity. There are compression and tension forces acting on the body at all times. Within the body these two opposing forces are always searching for balance…
For a hitter, if the body moves forward, but the back foot and leg stays behind, then these forces don’t get optimally transferred from body to barrel to ball. In other words, the backside gets “left behind”.
Hypothesis
Based on the above research, I think “squishing the bug” baseball swing mechanics will have a depressing effect on bat and hand speed because it doesn’t allow for full transfer of momentum and release of elastic energy in the springy fascia.
“Squish the Bug” Baseball Swing Mechanics Experiment
Forward momentum was taken out of this baseball swing mechanics experiment byhitting from a 1-2 second pause at landing
Back two “baseball markers” were set at about 3 baseballs apart
The two tests in the experiment were counter-balanced. Which consisted of eight blocks of 25-swings done in the following order ABBA BAAB. Say “squish the bug” was letter ‘A’, and “skipping back foot’ was letter ‘B’. 200 total swings were completed in the experiment, 100 per test. Counter-balancing helps remove the “getting tired” and “not being warmed” up factors.
Data Collected (Zepp Baseball App):
There were significant changes in Average Bat & Hand Speed, Time to Impact, and surprisingly, the hitter’s Attack Angle in this baseball swing mechanics experiment…
Data Analysis & Conclusion
+8-mph difference in average Impact Bat Speed, siding on “Skipping Back Foot”,
+3-mph difference in average Hand Speed Max, siding on “Skipping Back Foot”,,
-0.019 difference in average Time To Impact, siding on “Skipping Back Foot”, and
+4-degree difference in average Attack Angle, siding on “Skipping Back Foot”.
Notes
I think the “Squish the Bug” baseball swing mechanics experiment results were overwhelmingly clear.
Tyler did not technically keep his back foot posted to the ground during the “squish the bug” tests, so there still was an element of un-weighting going on with his backside.
In which case, measuring Ball Exit Speed (or how fast the ball came off the bat) may have netted interesting data to consider, compared to Impact Bat Speed. However, with the results with the other readings of Avg. Hand Speed, Time To Impact, and Attack Angle, I think we can put the “Squish the Bug” baseball swing mechanics myth to bed 😀
The data and results suggests that when a hitter “leaves behind their backside”, there’s a slowing down of forward momentum, and the body naturally decelerates because the springy fascia is forced to stretch, but not release.
Keep in mind what I call the Goldilocks Syndrome. The back foot can skip too far (porridge too hot), and it can also not skip at all (porridge too cold). We want the back foot to skip just right.
The Bottom Line?
In this “Squish the Bug” baseball swing mechanics experiment, “Skipping the Back Foot” showed a notable difference in average Bat & Hand Speed, Time To Impact, and the hitters Attack Angle. I want to encourage you to tinker and test this for yourself. The objective of these swing experiments is to put modern hitting theory to the test, literally. We NEED to test based on data, not feelings. Share these results with friends.
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https://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/baseball-swing-mechanics-experiment-tylerd.png452755Joey Myershttps://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/hitting-performance-labs_c90c0362088ef1d3d528f3078f4f8ac1-300x75.pngJoey Myers2022-05-10 10:00:412022-05-11 04:04:18Youth Hitting Fundamentals Why Squishing Bug Bad For Baseball & Softball In 2022? | Basic How To Hit In Certain Direction Beginner Swing Tips Experiment For 10 Years Olds & Younger
What is the proper youth hand bat grip for right and left-handed baseball softball hitters? Is door knocking knuckles the correct hold or is the “box” grip better. I’d argue the gorilla grip is best, evidenced in this swing experiment.
Look at the hands of Babe Ruth… Photo courtesy: PhotoBucket.com (user: BillBurgess)
Question: Do Relaxed Hands Really Lead to Higher Bat Speeds?
Using the Zepp knob sensor which you can’t get anymore, so instead grab a BlastMotion sensor. I wanted to use the Scientific Method to analyze whether having relaxed hands or “hand-tension” – pre-turn – increases or decreases bat speed.
Background Research
To me, it just always looked like the all-time greats – Babe Ruth – were squeezing the handle of the bat into sawdust before going into their turn. I’m basing this experiment off the following research and study:
In the podcast, Pavel talks about how the hands can be used to recruit more muscle tissue and connect larger areas of the body.
2. Homer Kelly
In his book, The Golfing Machine, Homer Kelly talks of four power accumulators…in particular, the first power accumulator (p.70 in the 7th edition):
“…is the Bent Right Arm – the Hitter’s Muscle Power Accumulator. Even though the Right Biceps is active, the Backstroke is always made with the Right Arm striving to remain straight. But the straight Left Arm restraints this continuous Extensor Action of the right triceps with an effortless Checkerin Action. Consequently, during Release, the Right Arm can straighten only as the Left Arm moves away from the Right Shoulder. This results in a smooth, even Thrust For acceleration of the Lever Assemblies from an otherwise unruly force.”
3. Front Arm Fascial Lines
Thomas Myers talks about Front Arm Fascial Lines in his book Anatomy Trains. These lines travel from the bottom three fingers (pinky, ring, and middle), across the chest, to the bottom three fingers of the opposite hand. It’s these three fingers that connect these springy fascial lines found within the torso to whatever we hold in our hands. It’s this hand tension, or finger pressure, that has fixed stubborn bat drag issues in my own hitters.
Hypothesis
Because of the previously mentioned research, I think the swing with Babe Ruth “hand-tension” will result in higher bat speed, and possibly other performance metrics, like max hand speed, time to impact, etc., that will be measured using the Zepp Baseball App.
Grab 'Finger Pressure' Video
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Swing Study reveals how majority of hitters are correcting 'racing back elbow' bat drag within 1-2 weeks WITHOUT overhauling swing mechanics OR buying fancy and expensive hitting aids.
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Yellow dimple ball feedback markers = my bat length, plus two baseballs
Distance from plate = end of the bat touching inside corner of plate, and knob of bat touching my mid-thigh.
Tee was set slightly behind the front feedback marker, and tee height was about mid-thigh.
First 100 baseballs were hit WITHOUT pre-turn “hand-tension”.
Second 100 baseballs were hit WITH pre-turn “hand-tension”.
Data Collected (Zepp Baseball App):
Check out the difference in average Bat Speed and average Time To Impact…
Data Analysis & Conclusion
Look at the difference in the Bat Vertical at Impact and Attack angles. This is the reason for the higher Fly Ball & Line Drive percentages…
When using pre-turn Babe Ruth “hand-tension”:
+3 mph average bat speed
Higher Max Bat Speed numbers
More horizontal bat angle at impact (matching pitch plane)
+6 degrees in attack angle
More productive outcomes (line-drives & fly-balls).
Notes
I had trouble finding a proper slot for my hands WITHOUT pre-turn hand tension. With it, I found more consistency with “educated” pre-tension Babe Ruth hands.
In the video, you can clearly see a better barrel launch angle when I had pre-turn “hand-tension”.
In the video, you can see an earlier barrel on the pitch-plane (probably as a result of the better barrel launch angle).
WITHOUT hand tension, my Zepp bat speeds swung wildly from swing to swing. Whereas with pre-turn hand-tension, my bat speed numbers were more stable, staying within the 72-78 mph range.
I warmed up using the ProHammer bat, to prime my swing to not roll over when I started the Experiment. Interesting to note that WITHOUT pre-turn hand tension, I began rolling over for the first 10-15 swings.
My upper half felt much more connected during the swing when I had pre-turn hand-tension.
The -1 degree vertical angle at impact was a much better improvement using pre-turn “hand-tension”. Now, most of my Line Drives were about 8-12 feet off the ground. My back foot was drifting forward a little much, so taming that and maintaining a 90-degree angle with the back leg, would push that vertical angle at impact even lower. And as a result, would angle my drives up more.
The Bottom Line?
The Babe Ruth Pre-Turn “Hand-Tension” Experiment highlighted what Homer Kelly calls “educating the hands”. This Experiment suggests that the old dogma of keep your hands “loose” before you turn holds no water. This is another example of backwards thinking that’s been taught for decades. All my hitters, from pro and college to Little League, say how much more bat speed they have when they use pre-turn “hand-tension”. I urge you all to repeat the same experiment and report what you find in the comments below. Test…Test…Test these dogmas, so we can finally put the ol’ dog to bed.
*EXPERIMENT UPDATE*: Thanks to my friend Lee Comeaux, who is a professional golf instructor, for further simplifying the finger pressure technique…have the hitter squeeze the bottom three fingers (pinky, ring, and middle) of the top hand ONLY, from the moment the hitter picks up their stride foot to all the way through impact. This alone has cleared up stubborn bat drag issues with my hitters from TEN to SIXTEEN years old.
Grab 'Finger Pressure' Video
Frustrated with fixing BAT DRAG? Beat it!
Swing Study reveals how majority of hitters are correcting 'racing back elbow' bat drag within 1-2 weeks WITHOUT overhauling swing mechanics OR buying fancy and expensive hitting aids.
Click button below to access FREE video that has been downloaded over 20K times!
https://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/babe-ruth-hand-tension.jpg546754Joey Myershttps://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/hitting-performance-labs_c90c0362088ef1d3d528f3078f4f8ac1-300x75.pngJoey Myers2022-05-02 09:30:492022-05-09 18:25:36Proper Youth Hand Bat Grip For Right And Left Handed Baseball & Softball Hitters | Is Door Knocking Knuckle vs Box Hold Correct?
Discover some of the best youth batting stance drills for baseball, fastpitch softball, and slowpitch softball. In the video below, Josh Donaldson addresses proper swing hitting mechanics such as power, elbow up or down, closed stances, and hitting lefty or righty.
13 Josh Donaldson Gold Nuggets: You Didn’t Have To Be A Professional, To Teach High Level Baseball Batting Stance & Hitting Techniques
(I apologize in advance…PLEASE set aside about 14 minutes of reading time for the following baseball batting stance & hitting techniques post. It’s a bit of an emotional RANT 😉
Josh Donaldson talks hitting with Mark DeRosa on MLB Network. Photo courtesy: MLB.com
We FINALLY have validation!!! To have 2015 AL MVP Josh Donaldson affirm A LOT of what we teach here at HPL! Some of you may have seen the above video already. If you HAVE NOT seen it, then please watch.
In the following baseball batting stance & hitting techniques post, I go into more depth about the 13 talking points Josh Donaldson mentions about the “NEW science of hitting”, beginning where Ted Williams left off.
I want to address the few ex-Pro and MLB player TROLLS that wrongly tear myself, my colleagues, and my readers down on the socials for bringing up things Josh Donaldson addresses in the above video.
Without further adieu, from my baseball batting stance & hitting techniques video notes…
Note #1: Back knee inside foot or weight inside back knee?
Is Buster Posey’s back knee being prematurely shifted inside his foot in the ‘Float’? Photo courtesy: InWriteField.com
This was a question from Mark DeRosa…
Josh Donaldson responds that he focuses his weight on his back heel and back hip.
I HATE when hitting instructors PREMATURELY force the back knee of every hitter they instruct, inside the foot (even in the stance).
There are phases to the swing, and Donaldson is talking about what my hitters refer to as the ‘Float & Fall’…
Matt Nokes calls it the ‘Ride & Stride’.
During the ‘Float’ or ‘Ride’, the hitter DOES NOT have to prematurely push their back knee inside the back foot…or focus the weight on the inside of the back knee.
CLICK HERE for a baseball batting stance & hitting techniques post I did on this, dealing with a Twitter Troll.
NEWS FLASH…
Self proclaimed elite hitting instruction doesn’t rest on taking a ton of ‘quality hacks in the cage’ and/or debating over millions of hours of video analysis footage of ‘only the best hitters’.
WTF does ‘quality hacks’ and ‘only the best hitters’ mean!!!!!?
Are we suppose to take your word for it that you know what you’re doing?!
Nah.
I’d rather watch The Kardashians.
Okay, back to focusing on where the weight is in the Float…
Prematurely forcing weight on the inside of a ‘dumb joint’, like the knee, can really put undo stress on the ligament material.
Coaches…please DO NOT wear holes in your players’ knees. This is really important for those FP softball hitting coaches.
And on that note,
FP softball coaches, CLICK HERE for a great BreakingMuscle.com post titled, “Women: Protect Your Knees With the Sprinter Stance Squat”.
Note #2: Not thinking about hands going towards the baseball
Derek Jeter is one of the few having a lengthy career with an extreme handsy approach. Not too many hitters could get away with how he did what he did. Photo courtesy: BaseballByTheYard.com
I totally agree!
ALL the following baseball batting stance & hitting techniques coaching cues are destructive for youth swings:
Hands to the ball
Knob to the ball
Be short to the ball
Hands inside the ball
Yes! Especially the last one…
WHY?
Like the others, it gets the hitter thinking about doing something with the path of their hands.
Some of you use this cue when instructing hitters, and may get occasional positive results…
However,
Any coaching cue that requires an extensive explanation or doesn’t get predictably positive outcomes, is INEFFECTIVE.
I’m looking for cues that with a minimal number of words, gets my hitter to do what I want them to do, even if the concept is new to them…over and over.
Note #3: When Josh Donaldson begins his fall forward, that’s when he goes into loading his upper half (his ‘coil’)
Andrew McCutchen ‘showing his numbers’ while his lower half is beginning to turn counter-clockwise. Photo courtesy: MLB.com
YESSSSS!!
I get asked this baseball batting stance & hitting techniques question quite a bit…when does the ‘load’ start?
And this depends on your definition of a load. But in Donaldson’s context…
The timing of Donaldson’s load, or ‘coil’, isn’t necessarily the rule,
It’s one of three options…
Option #1: Some hitters start in the ‘coiled’ position (highly recommended for younger hitters):
Yoenis Cespedes,
Hunter Pence, and
Ben Zobrist (from the left side)…
Option #2: Some hitters move into the ‘coiled’ position similar to Donaldson:
Bautista,
Cano, and
McCutchen…
Option #3: Some hitters move into the ‘coiled’ position later, like Dustin Pedroia.
The objective is that at landing, or what Josh Donaldson refers to as ‘heel plant’, the hitter is in this ‘coiled’ position.
And it requires the lower half to be open at landing (pelvis on down), and the upper half (above pelvis), to be closed.
Additionally, I LOVE Jose Bautista’s timing cue of loading ‘slow and early’ (CLICK HERE for a post I did on that).
More on the lower half landing open a bit later…
Grab 'Finger Pressure' Video
Frustrated with fixing BAT DRAG? Beat it!
Swing Study reveals how majority of hitters are correcting 'racing back elbow' bat drag within 1-2 weeks WITHOUT overhauling swing mechanics OR buying fancy and expensive hitting aids.
Click button below to access FREE video that has been downloaded over 20K times!
Note #4: Creating bat speed with shoulders, NOT hands (effortless bat speed)
Josh Donaldson’s swing illustrating the spinal engine and Springy ‘X’ Pattern discussed in the next section. Photo courtesy: PicPlayHost
This is VERY important…
WHY?
Because EVERY human movement is driven by the spinal engine…pelvis-spine-shoulders.
According to Dr. Serge Gracovetsky in his book The Spinal Engine, the spinal engine can move in a vacuum.
However, it’s the relationship between arms, legs, and Gravitational Forces that amplify how explosive an athlete can be.
Quite a few hitting instructors talk about hip thrust or loading and exploding the hips.
But what are the shoulder’s function in all this?
Being passive?
I don’t think so.
Some would say a right handed hitter’s front shoulder at landing should be pointing at the pitcher.
This is an ineffective hitting mechanic, shown in this Zepp swing experiment (CLICK HERE) where I observed an average 6-mph boost in Bat Speed at Impact showing my numbers to the pitcher versus pointing the front shoulder at the pitcher (not showing numbers), over 200 swings.
Don’t get me wrong, YES, the pelvis does ‘lead the way’ as Ted Williams said in The Science of Hitting.
But it plays a much smaller role than coaches believe.
Think about how we walk…
If I told you to fire your hips as you walked, what do you think your shoulders would do?
They’d FIRE also!
How about if I told you to fire your hips while walking, but don’t let your shoulders move…
Would that feel awkward?
Dr. Serge Gracovetsky talks about the coupled motion of the spine…
Meaning, while the hips rotate when we walk (albeit small to the naked eye), the shoulders counter-rotate the pelvis.
This is why your right arm and left leg swing forward at the same time.
To have effortless bat speed, like Josh Donaldson says, you MUST teach your hitters to take advantage of these natural laws of human movement.
DON’T use baseball batting stance & hitting techniques to coach them out of them.
Note #5: Rubber band effect, ‘stretching’, creating tension at the finish of his load
Another YESSSSS!
Although Josh Donaldson uses different baseball batting stance & hitting techniques terms, he’s talking about the compression/tension forces in the body via connective tissue called fascia.
Thomas Myers in his book Anatomy Trains describes, what he calls Tensegrity (Tension-Integrity), like this:
I don’t like to think of the body as a rubber band, but rather like a spring.
But what Donaldson is describing is correct.
I refer to this as the Springy ‘X’ Pattern.
CLICK HERE for this video post describing this using Adrian Gonzalez’s swing as a model.
Note #6: Creating the timing to hit the pitch
Most people probably missed this point in the video…Donaldson briefly mentioned it, but I find it VERY important.
TIMING FOR HITTING IS EVERYTHING.
This is why I don’t like rapid fire soft toss OR 15-pitch marathon rounds batting practice.
It’s NOT about quick hands either.
Look, a baseball player may only see one pitch every 12-20 seconds.
A fast-pitch softball player may see one pitch every 8-15 seconds.
In games, swing intensity EVERY swing matters.
I can take a hitter with seemingly slow hands, adjust his or her timing, and have them barreling the ball more.
Of course, we’ll have to address their still ineffective mechanics at some point in the future, but the point is, it’s not about fast hands.
It’s about using the shoulders to speed up the hands.
The opposite IS NOT true.
Coaches handicap hitters by using ineffective drills like rapid fire soft toss, drop toss, and/or marathon B.P. sessions.
Again,
TIMING IS EVERYTHING IN HITTING.
CLICK HERE for “The Dead Simple Guide To Optimizing A Hitter’s Timing In Games”.
Note #7: Front foot is open…hips can’t separate from upper half
Miguel Cabrera is one of my favorite swings to model, except for landing closed (less than 45-degree angle). However, he’s a physical beast, and most definitely succeeds despite one ineffective mechanic. Photo courtesy: MLB.com
Another baseball batting stance & hitting techniques golden nugget from Josh Donaldson.
However, there are quite a few other coaches getting their panties in a bunch about this comment.
CLICK HERE and follow the thread of one of my Facebook posts.
CLICK HERE and follow a Facebook post thread of my friend and colleague Taylor Gardner, founder of the BackSpin Tee. Actually a lot of really good discussion happening on this one.
They’re reinterpreting it as Donaldson is saying to ‘point the landing toe at the pitcher’.
This may be what it looks like in the video, which we also have to be careful of camera angles…
But the point of the matter is, that Donaldson is saying to ‘land open’.
And this is where, us coaches, must define terms.
I say if the landing foot is opened less than 45-degrees, the foot is closed.
If the landing foot is opened more than 45-degrees, the foot is open.
Chris Welch at ZenoLink says the front foot should land open, roughly around 65-degrees (at about 2-min mark):
And I agree.
I do think hitters like Donaldson and Bautista are more on the open side than others.
With my definition of landing foot closed versus open, I’d rather have my hitters err on the side of open, than closed.
CLICK HERE for another Zepp swing experiment where I tested this and found an average bat speed boost of 3-mph boost when landing open, over 200 swings.
Kyle Harrington, dad of one of my online hitting lesson students Stephen, who’s currently 13yo, 5’7″, 130-lbs…
Recently, increased his Ball Exit Speed 5-mph in the last 5 months off the tee, to now 77-mph.
I asked Kyle, what were the two biggest contributors to the increase…and he responded with:
“He grew about 2″ but he’s only 5’7”. I think the main thing is that he is not stalling the bat. In the 3D testing with Chris Welch [of ZenoLink.com] his peak bat speed slowed almost 10 mph before impact, which is common. So he is decelerating the barrel less coming into impact. He was blocking with the front hip and all the speed was too early . So he’s actually moving the bat speed forward in his swing more (where impact is) rather behind the ball before impact. That’s the main reason.”
This can happen for a few reasons:
Too much forward momentum (yes you can have too much),
Landing closed with the front foot, and
Inward turning (coiling) the pelvis towards the catcher (shifts our 45-degree optimal impact zone too deep into the swing).
When the hitter lands closed, as Donaldson said, it’s more challenging to optimize the body’s natural springy fascia.
It’s also worth noting that the front ‘foot shape’ will change depending on pitch location at impact.
For instance,
On an outside pitch, we’ll see the foot more flat, and possibly more closed, than on an inside pitch.
Note #8: 10yo kid told to get on top of the ball, tell them NO…don’t get paid for hitting ground-balls
Ground-ball Coaches, if you spent more time instructing 10-degree launch angles and boosting Ball Exit Speeds, than you do telling hitters to always hit the ball on the ground, our hitters will be in a better position to crush pitchers.
For me, this tip was definitely the highlight of this video.
There was a comment on my baseball batting stance & hitting techniques Facebook post that is worth noting:
Reader A: “If I’m coaching a team of 10 year olds, and either the kid (or parent) tells me no, they ought to start looking for another team to play for. If you allow a kid to tell you no at that age, the kid will become uncoachable when he gets older.”
And here was a great response from another readers to this person:
Reader B: “If a teacher tells your kid 2+2 is 5, you don’t want him to have the courage and character to question the teacher? This society man, anyone that questions authority is deemed to be at fault…how dare they!!!”
I agree with Reader B…however, I understand there are ignorant parents, as well as players, out there as well.
However, speaking in the context of what Donaldson is saying, I agree with Reader B on this.
If you’re a coach that’s teaching hitters to ALWAYS hit the ball on the ground, you’re being ineffective as a coach. And you MUST get educated because if you’re aren’t growing, then you’re dying.
Note #9: Relaxed in stance…time that arms get engaged with the body is during his ‘coil’ (mentions ‘scap load’)
Jace, one of my 11yos, weighs 67-lbs, and hit his first homer over a 180-foot fence. We fixed his racing back elbow bat drag with connecting his hands to his spinal engine through finger pressure.
I totally agree.
There’s a time to be relaxed, and then there’s a time to connect the body (driving engine) to the “things” holding the bat…the hands.
CLICK HERE for another Zepp swing experiment that talks about what I teach to my hitters as ‘finger pressure’, and how we’re banishing racing back elbow bat drag with this technique alone.
It’s ALL about “connection” folks. Quite a few of the young hitters I see just aren’t connected.
But when they get connected…this is when we can triple their body-weight in distance (see Jace image above).
Grab 'Finger Pressure' Video
Frustrated with fixing BAT DRAG? Beat it!
Swing Study reveals how majority of hitters are correcting 'racing back elbow' bat drag within 1-2 weeks WITHOUT overhauling swing mechanics OR buying fancy and expensive hitting aids.
Click button below to access FREE video that has been downloaded over 20K times!
Note 10: Hands load it (versus shoulders), then barrel tips too much…leads to getting underneath balls
Josh Donaldson is talking about getting into his load (or ‘coil’) with his shoulders and not his hands.
When he uses his hands to get there, he feels it leads to an excessive ‘barrel tip’ (click following link), and to getting under the ball too much.
CLICK HERE for an AthleticsNation.com article titled, “Josh Donaldson: Changes in Approach & Mechanics”.
In this article, Jerry Brewer from East Bay Hitting Instruction compares Donaldson’s swing and metrics from 2013 to 2014.
The one big difference being an excessive barrel tip in 2014, leading to drops in his BA, OBP, & SLUG metrics by something like 50 points EACH.
By the way, Jerry is right on with the swing as well.
Note 11: At landing, wants bat to be at 45-degree angle, and to split his head from behind
I agree.
I don’t really want to get into this, but I thought it was a good little baseball batting stance & hitting techniques nugget from the video.
Note 12: Swing down to create backspin
This is where I see Josh Donaldson picking up where Ted Williams left off. This is a well known graphic from Williams’s book The Science of Hitting.
This is something Josh Donaldson is against, and I agree.
Yes, every once in awhile, a hitter can swing down on a ball and launch one.
Did you read the keywords there…? “Every once in awhile.”
Do you know what the majority outcomes will be doing this?
Ground-balls.
And if you read my Ground-ball RANT, then you know how inferior default teaching your hitters to hit them is, unless of course you have hitters who run like greased lightning, or in a Hit & Run type scenario.
The biggest argument here, comes from Little League coaches saying, but the ground-ball is the hardest hit ball to field, throw, and catch.
And my rebuttal is, what happens when your ground-ball hitting team meets a team that can play catch?
It doesn’t matter anyway, because a majority of pitches are taught to keep the ball down in the zone to hitters.
WHY?
Because PITCHERS WANT HITTERS DRIVING THE BALL INTO THE GROUND.
Note#13: Intent – damage at all times
I thought this was a HUGE baseball batting stance & hitting techniques gold nugget.
When asked if Donaldson makes educated decisions to commit on pitches or against pitchers, he says, yeah it depends…
BUT,
His intent is to do damage at all times.
“Why wouldn’t I?” He smirks to Mark DeRosa 😛
Double and Dinger damage.
That’s what the Blue Jays pay him for.
Our objective as hitting coaches should be to get our sluggers hitting the ball as hard as their physical ability will allow them…as frequently as possible.
To return this baseball batting stance & hitting techniques post full circle, let me repeat:
You Don’t Have To Be A Professional, To Teach High Level Baseball Batting Stance & Hitting Techniques Today
You just have to understand human movement principles that are validated by science, and apply these “rules” to hitting a ball.
Circling back to the headline of this post, looking at proper swing hitting mechanics: power, elbow up or down, closed stances, and hitting lefty or righty…
Power – at HPL we believe 70-80% of consistent power comes from properly moving our spinal engine, power doesn’t mostly come from the lower half as some would believe.
Back elbow up or down – what’s important is hitter gets a slight downhill shoulder angle by stride landing(6-10 degrees down). Lifting the back elbow can help with this, but if lifting the back elbow keeps shoulders level, then it doesn’t matter.
Closed stances – I know Donaldson and I differ on this, but I like the closed stance to restrict hip movement. Some hitters OVER rotate their lower half and lose out on directional force.
Hitting righty or lefty – I don’t have a preference for this. The hitter will figure it out either way. However, I do have an opinion on switch hitting…I don’t believe switch hitting is all it’s cracked up to be because they get waaay more at-bats on the left side early on because there aren’t that many lefty pitchers, so the righty swing significantly suffers. Evidence of this lack of lefty pitchers is shown in the majority of lefty hitters struggling against lefty pitchers.
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Now, this Jose Altuve hitting analysis post isn’t about the ‘laser show’…however,
Standing in at 5’6″,
…and weighing in at a soaking wet 165-pounds, we’ll look at Jose Altuve(his height and weight numbers are a little closer to reality I think).
Although,
I do think Jose Altuve has one thing over the ‘laser show’, and that’s dancing (parental guidance is recommended 😉:
In this Jose Altuve hitting analysis video, we’ll go over:
Jose Altuve stats,
Presents of Forward Momentum (FoMo)?
How well he dominates the plane of the pitch,
Where his power comes from, and
Does he practice Pitch Recognition?
FYI: the pitch Jose Altuve is hitting in the video analysis looks like an 87-mph FB straight down broadway, and it does look like he’s on-time.
Without further adieu, here are the notes for the…
Jose Altuve Hitting Analysis Stats (the averages of averages)
CLICK HERE for the FanGraphs.com post I pulled the following stats from*:
ISO = +20 points
BABIP = +34 points
GB% = +4%
LD% = +1%
FB% = -6%
HR/FB% = -3.5%
(*a (+) denotes how many points OR percentage points or above league average, and a (-) denotes below league average.)
Presents of Forward Momentum (FoMo)?
Is FoMo present?
Shifting foot pressure (mentioned landing with closed front foot), and
Moving Center of Gravity (COG).
How Well he Dominates the Plane of the Pitch
Knee Action – ‘getting shorter’ and ‘staying shorter’
Barrel Plane – keeping barrel on plane for as long as possible
Where his Power Comes from…
Showing numbers,
Hiding hands from the pitcher,
Hunch – Posterior Pelvic Tilt (PPT), and
Down shoulders? (not so much here).
Does he Practice Pitch Recognition?
My friend Aaron Miles, who was small (5’8″, 180-lbs), and played 9 years in the Bigs, talks about how his High School coach was forward thinking…in that he did Pitch Recognition training with his troops, and Aaron’s coach said he had the best PR on the team.
My hypothesis in this Jose Altuve hitting analysis is that he does some sort of PR training, OR has a God given early pitch recognition ability that allows him to hit the ball so hard, so often.
Sure, according to this Jose Altuve hitting analysis,
…Altuve may not hit over 30 homers per year, but he sure will hit a boat load of doubles, which is just as good to contributing to team wins…just look at his above average (average) ISO and BABIP scores above!
'Add 40-Feet' To Batted Ball Distance
Swing Study reveals how tens of thousands of hitters are adding 40-feet to batted ball distance by using one simple strategy.
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https://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/jose-altuve-hitting.jpg15802048Joey Myershttps://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/hitting-performance-labs_c90c0362088ef1d3d528f3078f4f8ac1-300x75.pngJoey Myers2022-04-20 09:30:072022-04-20 20:48:36How To Increase Hitting Power Stats Like Jose Altuve Swing With Fundamental Baseball & Softball Drills In 2022
Part-3: How To Develop Powerful Wrist Snap Like Hank Aaron (Is Devastating Against Pitchers)
Youth hitting consistent power trainer for baseball, softball, and senior league softball located in Fresno – Clovis, CA. Discover wrist snap batting drills, techniques, and training for home use. This video is a sneak peak at a 1 on 1 private lesson, and we also do online lessons as well.
In case you missed the background information of Part-1,
Zack is a 14-year-old hitter from Visalia, California, which is approximately an hour drive from me, one way. And this is the first time I worked with him since about a year ago. We’ve had about half a dozen session together in total. And what I like about Zack is he asks a lot of really good questions during our sessions.
And before we started this session, Zack was having a challenge with hitting line drives. He was either hitting the ball on the ground or non-productive balls in the air.
DISCLAIMER about the video:
Fortunately the video quality is great because Dad used his GoPro, but unfortunately I wasn’t mic’d up, so the audio isn’t like some of my other videos.
We’re at a public High School on a Saturday afternoon, so there are other team noises, bird sounds, emergency vehicles, etc. going on in the background that can be distracting.
Sadly, a few coaches on the socials will be overly critical of this hitter, and I’m asking you to suspend judgement. The purpose of this video IS NOT about being overly critical of the hitter’s swing, it’s about the demonstration and use of sticky coaching principles.
Swing and coaching suggestions are welcome, but be nice coaches.
Now, for those coaches looking to learn and help their hitters get better…ONWARD…again!
A typically lesson I do, is organized like the following, from start to finish:
Dynamic warm-up,
Beginning Ball Exit Speed readings,
Record and analyze current swing,
Lesson, and
Ending Ball Exit Speeds readings.
Part-3 lands you towards the end of #4 above.
What you can look out for in above video
Training something new should feel goofy, that’s normal…if they feel no change in movement at the beginning stages of motor skill development, then they’re repeating the same old thing (about 0:45 mark)
The arch and hollow (hunched) positions in Gymnastics. “Hunch” can have a negative connotation, but reality says it’s a VERY SAFE position for a twisting spine to start in. CLICK HERE for a Zepp swing experiment that looked at the benefits of a “Hunched” spine. (about 1:55 mark)
Playing around with wrist snap variance using the target ankle resistance bands. It’s NOT a roll over, it’s like a “waggle” that golfers use pre-swing. Great defender against off speed and breaking pitches, AND increase BA by controlling the barrel. Keep main objective in mind: hit ball as hard and far as you can. (about 3:45 mark)
Working the Wrist Snap Variance Drill on the open field hitting targets. Hank Aaron was really good at this. Watch Hank Aaron video below and watch his wrist action at impact… (about 6:15 mark)
The Frog Tape bat…barrel awareness. Focusing on hitting a certain part of the barrel AND hitting it in a specific direction or target. (about 11:20 mark)
Discussing how switching bats between rounds forces a hitter to focus on adjusting their timing. Heavier/top heavy bats have to start sooner…lighter/balanced bats can start later. (about 15:30 mark)
Zack made the observation that Finger Pressure makes the Wrist Snap Variance Drill easier to feel. (about 17:30 mark)
Also, when it comes to sticky coaching principles, notice how I:
Move the tee positioning around after every swing (both high/low and inside/outside),
Vary soft toss heights and depths,
Vary mechanics on certain swings in a 5-swing round (I call these Varied Rounds), or practice one thing the whole round (I call these Block Rounds),
Ask quite a few feel, visual, and/or audio feedback questions AFTER round is over (think of it like a hitting quiz),
Keep my mouth shut during the 5-swing round(little to no feedback from me),
Don’t make Zack take a lot of swings during our time together,
Chunking certain movement together, so they don’t seem like separate pieces,
Have him change his bat size during rounds, and
Work with him on simplifying the juggling of a couple different mechanical cues.
https://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/over-shoulder-look3-blog.png401600Joey Myershttps://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/hitting-performance-labs_c90c0362088ef1d3d528f3078f4f8ac1-300x75.pngJoey Myers2022-04-19 09:00:262022-04-20 04:56:21Youth Hitting Power Trainer For Baseball & Softball? | Discover Wrist Snap Batting Drills, Techniques, And Training At Home Sneak Peak | 1 On 1 Private Or Online Lessons In Fresno – Clovis, CA
Mickey Mantle: How To Increase Batted Ball Distance When You’re Not Throwing A Javelin?
Check out Mickey Mantle’s bat lag. Photo courtesy: LegendaryAuctions.com
This post looks into Mickey Mantle’s left handed swing, hitting home runs. We do swing analysis, look at his height compared to current players, strength, and share a bleacher report article with his switch hitting left right split stats. We’ll also compare his swing principles to an Olympic Javelin thrower!
Since publishing the YouTube video, it has amassed over 148,241 views and 500 video “Likes”.
The basic premise of the above video is to compare Mickey Mantle’s right handed swing mechanics to Czech javelin thrower, Jan Železný’s throwing technique. Jan is a world and Olympic champion and world record holder. He also holds the top five javelin performances of all time…according to Wikipedia.
In the video, I brought up my favorite Ralph Waldo Emerson quote many of you have seen me post before:
“As to the methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.“
SCIENCE-BASED TRAINING:
Improve your hitting strategy dramatically by applying human movement principles.
Learn not only how and what to train but also the science behind the methods.
And, some of The Mick’s dingers have been the talk of folklore, claiming to have traveled over 600-feet!
Although with the computation of Metrics now, as Christopher Harbour, a YouTube reader commenter on this particular video, put it:
“The farthest official home run in MLB history was hit by Babe Ruth in Detroit at a distance of 585ft. Mickey’s longest shot was 510Ft. It was often claimed to be much farther but that distance was the distance AFTER the ball rolled. This info is proven by SABR historian Bill Jenkinson.”
Whatever the case, it’s still amazing that a guy of Mickey Mantle’s stature, can hit a ball over 500-feet! We don’t see Giancarlo, Miggy, or Trout doing that.
And by the way, everyone thinks Babe Ruth was this hulking mass of a guy…he was only 6’2″, 215-pounds. And according to the above comment, launched the longest dinger 585-feet!
So what was Mickey Mantle doing mechanically making him so special that we as coaches should be teaching our younger hitters?
'Add 40-Feet' To Batted Ball Distance
Swing Study reveals how tens of thousands of hitters are adding 40-feet to batted ball distance by using one simple strategy.
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Mickey Mantle on the Un-Weighting Principle (or Forward Momentum)
Look at Mickey Mantle’s shifting foot pressure… Photo courtesy: http://s685.photobucket.com/user/BillBurgess
I said in the video that The Mick’s back knee wasn’t floating over his ankle, but that’s simply not true. This was knowledge residue from past baseball experts I was listening to at the time.
What Mickey Mantle did really well was shifting his foot pressure.
We can see from the moment he lifts his stride foot to that foot touching down that his foot pressure looks like this:
Back foot pressure – is on the outside, and
Stride foot pressure – is on the inside.
This is similar to a story one of my readers, Stephen Reid, shared about prolific golfer Ben Hogan (5’9″, 145-pounds), saying in an email:
“A friend of mine worked at Shady Oaks in Dallas where Hogan played and practiced. Towards the end of Mr. Hogan’s time of ‘grinding it out of the dirt”, he was allowed the opportunity to sit and watch him hit balls. He said that Mr. Hogan started talking about the stance, and he stated that the way he thought it would come to pass in the future would be that both feet at address would both be turned slightly towards the target- 30 to 45 degrees. By turning the right foot in at address, the golfer would essentially be putting a governor on his/her right side.
He also reasoned that by doing this, the player would create the tension and brace with the right side and would create a strong coil that would not allow for any “over-coiling or over-swinging”. Therefore, you would be presetting the coil or brace of the right side in a controlled manner and would not allow oneself to overturn in the backswing. Conclusion was that the energy from a strong brace and controlled coil, the golfer would create greater energy in the release of the right side while creating greater swing speeds through impact.”
As Mickey Mantle’s stride foot lands the foot pressure shifts as follows:
Back foot pressure – moves to the inside, and
Stride foot pressure – moves to the outside.
Mickey Mantle is also most certainly picking up his stride foot and leading with his hip forward. Just pick out a point of reference in the background, and track how far his hip moves forward. He’s effectively ‘un-weighting’ his bat, or getting a “head start”, to make the transfer of linear momentum into angular (or rotational) easier.
And we can clearly see the Javelin Thrower, Jan Železný, using forward momentum sprinting down the track before slinging his “arrow” A LONG WAY.
The Catapult Loading System
The ‘Springy X Pattern’ I developed through reading the book Anatomy Trains by Thomas Myers. Watch the following FunctionalPatterns YouTube video of Thomas Myers talking about the concept of Tensegrity, or Tension Integrity:
It’s the idea that there are compression and tension forces acting within the body at all times. In the Mickey Mantle video, I talk about imagining a big ‘X’ on his chest and back…connecting one shoulder to the opposite hip. The fascial lines are a little more complicated than this, but let’s take a general look at how this works…
When Mickey Mantle pre-loads his torso – before turning – we see his lead shoulder come down and in towards his back hip (one leg of the ‘X’ shortens), while the rear shoulder and front hip move away from each other (other leg of the ‘X’ lengthens). And the reverse is true on the backside.
This is evidenced by tracking his LEFT shoulder:
Pre-loads DOWN before Final Turn,
Unloads UP during the Final Turn, and finally
Reverses DOWN during the follow through to decelerate rotation.
CLICK HERE for an interesting article titled “Muscle Power Golf?!…NOT!” by Kelvin Miyahira (big thanks to Stephen Lowe for the link). It talks about how the swing – whether we’re talking baseball/softball or golf – IS NOT about activating fast twitch muscle fibers, but engaging the springy fascia. It’s a rant that I wish I did FIRST!!
Other Interesting Resources from Mickey Mantle YouTube Viewer Comments & More
Gabriel Pennington – “Mantle’s massive strength came from blue collar work, swinging a sledgehammer in a lead mine (on top of freakish genetics). Couple that with the workman mentality of your best never being good enough and you have a lethal combination for an athlete.”
koryguns – “3.1 seconds to first. Legend has it when he was a rookie in 1951 they decided to have a foot race among the team. Mantle beat everybody like they were standing still, puked, and apologized to Stengel for being out of shape.“
Also, here’s slow motion video of his left handed swing…
'Add 40-Feet' To Batted Ball Distance
Swing Study reveals how tens of thousands of hitters are adding 40-feet to batted ball distance by using one simple strategy.
Click the button below to access the FREE video that's been downloaded over 30K times!!
Are you looking for 1 on 1 or small private group hitting lessons for baseball and softball players in the Fresno and Clovis, CA areas? Or are you looking for the best private online batting instruction and swing analysis in 2022? We do training for both adults and youth. This 20-min part-1 video webinar will give you a little taste of what we’re about…
Increase Consistent Power In 2-Weeks: Baseball Trainers Webinar Part-1…
Please text me at: 559-709-5808 (Joey) if you’re in Fresno, Clovis, or general California area to setup private 1 on 1 instruction or small private group lessons.
CLICK HERE for a link to Our Story and testimonials.
SCIENCE-BASED TRAINING:
Improve your hitting strategy dramatically by applying human movement principles.
Learn not only how and what to train but also the science behind the methods.
The following is the transcript to the baseball trainers near me webinar… (about 18-minutes reading time)
Joey Myers 00:06
Get cozied up to technology over the years, because of the online thing, it is what it is.
Joey Myers 00:14
Let me let these people in. Welcome everybody that are coming in here. Some are coming in by phone.
Joey Myers 00:25
We have a lot of information today, I’m going to try and get through it really quickly, within 30 minutes. It will be good information.
Joey Myers 00:32
If you have any questions, I know, I have a lot of questions, a lot of great questions that Neil relayed over to me, from many of you. There’s a lot of them, like I said, 40-50, something like that.
Joey Myers 00:42
I’m going to do my best to really get through those quickly. Obviously, I’m not going to be able to go through them in depth, but if you have any questions after this, feel free to reach out and email me at Joey, J-O-E-Y, like Joey from friends, at hitting performance lab dot com, and I’ll have that at the end of this too. You don’t have to worry about downloading it into your brain. If you have any baseball trainers near me webinar questions, please, and I will answer them, have them ready.
Baseball Trainers Near Me – Our Story
Joey Myers 01:08
I think we’re adding them here. As they as they come in, we will add them. Today, we’re going to be going over something, about 2012, towards the end of 2012, is when my son, who’s now going to be turning eight in three days.
Joey Myers 01:28
When he was born, and the wife was doing the midnight, every two hours, three-hour milk feedings. I had a book called Anatomy Trains by Thomas Myers, same last name. I’m sure on the family tree, we are related in some way, but I don’t know him like I would know my brother or my uncle or anything like that.
Joey Myers 01:50
Thomas Myers’ book Anatomy Trains was something that really changed everything, how I teach hitting, and how I’m going to teach hitting, and you will hopefully get to see a little bit of that in this baseball trainers near me presentation. So again, welcome.
Joey Myers 02:04
Thank you again, Neil, for putting this thing on and keeping you already to go. Hopefully, we can get a lot of information in and if you got to go, we’re going to record this, don’t worry, we will get that out. I’ll get the recording out to Neil and he can get it out to you guys, so let’s get going.
Joey Myers 02:19
This is the baseball trainers near me seminar, teleseminar, whatever you want to call it, how to teach 100-pound hitters who consistently drive the ball 300 feet. This was something that I didn’t just cook up and create a product and go. This came to me with the results that my hitters were getting, and hitters were soon to be, what other coaches were learning, and were applying with their hitters.
Joey Myers 02:44
Brought to you by Hitting Performance Lab, that’s my website. You got Neil over at MaxBP. One of my favorite quotes is by Ralph Waldo Emerson, you might know that gentlemen,
“As to the methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles is sure to have trouble”.
Joey Myers 03:15
Now this is an important quote, because it distinguishes between methods and principles, principles are rules. Think about playing Monopoly, you got to know the rules of the game before you can play the game. The principles to hitting can come in the form of bio-mechanics, physics, engineering, those are the principles that we tend to stick with.
Joey Myers 03:42
What we’re going to be talking about today, case studies, why legs fail, and spinal engine succeeds in the power equation, discover the springy fascist secret, how to turn the spine into a safe ball crushing machine. We were talking about this with Neil, I talked to him yesterday on the phone, he was having some back pain with his baseball golf swing, and we’ll see if we can get to that in this, but I really want to focus on more of the power side, but we want to make sure the swing is safe, we will talk about that.
Joey Myers 04:17
Before we get there, let’s add some more people in here, probably have Neil do this. That’s right. Thank you for joining everybody. All right.
Joey Myers 04:35
The first question usually when you go to a wedding is how do you know the bride? How do you know the groom? So, how do I know MaxBP? Well, it first started with the Sandlot Slugger, and then MaxBP acquired Sandlot Slugger, and that’s where we connected, and I connected with Neil. That’s probably been, I don’t know, Neil can probably say on this five, seven years ago, maybe, that this happened. Is that about right, Neil?
Neil McConnell 04:58
Yes, that sounds right. We’ve been around about 11 years; Sandlot Slugger ran probably about 14 years ago. Somewhere in that mix.
Joey Myers 05:08
I know them because we started the starting lineup store dot com, where I started it back 2010. I was grouping a lot of the hitting aids that really love to work with my hitters that are proven, whether it’s through science or just data, and MaxBP, Sandlot Slugger at the time, the MaxBP is one of those hitting aids, I call them the best hitting aids in the world, on the planet. That’s how I know Neil and MaxBP.
Joey Myers 05:38
I played four years division one baseball at Fresno State from 2003, I just want to give just a little bit, I’m going to probably rush through this because I know most year, just cut to the chase. I think some of you that don’t know me, would be good to just take a gloss… Over 15 plus years in the corrective exercise industry, and those are some of the alphabet soup that I have certification wise.
Joey Myers 06:02
What’s funny is in college, I was a criminology major and I really fell in love with kinesiology. I wish if I did it over again, that’s what I would have done, but I’m mostly self-taught. I used to train people, I wrote a 2018 Amazon bestselling book, Catapult Loading System, that’s the title of this baseball trainers near me webinar.
Joey Myers 06:24
How to teach 100-pound hitters, how to consistently drive the ball 300 feet, and that started me on this journey that this stuff really works, because you really start to get in with a lot of other coaches reteaching the same information, and you really get to see this stuff.
Joey Myers 06:42
It’s not just me and my hitters, or my magic, but other coaches are able to do the same thing. I’ll have a cool little bonus for you guys, free bonus that you can grab this book at no cost on Amazon. At the end of this baseball trainers near me webinar, we’ll talk about that.
Joey Myers 06:58
We’ll get a couple more of these, about almost 30,000 online courses, lessons and books product sold online, over 333 blog posts at Hitting Performance Lab dot com, giving away over 8500 copies of Amazon best selling book…
Joey Myers 07:19
We applied human movement principles that are validated by science to hitting the ball. Like I mentioned, I played four years of division one baseball at Fresno State. I didn’t play pro ball, I didn’t play major league ball, but I played probably more than 95 and 98% of the baseball population.
Joey Myers 07:34
I don’t say that to brag, I say that most of the teaching that I teach has nothing to do with how I was taught. I do use some of that stuff. I do use some of the cues and different things like that in certain circumstances, but most of my stuff, if not all of it, is validated by science.
Joey Myers 07:53
The other thing, that we talked about is, I’m working on a new book that’s going to be published, we are working on January- February of 2021. It’s called “Swing Smarter: Science-Based Hitting Training, Built to Understand How, Why and the Reasoning Behind it”.
Joey Myers 08:09
Those are all things that we stand for and set us apart from a lot of the others that you’ve probably read, heard, watched out there, purchased their products, watched their YouTube videos.
Case Studies
Joey Myers 08:19
Let’s get started, case studies, so the only reason I got, I’m not here to brag, and I could give you a hundred other ones, but I want to give you an example since Neil talked about that there’s a huge smattering of different people on this call. There are parents that are just coaching their kids, there are team coaches that are coaching a group of kids from 14 to probably 30 plus in high school, professional and there are instructors out there like myself, there are probably academy owners out there.
Joey Myers 08:27
I just want to put it up front on the people that we help and how these human movement principles that are validated by science can help anybody.
Joey Myers 09:04
At 14, a 130 pound hitter that was driving the ball 385 feet and by the way that was with a hickory wood bat. That wasn’t the hot metals that everybody says, “oh they always try and explain these case studies away”. This particular hitter, I think it’s Texas Tech, he got a full ride to Texas Tech, Hudson White is his name. I do have a blog post on him that is featured on my blog, but he’s one of them.
Joey Myers 09:31
Sixty-seven-pound hitter at the time, soaking wet. I think that 67 pounds, he had eaten a Costco chocolate muffin, that I think after he went to the doctor to get that measurement or something like that, he might have even been easy, 65 pounds before eating that muffin, but he was hitting the ball 180 plus feet and this is consistent.
Joey Myers 09:50
I always tell my hitters that I’m just the compass and the flashlight in the dark, you have to walk the path, I don’t have to walk the path for you, I’ve done that on my own. I’ve walked the path plenty of times, but now it’s the hitters that have to do that. They are 90% of this. I’m just the 10% that gives them the right direction to go.
Joey Myers 09:50
She put a lot of hard work in that summer, and she gained 10 miles an hour and ball exit speed, hitting a softball. We have an indie baseball player, he was pretty much out, he came to me, and in one hour, we increased, obviously baseball, plus 10 miles per hour and ball exit speed.
Joey Myers 09:50
This isn’t just a one flash in the pan time, 90-pound hitter driving the ball 300 feet. D-1 college fast-pitch softball player, she was a Fresno State in a summer, now with softball because the balls bigger, many you know in softball obviously, in baseball you should know bigger softball, heavier, more mass, and to gain 10 miles an hour in one summer in two and a half months is a big deal. That’s what she did, a lot of hard work.
Joey Myers 10:52
Now those things when they gain that much, the reason why, is because the principles we’re going to talk about today, the consistently power principles, and they were almost nonexistent in their swing. If you have a hitter who is nonexistent, you’re going to see these big gains using principles seen in this baseball trainers near me webinar.
Joey Myers 11:07
If you see hitters that have maybe a couple of these or one of these, you’re not going to see that kind of a gain, just because they’re not starting from zero. I want you to understand that this isn’t the norm. It’s not the norm when somebody started from zero but it’s pretty close. It’s between six and 10 miles an hour ball exit speed when they’re starting from zero, it’s what I tend to see.
Joey Myers 11:28
55-year-old slow-pitch softball optometrist online lesson, and he’s working with me and doing pretty well. I don’t have any gains on that side of it, but it’s interesting and 71-year-old senior league baseball player, I worked with him this week, he came up, he read my book, he said, “It makes sense, I love what you wrote. A lot of the other books I’ve read are hard to understand”. He’s an attorney, by the way. Attorneys usually are really into that jargon.
SCIENCE-BASED TRAINING:
Improve your hitting strategy dramatically by applying human movement principles.
Learn not only how and what to train but also the science behind the methods.
He picked it up, he said “I love it”, it kind of come up. He’s from Ojai, in California, he drove about three and a half hours. For two days, we worked, and we increased his ball exit speed by nine miles an hour in one hour.
Joey Myers 12:09
The first day we really hit a couple of these principles hard the first day, and he gained nine miles an hour, plus, he had a little bit of back pain when we first started, and we got rid of it in his swing.
Joey Myers 12:20
Again, that’s something maybe we’ll talk about if you guys want me to. I’ve worked with major leaguers, whether it’s in person or they bought my courses and we’ve talked online through some of this stuff, professional hitters I’ve worked with in person, college, Juco, high school, junior high school, little league and senior league.
Joey Myers 12:38
This goes across the board, it doesn’t matter what level they’re at, these principles work, whether they are male or female, they work, it doesn’t matter. Human to human is basically what it works for. And you’ll learn these principles in this baseball trainers near me webinar.
Joey Myers 12:49
If you want to get a lot of the testimonials, and that’s just probably, I think it’s 50 to 100 of them on my website, I have more, I just had been lazy to get them up, but if you go to hittingperformancelab.com, if you scroll all the way down into the footer, you’ll see the about page and you can click that, read a little bit about me, and then scroll down and there’s a ton of testimonials there. You can go check out more of those.
Why Legs Fail and Spinal Engine Succeeds in the Power equation
Joey Myers 13:11
Enough of that, let’s start to transition in this baseball trainers near me webinar… why the legs fail, and spinal engine succeeds in the power equation. Learning principles from water polo, maybe those of you out there have had kids that played water polo or have hitters that have played water polo. I have cousins and hitters that also did it, and the idea came to me, I ran an experiment where I wanted to have my pelvis facing forward, I was using a knob tracker, like a Zepp on my on my knob for those of you who blast motion, same thing, swing tracker.
Joey Myers 13:44
I was facing my hips forward, but I was just turning my upper body to be able to hit the ball. The experiment didn’t really turn out really well, but I tried to do it because my mobility in my spine or my shoulders and my pelvis weren’t allowing me to actually do the experiment like I should.
Joey Myers 14:02
We had the backspin tee guys, I’m really good friends with them since I met them. They did an experiment where they were jumping up and hitting a ball off the tee and dropping off of a chair hitting a ball before they hit the ground. They were doing a couple different experiments like that, and what they found was when their feet weren’t on the ground, and they were just using their shoulders in their thoracic spine, the middle of their spine, that their base when they had their feet on the ground ball exit speed…
Joey Myers 14:27
They had single-A ball players, they had indies or rookie ball, they had golfers that are hitting the ball 300 plus yards or 400 yards now and they had an eight-year professional pitcher who hits pretty well too. They were doing the experiment and they found that about 90 miles an hour was their normal control when their feet were on the ground, but when they were jumping up hitting or when they were falling and hitting, and doing their other things trying to take the lower half of the equation that their ball exit speeds were about 70 to 80% of what their control was, which was interesting.
Joey Myers 15:06
They were about 60 to 70 miles an hour versus the 90 with their feet on the ground. It got me thinking, and then somebody said, “well, that’s not a good experiment”, because you know, if you really wanted to do this, you had to hang from a harness, where your feet were hanging in, and then you hit it like that, like, well, who’s going to do that? Unless you’ve got access to a harness, like that, maybe at a farm.
Joey Myers 15:25
I was thinking, what athletes do throw or hit, from that kind of a position? I did a blog post, and it was titled “Is rotating back hip through the ball necessary for power?” Think about this baseball trainers near me webinar thought experiment.
Joey Myers 15:43
I don’t know if anybody has actually done this. I probably have to do this next summer, but think about that the fastest water polo throw, if you googled it, what do you think of that speed of that water polo ball. As you can see, the size of that ball is like a volleyball, Croatian Olympic water polo, male athlete, 60 miles an hour.
Joey Myers 16:15
As you can see floating in water, they’re not going down to the bottom and pushing up, they’re floating in water, so the lower half is minimal to almost zero friction with the lower half, so you’re not able to use a lower half like you are when you are standing on land, 60 miles an hour.
Joey Myers 16:31
Think about the pitcher, who is going down the mound, they got gravity, they got access to everything. Fastest pitcher, let’s just round it up to 100 miles an hour, so 100 miles an hour, on flat ground, falling down a mound is the fastest pitch.
Joey Myers 16:51
I know 102, 103, we can argue but say 100 easy numbers, so that water polo throw is throwing a big ball, that’s going to have an effect. Now, what happens if we put in that Croatian, male Olympic water polo player athlete, we put a baseball in his hand and have them floating in water and have them throw that baseball as hard as you can?
Joey Myers 17:13
What do you think that speed is going to be? It’s going to be a lot faster than 60 miles an hour, I can tell you. Is it going to be, instead of 60, is he going to throw at 70? Is he going to throw 80 miles an hour? Let’s be conservative and just say 70 miles an hour.
Joey Myers 17:27
You’re telling me in water, the fastest water polo thrower throws a baseball 70 miles an hour, while on land, the fastest pitcher throws 100 miles an hour. Easy numbers, 70% we can say, maybe conclude, that without ground reaction forces, that 70% of that velocity is coming from the pelvis, spine, and shoulder combination.
Joey Myers 17:56
Without ground reaction forces, we are very minimal when we’re in the pool. I say the spinal engines is responsible for about 70 to 80% of the power equation, and the lower half the legs and ground reaction forces are responsible for the other 20 to 30%. That’s what I say. Keep that in mind as we talk through this baseball trainers near me webinar and the spinal engine system.
Betts, Arenado, & Trout. Showing ‘dem numbers!
Joey Myers 18:20
Do you recognize some of these hitters? Some of them have changed unis, or one of them at least, Mookie Betts, he’s on the Dodgers now. Nolan Arenado is in the middle, Mike Trout.
Joey Myers 18:29
Notice the pinstripe on the side of their leg and how it connects into the belt. Notice the positioning of where that is. Pelvis is already starting to open; all these hitters are at toe touch or pretty close to toe touch. Notice the numbers on their back. Now the righties, because the camera in the major leagues isn’t straight on center-field because you get to see the pitcher and the hitter, it’s slightly off center towards left.
Joey Myers 18:56
Your righties, you’re going to see probably more numbers than you would see lefties doing the same degree of rotation. This started off as showing numbers, it’s what we called it, and we will talk in a little bit how we’ve refined it to creating neck pressure but notice these in this baseball trainers near me webinar.
Joey Myers 19:12
Swing experiments results with the big three. The first of the big three is showing numbers. When I used a Zepp back in the day, now Zepp is turned in blast motions taken over and swing tracker. When I did about two- three experiments showing numbers, we found that out of 100 swings not showing numbers and 100 swing showing numbers, that bat speed was increased on average by four to six miles an hour, that’s bat speed.
Joey Myers 19:40
Bat speed is the close cousin to the ball exit speed. They are not the same, but they’re like first cousins. Without bat speed, ball exit speed probably is not going to be there. We got to be able to swing the bat somewhat hard to get the ball coming off the bat as fast. There are three others…
To be continued in Part-2 to this baseball trainers near me webinar…
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https://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/baseball-trainers-near-me-2-e1609830540324.png281500Joey Myershttps://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/hitting-performance-labs_c90c0362088ef1d3d528f3078f4f8ac1-300x75.pngJoey Myers2022-04-04 09:00:262023-08-18 21:39:491 On 1 & Group Hitting Lessons For Baseball And Softball Fresno-Clovis, CA | Best Private Online Batting Instruction & Analysis 2022 | Training For Youth And Adult [VIDEO]
How To Apply The “Precision” Golfing Principles To Baseball Hitting Fundamentals
In this baseball hitting fundamentals gold interview with Golf Pro Instructor Lee Comeaux, we go over:
“You’re going to ruin low backs if you teach that!”
“Golf is about accuracy. If you ain’t accurate, you’re not gonna play a good score”…
“All of a sudden, I realized, turn your rib cage, and then boom…”
“You got to understand how the fascia and these trains all play because there’s layers upon layers in the body”…
Hitting for targets and areas on the barrel, and…
How to apply the “precision” golfing principle to hitting.
CLICK HERE to download the baseball hitting fundamentals video transcription pdf. The following is the transcription in its entirety. And by the way, this is one of 24 expert interview in our brand NEW baseball hitting fundamentals book on Amazon: Swing Smarter … Enjoy!
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"Swing Smarter: Science Based Hitting Training Built To Understand How, Why, & Reasoning Behind It"
Hello and welcome to the Swing Smarter Monthly Newsletter. This is your host Joey Myers from Hitting Performance Lab dot com and with me today is a good friend of mine and I didn’t really get to say his last name correctly. It threw me for a loop until David Shanklin, mutual friend of ours, it’s Comeaux, right? The last name?
Lee Comeaux 00:18
Yes, Comeaux.
Joey Myers 00:19
So, Lee Comeaux. For those of you who’ve read catapult loading system, which became an Amazon bestseller in the baseball hitting fundamentals niche in 2018, you will know Lee because Lee was in the book. He’s had a mentorship in my program namely the hollow position, we call that and the finger pressure. I was working on finger pressure, but I was a little bit off base and he really helped with that. So, welcome first, Lee, to the show.
Lee Comeaux 00:47
Thanks for having me. I hadn’t talked to you in a while.
Joey Myers 00:51
It’s been a while. It’s fitting that it’s right before Christmas.
Lee Comeaux 00:55
It is.
Joey Myers 00:57
First question, Lee. When we first met, you were really disgruntled with my system, you said “hey, you know you’re going to be hurting lower backs” and all this kind of stuff. I loved it and I’m one of those guys that if you can show me a better way, and then I’m all ears, and I was with you. Lee, for those of you who don’t know who he is, he is in the golfing world.
Joey Myers 01:20
He works with golfers internationally, he works with golfers of all time from professional, amateur, the whole thing. It’s interesting to get his perspective from the golfing world. Tell me just initially when you first came in and were like, you know what, this is really going to ruin backs and things like that. What brought you to that baseball hitting fundamentals decision? That observation?
Baseball Hitting Fundamentals: “You’re going to ruin low backs if you teach that!”
Lee Comeaux 01:40
Let me tell you the story how I got to anatomy trains, fascia, and things like that. I quit golf about 2000, every single move hurting and I had a lot of questions from my teachers. One of them was I tend to hit it with forehand a lot, right hand. Most instructors were usually lead arm, left arm. They changed me up, I just got tired of hurting, got tired of playing bad, I quit.
Lee Comeaux 02:07
My daughter, one night, let’s go the range, we go the range. I hadn’t hit balls in months or years even, I’m doing my thing, the next day she comes back, she said, “Dad, where’s the power come from?” Well, I really didn’t know.
Lee Comeaux 02:20
Long story short, kind of started over, I was like I’m gonna do it my way this time. I’m not going to go to instructor, I hadn’t played three to four years. Just started hitting balls in the range, just letting my right hand hit forehand shots, and before I looked up, I’m 10 buckets into it. I haven’t missed a shot, I feel great.
Lee Comeaux 02:43
What are these baseball hitting fundamentals things I’m feeling in my body? I started asking questions. My wife was a massage therapist, she just came home, and it was unbelievable. I went to the range, I took it back however I wanted, swung it down however I wanted, put one right where I wanted. I was feeling these things with my body, all she said was anatomy trains.
Lee Comeaux 03:06
You might as well say it in Chinese. Anatomy trains? Off I went! I found Tom Myers, anatomy trains, started to understand the fascia of the body. It really was how when we’re just sitting there and I’ll take my daughter, a daughter had a select career from 8u, all the way to 18u, .697 batting average. We kept it simple, the object was just to hit a ball. That’s it, not hit hard and in fact, when we would go to practice, talking about squeezing the last three. What I found was anatomy trains, I understood the arm lines, functional lines.
Lee Comeaux 03:48
I understood why when I grabbed a golf club, a bat, anything, for the last three, my hand is clenched. How my hand pivoted, how when we do simple tasks, paying attention to what your hand is doing, your grip. Not what does it look like, not in golf, is the beast point somewhere because all those things lead to how, it will lead to poor kinetics, it’ll lead to your brain and body being confused.
Lee Comeaux 04:22
The thing that blew me away was my back didn’t hurt, but also realize that first night how engaged my knees were, which you know and what you know now. Look how the functional lines attached in the knees, come up here and attach to the upper arm. We’re in golf, everybody’s teaching connection where when you learn that your functional lines attach on three sides of the humerus and they’ll connect about right here on the front, back and sides. It all starts making sense.
“Golf is about accuracy. If you ain’t accurate, you’re not gonna play a good score”
Lee Comeaux 04:51
Why my knees got involved was because it made my lumbar spine move around and time and space. Instead of me chunking hips around, and I’m never was a hip chunker, I was never one of those who bought into that theory. Golf is about accuracy. You had to be accurate, but powerful would be nice. If you ain’t accurate, you’re not gonna play a good score.
Lee Comeaux 05:15
When I played in college and professionally, accuracy was where it’s at. All of a sudden, I went from being sore and hurting to not hurting anymore because I was letting my body do things. It was wanting to do, not what that guy saw, what he saw, what he thought, I’m having results. I think of a shot and hit it, boom, there was.
Lee Comeaux 05:38
I think I’m gonna leave right there, in Texas we have crawfish holes, I’m going to hit it by a crawfish hole, about four feet, and have it stop right there and I’m like, whoa, never in my golf life that happened. Here I am at, I’m 52 now, this happened. Six, fourteen, thirty-eight and found anatomy trains, and was just started answering all these baseball hitting fundamentals questions of why things work. It also answered why things weren’t working in that, you can focus on things that are irrelevant and that really affects the way all this tissue operates.
Lee Comeaux 06:16
I’ve never heard in baseball, or golf. You never hear them talking about thoracic movement until you came along. It was always turning your shoulders, that’s great. They sit on top your thoracic that pivots, unbelievably, because that spiral line, but if you’re worried about throwing these joints around a rib cage, you’re going to struggle, you’re gonna fight it.
“All of a sudden, I realized, turn your rib cage, and then boom…”
Lee Comeaux 06:40
All of a sudden, I realized, turn your rib cage, and then boom, I just started looking. At 52 years old, I hit it further than I’ve ever hit in my life. Understand what thoracic pivot is, versus, I would never tell a student, turn your shoulders, turn your thoracic, because that’s what’s turning. As simple as that sounds, it is just it’s huge.
Lee Comeaux 07:01
Again, my daughter 697… .692 career, batting average. She went three years, she swung it for three years, whenever she pulled the trigger on the back move, she made contact, she averaged .954 percentile. When she swung the bat in a four-year period, she made contact, she may have found it, she might have popped louder, it didn’t matter.
Lee Comeaux 07:29
What we trained was, when this move, its job was to touch that ball. Confidence will teach you how to touch it harder and better, if that’s what you want, but what she found was you’re just going to want to hit it, you’re going to want to place it where they aren’t like Ichiro said. Same thing with her, it never hurt, never.
Lee Comeaux 07:37
It wasn’t until later in her career, in her college, D-1 career where they change things up, she started having back issues, but I knew that was going to happen because she knew that she had to do what they said. She also knew what they didn’t know, but we knew how to fix it. Thank God, through anatomy trains and things like that, you know how to fix it. I may want to leave it alone but that’s kind of the baseball hitting fundamentals backstory of how I got to that. Then, I saw you.
Lee Comeaux 08:18
I learned this in golf, come out in ’06-’07, talking about anatomy trains and fascia and pushing versus pulling and I was on a site called The Secret is in the Dirt, that Steve Elkington had. I look up one night and you look at all the hits on this website and if there were a million hits, 750,000 were my little thread.
Lee Comeaux 08:40
I’m some guy in Beaumont, just decided to pay attention to what was going on, to define some parameters or what I call good, listen to what my body was telling me, and then ask some questions, and my wife’s genius was anatomy trains. I look back and I’m glad that’s all she said, because she would have said anatomy trains and went into it real deep, I probably would have just walked away with “Yeah, I don’t care about all that”.
Lee Comeaux 09:07
Because it forced me for the first time ever, to research something I knew nothing about and you’re… I tell people this all the time, God gave you a gift called arm lines. It makes life so easy for human, for about four- or five-point human being. That’s why you can just throw, that’s why you can just swing and hit it. It’s when we get into the baseball hitting fundamentals of what does it do from the bottom of the feet.
Lee Comeaux 09:31
You’re not going to bat .692 in a 10-year span, you’re not going to not miss one or three years because you’re worried about you forced your motor cortex to worry about things that are irrelevant, none of that has anything to do with do this, other than the limbs are attached to it. That’s it. That’s why God gave you this and these, that’s it.
Lee Comeaux 09:53
You had no pelvis and hips and certainly Gracovetsky opens your eyes in his video is about the guy with no legs and how he was is able to propel himself, and when you get into the spinal engine, it’s like I tell people, especially in golf, the spine is such a focused-on thing. It’s probably focused on to a detriment, where it’s a curve, it’s an S, you’re going to slump some days, you’re going to be straight some days.
Lee Comeaux 10:23
Tiger showed us and a lot of these strike back golfers for sure. You look at the spinal injuries on tour, and it’s all from you not letting your spine. You got Nicklaus, who would always say, global flex. These are terms that weren’t around in 2006. Global flexion, local flexion, Hogan was a local flexing guy, it just wanted his arms around his waist, his hand, his hand path was around his pelvis. Make sense, so, this is where I was at years before where you got, and other people, and you’re seeing that more and more in sports.
Baseball Hitting Fundamentals: “You got to understand how the fascia and these trains all play because there’s layers upon layers in the body”
Lee Comeaux 10:59
You got to understand how the fascia and these trains all play because there’s layers upon layers in the body. While somebody listening to this may get a little bit as a parent, get nervous, but if you just leave it to pros and leave it to grip pressures, and you leave it to what’s my objective, all those other things do their job. Their job in hitting is to hit, you put this on the ball and how I taught her to do it because it tells me just like your brain tells you how to train anyone, mainly your kid.
Lee Comeaux 11:17
What we used to do was that here’s the deal, you’re going to get 100 looks tonight, you make 100 swings, wherever daddy throws it, you have to go put this bat on the ball. The minute you miss, we start over. If I threw it, if she had to jump and hit it, she had to jump and hit it, if she had to step over and hit it, I got her brain numb wrapped around what is the strike? I told her that ump you’re facing and how many times have we seen this?
Lee Comeaux 11:42
You got an ump calling strikes, here or at the ankles. We practiced in such a way that when the bat moved there was going to be a strike, whether you hit it or didn’t, you just initiated a strike. We just saw thousands upon thousands of not misses, and it got to where, but it became a game in the batting cage, I toss it or throw it harder, I thought it didn’t matter how I throw it behind my back. Her goal was no matter how it came at her, she was so focused on hitting it, so I throw it, top right corner, top left corner of the cage that’s got to where we would have to do that to kind of make it somewhat entertaining because she wasn’t missing.
Lee Comeaux 12:42
She was hitting it as hard as she wants then we got into it, barely hit it and hit, just to where it barely comes over my head, the batting cages and that what taught her all the anatomy trains in her body. It taught her control. How? What if you want to just bloop it up? What if you have one of those nights, you’re not feeling it and maybe all you need to do is get it out the outfield, and third base comes in and you win, I can’t tell you how many games she won like that.
Lee Comeaux 13:12
We did it and she did it successfully over and she got to where she could drop it into buckets, and we did it over and over. We had fun with it because the game was to hit just like the game is to throw the game has to catch. When that ends, she never hurt, that was pushing. I say pushing was the key to that, whenever we push, it’s very hard to hurt your back, whenever we pull, it’s doing what we have most of our injuries as a human.
Joey Myers 13:42
A couple things, and I love just listening to you talk and it goes into different baseball hitting fundamentals rabbit holes, you covered a lot of different things. Thing number one is swinging without pain. I just had last week, Monday, Tuesday, I had a gentleman come up from Ojai, California, which is down LA area and he came up 71 years old.
Joey Myers 14:07
He had contacted me over DM on Facebook and at first, I thought it was a hoax, and then he was legit. He’s like, “hey, what date? Tell me where to go? Give me the address.” He comes, 71 years old, we started swinging. He read my book, that was the thing, so he read my book, and then he’s like, “I love it, it makes sense”. He’s an attorney, international attorney.
Joey Myers 14:26
It made sense to him, a lot of the language he has read every book out there and a lot of people don’t know how to explain it. He comes we work on basically we call it neck pressure now. It’s the idea that the C and the T are creating tension, right that pressure. We took him from 51 miles an hour ball and speed off the tee, to 60 miles an hour within that first hour session.
Joey Myers 14:49
The one baseball hitting fundamentals thing when we talked about safety in the swing, was he took it he took a swing and he’s like, “oh my back” and I was like is it on the outside part of your back? Like your oblique, your external oblique? He said no, it’s the center and so I said, let’s do this, let’s do hollow.
Joey Myers 15:05
We call it the pinch, we take the belly button and the belt buckle, and we pinch those two points together, which is putting that flexion into the lower back and having swing and zero pain, no more pain. That’s number one, so maybe we could talk on that a little bit, but the other thing that you mentioned that I really love, that you gave me a huge idea back in the day, was you talked about Bustos, where she did a video where she had her bat, actually it was three tapes.
Lee Comeaux 15:31
It was somewhere blue, she had different videos, but the thing was pink. The one in her hitting where she hits the girl.
Joey Myers 15:40
Yes the target, so she had to hit, her girlfriend that was hitting with her was standing out, I think she was off the tee, she was standing out different places in the cage, and she’d have to not only hit the spot on the bat where she had taped there and I’ve done it in an ‘S’, I think maybe you had an answer something where there was like, maybe a half an inch, the actual tape itself, right?
Joey Myers 16:02
She hit it on one part of the tape, it could be this. the number one, number two or number three, and she had to hit their target that was out there, which was her buddy that she ended up hitting on her right back butt cheek and made it really hurt. But this idea that you talk about, that you don’t hear anybody talk about this, is hitting on a certain part of the barrel and hit a target, and you were saying with Goose is, it’s either hit it up there, hit it over there, it’s hit it in different spots, but also hit the part of the barrel. Those are two baseball hitting fundamentals things, both the safety of the swing that I’ve really learned from you and then the idea of changing targets and changing spots on the barrel.
Hitting for targets and areas on the barrel
Lee Comeaux 16:44
Correct. This is a manmade bat and a bat I’ve always preferred because of the way it’s made, and it has a lot of inertial value in it, but you take the measurements of the tool you’re using, you measure three quarters the length from the in you’re holding in this sweet spot right there. It’s a mathematical…it’s called center percussions. Now, where I started with her was, as I would put that, I made her start at the ball and go, with no wind up.
Lee Comeaux 17:24
For the people listening, you go to McKenzie Comeaux, M-A-C-K-E-N-Z-I-E Comeaux, C-O-M-E-A-U-X, she has a YouTube, 77 videos. There’s some of her hitting, but the main thing was, we start from here, we’re not ready to play, the minute we go, this thing lists tension, this about integrity of tension we need, we go, then it’s allowed. The same thing is when this lifts, that area lifts we go, and if I tell you, you’re about right here, and I tell you go left, you bet you got to be able to control this and go there.
Lee Comeaux 18:00
What it told her was, because when you’re in a game, you see the hole and you see the guy look at the pros, they’ll submit, the play offset…If you taught someone how to hit like that, and they shifted on you, and they left field wide open, you own them. Now, we got into what side of the ball to hit it, the left field wasn’t turned fast to hit a left field hit the outside quadrant, and that was just the deflection angle. That’s kind of where we went with it.
Lee Comeaux 18:34
It was a true game changer, and your anatomy trains. What I tell people is human bodies learn how much effort to put in something. It can go all out; McKenzie could lay a bunt this far off the plate every time. That’s controlling, that’s catching the ball with the bat, you want to catch it and drop, just take the inertia in and drop it.
Lee Comeaux 19:06
It’s actually fun when you do it, when you take the time to learn to do it, it’s just like golf. How to hit a fat chip on a fast green downhill because that’s the only shot you got. I see amateurs trying to spin it and they got no chip, no matter how much you spent, you got no chip, you should have fatted it, get it barely rolling, let the ground do the rest.
Lee Comeaux 19:27
That was kind of how we treated and she’s taking up golf so she’s really getting my analogies now because she’s gotten into golf at 19 but that’s anatomy trains, that’s the animal in the forest stalking that’s gotta turn it on. That’s human, humans got the same thing. We have been so joint focus for 200 years, structural focused. It’s just like tell people there’s a lining around the button, this is simple, there’s a lining sack around the bone that allows this arm. This looks goofy, but there are no biomechanical descriptions for that. They don’t know how that happens, if you ask somebody in biomechanics, what makes that go in those directions? They don’t know. Well, it’s that tissue, its fascia, it’s your ability to just think it and do it. That’s the beauty of it.
Joey Myers 20:21
What I love about what you bring to this, from the golf world, is precision, right? We’re talking about an industry, as you know, this baseball hitting fundamentals industry, baseball softball was more so baseball, but softball too, is this idea of hit the back, top third part of the cage, launch angles long, hit it hard, launch angles, launching and launching. It’s this push for aggressive swings all the time, where I think is lacking is the precision side and that’s where you come in.
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How to apply the “precision” golfing principle to hitting
Lee Comeaux 20:49
Here’s a challenge for everybody listening and follows you. I used to tell McKenzie, how easy can we swing at it? What you come to realize is the moment of contact between the two, when this bat touches the ball, like in golf, I told her, the moment I felt the ball touch the face, I could accelerate. That was something I always had and it’s just for that little bitty golf ball distance, same thing with a softball or baseball, but how easy can we go and still get this out the park? What was the bottom limit? What was the top limit?
Lee Comeaux 21:00
She learned some things like I’ve shared with you 45-degree launch angles, you can go very very slow, but if you have a 45 degree launch angle, that’s optimal projectile distance. All of a sudden, I don’t only remember bat speed, but just say, she could probably at about 35 miles an hour at the right launch angle, get it out the park, which isn’t a whole lot of bat speed, but you can’t quit on the hit, you got to drive, you got to create the inertia to get the ball out.
Lee Comeaux 22:02
She started understanding the differences. We’ve all hit a hard ball versus kind of hit a ball, it’s fast and quick, and it just had nothing. You see a lot of kids that make this contact the ball just kind of fizzes off of there. You put them on video, it looks like they just nailed the center of it, but then what happens is they kind of let go the grip pressure, they let go… they think it’s over with because they practice so hard to quit it at impact.
Lee Comeaux 22:04
We practice, that’s why I started impact through impact through, punch it, it’s what you do. Once you make contact, all the damage is done by keeping going catapult system, the catapult has got to keep, the catapult doesn’t quit. That thing is the slings or the ball way past the mechanical point. The cable still has it, once it all the way stretches forward, it launches it, it doesn’t let go when it passes the two prongs.
Lee Comeaux 22:59
It’s all about getting all the energy out and inertia out, that’s kind of how the anatomy trains, that’s how you save your back. It’s like I tell people, I hear it all the time, turn your hips, all your pelvis is doing is taking your lumbar spine. This is the back of my lumbar spine where your pelvis moves, and it just rotate. It’s what gives your lumbar spine move 45 degrees, because it only has one degree of motion.
Lee Comeaux 23:28
If I want my lumbar spine to look that way, my pelvis will move that way. It has nothing to do with power, it has everything to do with safe lumbar movement to have a lot of what looks like motion because the more motion you have, the better you are. You have to open up areas of joints and able to move through the joint, where golf dynamic x, where we’re trying to hold our pelvis still. Can I do that? Sure. That’s really on the short shot.
Lee Comeaux 24:02
I’m just trying to get it through the outfield… I tell people, everything we do is a catapult system, optimum human performance is a catapult system. No matter, we’re fishing, if we’re tennis’ing, whatever we’re doing, we’re trying to move an object with a stick or something outside of us. Here’s a term I’ll never hear but what I call it the right-angle feet.
Lee Comeaux 24:32
Right foot like this, left foot is going to be like that and it can be anywhere. Golf is no different. When I’m playing good golf, my right foot square, my left foot, flair it out. Here’s why, the minute you do this, the minute your footsteps. If you hit against a spine with feet like this and pelvis like this and hips like this, all the tension from all these diagonals changing, your ipsilateral is all going right to your lumbar.
Lee Comeaux 25:00
For all of you listening and go home tonight, open this foot up, and then turn. You take all the pressure off one side of your back, bye bye back pressure. If I go bye bye back pressure, guess what I have a spinal engine telling me how much do you want? How much can I give you? Your only limit?
Lee Comeaux 25:21
I’m asked, where does the power come from? I’ll give you a minute to say it or think it. The answer is simple, it’s your glands, your adrenals. All these glands you have a release this energy, that’s the days when I as a golfer or me as any athlete or anything, no matter what I’m doing, I have optimum power management and optimum power results for the given baseball hitting fundamentals situation.
Lee Comeaux 25:56
You can work out until the cows come home, but if those things are not moved, fluid moving and again, that’s why we curve the spine. The things I learned, when the spine curves, we hit certain buttons that help certain glands activate for us to be our best us. Our job is to learn how to, “I want to hit it out the park, but I really need to get this just over the second baseman or just out to the infield, because I need to score the guy on third, so we win the game”,
Lee Comeaux 26:24
I take the chance of hitting out of the park striking out, and that’s what my daughter got good at sending it on the ground, we practice trying to hit it and skip it off the earth as hard as possible. You know how many times she skipped it over second baseman head because she just practice beating up or over the pitcher’s head.
Lee Comeaux 26:44
You run out of things to do when all you’re worried about is making contact, we learn all these ways to control the contact to get a result, to get on base, to either score someone. We learned, we practice how to fly out to the right and left field to score somebody on third hit a deep, everybody thought, Oh, she flew out, but to her, I score the guy on third, or the lady on third. That was her job.
Lee Comeaux 27:08
That’s where you go with this once you learn, once you’re pain free, and once you can focus. You’re not worrying about these things you’re not worried about; I sit down for the next day. We never iced down. We got to have fun. We got to have a career that’s legendary around here.
Joey Myers 27:31
Yes, it was unbelievable. We talked about this idea of people, they are used to hitting .300, .400. They’re not used to hitting .600, .700, .800, right and one thing that came to mind when you’re talking about the lower back taking pressure off by taking that front foot and opening it up a little bit, is think about when at a bar, you have that barstool, you have the barstool, and then you have the little bar at the bottom for the foot. That was meant so that when you got your arms up on the bar, and these guys been there for hours drinking, talking, singing, and you’re standing for lengths of time with your feet like this, that little bar at the bottom there is for you to pick your foot up, put it down, and most of the time, it’s in that position.
Joey Myers 28:14
Another baseball hitting fundamentals scenario is you’re lying on the couch, watching TV, where you’re laying back, not laying, laying kind of prop down. You have both legs straight out this way, what you do when you start to feel your back getting tight, is you’ll bend the knee, and you’ll shift out this way and one side, you’ll bend the knee and go out the other way to take the valgus knee.
How to take pressure off the low back by flaring front toe out
Lee Comeaux 28:35
It’s because the bottom of your feet, now you get in the deep backline which starts right here on the forehead runs on top of your head, the bottom your feet. This is where people go, I get where people in golf were doing the spine and doing alignment squared because it’s based off of the deep backline.
Lee Comeaux 28:52
These are all things that God gave us as a gift to perform best but also to fix ourselves when we do ache and we do have pain. It’s just like my daughter came to me one day, I don’t know how long into this and she goes “Your femur head”. I’m like, “What do you mean your femur head?” I told her, your femur head is the reason your front foot is open, you got your femur head sitting here and you’re sitting here just like that, the pelvis and also one day you’re going to feel the same kind of slide move.
Lee Comeaux 29:24
What’s happening is people throwing their pelvis and hips are kind of all these femurs are getting. Everything’s getting all torn up. That’s when Nicklaus repaired his hip, that’s where people have bad hip injuries, or their hips get worn out because they’re trying to spin them and they’re getting all mangled and all sudden one day you feel it slide.
Lee Comeaux 29:43
I’m on the range one day, I felt mine, it’s a bulge, I get up pivoted around this joint, but that foot being that way, leave the pressure to where this thing can move and the ligaments around your femur head are probably the strongest you got, things just start. She went, I get it. I said, you get it now. And she’s like, yeah.
Lee Comeaux 30:08
Again, it’s because she was actually daydreaming once, she was at batting practice. She got bored of what to think about. She still felt it, there you have it. She was hurting a little bit. She had been at that point, I think some of the college coaches were trying to get her to do the hang back, throw it all out the last second. Whatever that means.
Joey Myers 30:33
Crazy.
Lee Comeaux 30:34
It’s like reverse catapult hit the brakes, work your ass off to go nowhere to get it. You went from barely swinging and hitting over the fence, to now you got to give it, you got to go work out just to get to the fence.
Joey Myers 30:50
It’s baseball hitting fundamentals with the emergency brake on.
Lee Comeaux 30:52
Very well put, it’s hitting in park. I like that.
Joey Myers 30:58
I know we can we can talk all day and I would love to listen to you all day, but I want to be respectful of your time. I got a hard stop here in a couple minutes, but I wanted to ask you, if there’s anywhere that you want people to go to find out a little bit more information on you, maybe there’s some people that will see this that are golfers that maybe want to look.
Lee Comeaux 31:16
If you can google me “Lee Comeaux golf” and I’ve got a basic little video on YouTube, now called “Making the Divot”. For golf, you got to keep the symbol just aim your divot, because it’s an aiming sport for what you do.
Lee Comeaux 31:35
The good thing is you don’t have to be an aimer, you can start keeping the lines and to be a .600 plus hitter, you start focusing on exact spots, and the Ichiros of the world, that’s what they did. That’s why they had the hits they had, and that’s who they were, and that’s the same people that come here.
Lee Comeaux 31:53
That’s what they all want to be. We all think we want to be the Barry Bonds with the homerun record, we really want to be an Ichiro with a long career. How many pitchers do you think, just when he came up, they’re like, I got no clue how to get about this guy? That’s what you want to be.
Joey Myers 32:12
The idea of them striking Ichiro out or even getting them out, didn’t even enter their mind, it was to minimize the damage or to get him to go someplace that they didn’t want him to go.
Lee Comeaux 32:25
Ichiro was a pure fascia. He said it a lot. You have to have soft muscle and you get that once you realize what soft muscle is, and when the fascia melts, and all this stuff is working in your favor, and you see it on high speed all the time, you will see the tissue in the arm just flapping around.
Lee Comeaux 32:45
That’s us in our best, that is always a high-end athlete you see it in and that’s why he had a cannon like he had. That’s why the guy could run this fast, this dude performed at a high-level catching, throwing and hitting. If you look at the complete package, and why because the guy obeyed his anatomy trains, he kept these squeezed.
Lee Comeaux 33:09
It’s the same thing I feed to my daughter, when you squeeze these three, the same thing happens to your feet and we become a supple leopard, like a lot of people talk about in… the older gentleman came to you and he learned it’s about, there’s so many blocks we put in our way because the way we just stand there really, and I like what you’re talking about with the head.
Joey Myers 33:35
Neck pressure.
Lee Comeaux 33:37
Golf is one where you see it in an opposite where they’re looking, a lot of people turn their head this way, so they go in a lot. What that is, is because their thoracic is trying to make the biggest motion possible and all the tissue connects around the head. If I turn this it allows me more, it allows me to turn my thoracic. That’s all it is.
Lee Comeaux 33:57
Unfortunately, it gets very confusing if you want to go this way. I’m more of a guy this way because I know I’m playing that’s where I’m going, I understand all this and I want a compact golf swing, so I turn mine this way and keeps it. It’s no different than baseball.
Joey Myers 34:14
Absolutely.
Lee Comeaux 34:17
I appreciate your time, I appreciate it.
Joey Myers 34:21
I love listening to you talk baseball hitting fundamentals, and I always learn something new. Tell Mackenzie AKA Goose, tell her we missed her and Merry Christmas to you guys out there in Texas and think about us in California because we need all the help we can get with our Governor.
Lee Comeaux 34:35
Big fan. I wish you the best of 2021, keep doing what you’re doing, I told you this a long time ago, your days are coming where you’re going to be the guy, they’re all going to be chasing you. Have a great Christmas, my friend.
Joey Myers 34:49
Thanks, brother. Keep up the good work yourself.
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The following is the continued transcript to the perfect baseball swing webinar part-2… (about 18-minutes reading time)
‘Showing Numbers’ and ‘Neck Pressure’
00:07
Do you recognize some of these hitters? Some of them have changed unis or one of them at least. Mookie Betts, he’s on the Dodgers now, Nolan Arenado is in the middle, Mike Trout.
00:16
Notice the pinstripe on the side of their leg and how it connects into the belt. Notice the positioning of where that is, pelvis is already starting to open. All these hitters are at toe touch or close to toe touch. Notice the numbers on their back.
00:33
Now the righties, because the camera in the major leagues isn’t straight on center-field because you have to see the pitcher and the hitter, it’s slightly off centered towards left.
00:43
Your righties, you’re going to see probably more numbers than you would see lefties doing the same degree of rotation. This started off as showing numbers, it’s what we called it. We’ll talk in a little bit how we’ve refined it to creating neck pressure. but notice these.
00:57
Perfect baseball swing webinar experiment results of the big three. The first of the Big Three is showing numbers. When I used a Zepp back in the day, now Zepp is turned in, BlastMotion taken over and SwingTracker.
01:05
When I did about two, three experiments showing numbers, we found that out of 100 swings, not showing numbers and 100 swing showing numbers that that speed was increased on average by four to six miles an hour. That’s bat speed.
01:27
Bat speed is the close cousin to ball exit speed, they are not the same, but they’re like first cousins. Without bat speed, ball exit speed probably is not going to be there, we got to be able to swing the bat somewhat hard to get the ball coming off the bat as fast.
01:46
Here are three others, you can probably notice these ones again, jerseys might have changed. JD Martinez, on the left, you have Aaron Judge in the middle, and you have Altuve on the right.
01:57
I know I’m as big against the whole cheating thing, as probably many of you are with Houston, the Astros back in 2019. But Altuve, being 5’6, 5’7, he does a lot of these mechanical things correctly. Regardless of whether you knew the pitchers coming or not, he still got to be able to hit it, as far as he does, which I think that year up, you hit 30 plus… 35, even with the playoffs in the World Series, I think he got close to 40 home runs that year.
02:32
Even though you know it’s coming, the guy is 5’6, he’s not Judge who is 6’8. You can’t just write the guy off for “Oh, he’s gifted”. There’s a lot of things that he’s doing in his swing that are very effective when it comes to this perfect baseball swing webinar – spinal engine mechanics. That was showing numbers.
‘Hiding Hands’ from the Pitcher
02:51
The second part, it was the third part, we’re going to get to the second part of the big three and the second one of the big three, but the other one is we call hiding the hands from the pitcher.
03:01
A lot of times what you will see is at the start of the swing, you’ll see the hitter’s hands, and then by toe touch as you can see, all three of these hitters are pretty much a toe touch or right at toe touch. You’re not seeing their hands, they’re hiding them.
03:15
You can see Judge, they’re kind of behind his head over here, Altuve is the same, JD Martinez behind his head, but from where they start with their hands, where their hands are at. Before the pitcher starts or gets in the wind up to when they’re at landing, there’s this move the hands to go back, and it’s not towards the catcher, it’s actually back at an angle behind the hitters heel or over the hitters back heel, that’s where the hands need to go.
03:43
We see this idea of hiding the hands, now in the swing experiments with that, we found between a one to three mile an hour average increase in bat speed with hiding the hands versus not hiding the hands.
The second one we’ll talk about here in a second, it’s called downhill shoulder angle, but I wanted to go into the three basic principles of locomotion. There were three books that ruin my life when it comes to hitting in a good way.
04:13
The first one I mentioned was Thomas Myers book Anatomy Trains. The second one was called Dynamic Body by Dr. Erik Dalton, D-A-L-T-O-N. It was a collaboration of different authors that were all along the same lines of springy fascia, Spinal Engine and locomotion, that kind of stuff.
04:30
In that book, Dynamic Body, I found Dr. Serge Gracovetsky’s book The Spinal Engine. This is out of the spinal engine, the little thing on the right, which he’s talking about a pitcher and talking about side bending, which is downhill shoulder angle, and he talks about axial rotation, which basically means shoulders moving opposite of the pelvis.
04:30
When we walk as humans. our left leg comes forward when our right arm comes forward and the opposite happens. Left arm comes forward our right leg comes forward. That is axial rotation, your shoulders turn opposite your pelvis, and it’s like this gear shift that just does this when we walk, our shoulders and our pelvis and they move opposite each other, almost like winding it up, unwinding, winding, unwinding.
05:15
The axial rotation, shoulder, pelvis separation, the side bend, or downhill shoulders, and then the third move of the spine is flexion extension. If you go into an arch, you’re extending your spine, you’re hyper extending your spine, if you just stand in neutral, your lower back has a slight curve to it, or at least it should, if it does not, then we’ve had surgery to correct something we put pins in or something, or maybe we’ve got a lower back that’s compromised, but we should have a slight curve in the lower back.
05:46
Dr. Serge Gracovetsky calls it “lordosis”. Just standing there in neutral, with that curve in your lower back, you already have extension in your back, it’s not hyper-extension, it’s just extension.
06:00
Flexion would be if you were doing a crunch, and you were to go the opposite direction and you flex your spine. You think about whales, they go this way with their tail, right? That’s flexion extension of the spine, sharks go side bend, you see this right here, they do a little bit of both, but that’s the good example of side bending.
06:17
We use all three of those when we walk. We already have lordosis or that little bend in the lower back. We drop our shoulder into a side bend, and that helps us to initiate the axial rotation where right arm comes forward as the left leg comes forward.
06:31
The story that really got me with this was Dr. Serge had a patient, you see this gentleman on the left, he was born without any arms or legs. He walked on what’s called the ischium the bottom of the pelvis, and you can see him here in this perfect baseball swing webinar.
06:50
What he did was he hooked up electrodes, not to shock him but to measure his muscle activation and his ligament activation. He said if you watch and you can go on YouTube, and you can put in Dr. Serge Gracovetsky, try and spell it the best you can.
07:07
It’s kind of a goofy name, spinal engine, and he’s got a video on there that’s like an hour long, and you can watch I think it’s around the four-minute mark or three-and-a-half-minute mark, his show has a video of this gentleman locomoting.
07:21
What’s crazy, if you remember, this is from birth, this wasn’t the guy who had arms and legs until he was 18, got in a car accident or got a bad disease or virus or something where he had to be amputated, he was born this way. It was from the start.
07:36
If you covered the lower half of his pelvis to know he didn’t have legs and you watched him move, you would swear he had legs. That begs the premise locomotion is from the beginning.
07:51
As we start going from baby crawling or rocking, crawling to standing to walking, we learn how to locomote this way, this is the best way how to locomote. This gentleman really opened my eyes to wow there must be something here and where it got me to reverse engineer the swing.
Perfect Baseball Swing Webinar: Springy Fascia Secret
08:13
Discover the springy fascia secret. Springy fascia for those of you that don’t know out there, we got bones, we got muscles, but did you know, we have connective tissue? Part of that connective tissue is called fascia.
08:25
What is connective tissue? Tendons, ligaments, fascia, to cotton candy or spider web-like material that your bones and muscles float in. It gives muscles their shape if you’ve gone to the grocery store and bought a bag of tangerines in that, that fishnet type of bag, think of the tangerines as your bones, muscles, and your organs, and the bag being the fascia, so it gives muscles their shape.
08:52
Myofascia or fascia, if you’ve done myofascia release on a foam roll, you probably felt the pain especially if you do your IT band of that fascia when it gets really tight and clogged up. Cotton candy and spider web-like material, it’s made up of mostly collagen and elastin fibers, mostly collagen, but there’s elastin in there, collagen is very springy.
09:12
You’ve seen the Kardashians, how springy it is because they inject it in their face and their butt and everything else. It keeps everything nice and plump and tight. Bones and muscles float in this web, they’re composed of compression and tension forces.
09:27
You see a couple of these things you probably recognize as a kid or if you bought these for your kid, that Chinese finger trap and the geometric toys, although I don’t know about the Chinese finger traps nowadays, unless you go to some arcade and you can win tickets and get some of those things. Never thought you’d be learning about Chinese finger traps in a perfect baseball swing webinar!
09:42
The idea is compression forces a brick stacked up on top of a brick pushing down, each push against each other tension forces would be like a boom crane and you have the cable. You got the big wrecking ball at the bottom of the cable. You got the structure, the boom crane.
09:58
There’s a tension force being exerted on it by the structure of the boom crane and the wrecking ball itself. We have both of these forces, fascia that are acting within our body at all times and resembles more of this toy on the left, this kid’s toy, when you push one side of that toy down, it kind of shifts and changes it, one side opens up as you push on the other side. We got those two forces that fascia is into.
10:27
In Thomas Myers’ Anatomy Trains, we have three different systems. According to him, we have the neural which is brain spinal cord stuff, the fluid, which is your veins and your heart, and then we have the third one, and hopefully, if you got kids there, there’s no naked pictures here, but it can be a little bit unnerving.
10:47
We have a fiber system, which looks like this, they did a lot of cadaver work. This is what the fascial system looks like. It’s not just something that is magic and floats, they have done a ton of research on this, and this is your fiber system or your fascial net, it’s what Thomas Myers refers to this as.
Finger Flick & Wringing Towel Effect
11:05
What I want you to do is do a finger flick test. Thomas Myers came up or this is where I read this from. To show you the power of the springy fascia spinal engine system, what I want you to do, if you’re seated, I want you to take your right hand or your left hand, whatever your dominant, whatever hand is dominant, I want you to put it on your leg on the thigh of whatever side leg, I want you to take your index finger, and I want you to just pick it up by itself and try and slam it as hard as you can on your leg, do it three times, pick it up, slam it, pick it up and slam it.
11:38
That’s an example of muscle using muscle to do it. Now we’re going to use only the ligament, I want you to take your opposite hand, pull the right finger, or mine is right finger, pull your index finger back as far as you can, and let it snap against your leg, you might be able to hear it on the camera, on the computer three times.
12:01
That is an example of a 100% ligament driving that, you can probably already tell that you’re going to bet a bigger snap than you are when you’re using your finger muscles.
12:11
The last one is I want you to use a combination of both, use a combination of the elastic or collagen, the ligament tissue, you’re going to pull the finger back and as you release the finger, I want you to slam it. I found that that hurts a lot more than the other two.
12:31
What we talked about in the swing is we’re using a little bit of both, we’re using more of the ligament tissue, which makes it safe on the body, and then we’re using some of the muscle, the muscle isn’t required, but it does help.
12:45
When we talk about strength conditioning programs and that kind of stuff, that helps, but we want to make sure we get our hitters moving correctly first. A must you’re learning in this perfect baseball swing webinar.
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The other metaphor I like to use is the wringing towel effect. Imagine we got a wringing towel, like you see me in the picture, I got my bat here and to wring a towel, you got to turn one hand one way and the other hand the other way.
13:05
When we combine the springy fascia and the spinal engine, instead of two hands, like we only have two, if I had a third hand like Squidward on Sponge-Bob, I have a third hand down here facing the same direction as the one on top.
13:18
The one on top is my head and my neck, my C spine cervical. The one in the middle is my shoulder and my thoracic spine, the middle part of your spine, the 12 vertebrae, the bottom one is your pelvis and your lower lumbar, the head and your lower back, turn the same direction, they’re turning the same direction.
13:38
It’s the one in the middle, the shoulders and the thoracic spine are turning the opposite. Imagine a wringing towel, except with two hands, we’re using three like Squidward. As you can see here in this video, this is what we’re doing with the spine and we’re doing it in a safe manner.
13:54
Again, returning to our hitters here. We talked about all these guys, neck pressure, AKA showing the numbers. When it comes to the pressure, what we’re talking about is taking the head and we anchor the head in a tracking position, because when I used to teach this is just showing numbers that hitters were showing too much of their numbers, and now they weren’t able to see the ball.
14:16
We make sure that their head is the anchor and anchors in a tracking position, the shoulder, the front shoulder comes underneath the chin, possibly even past the chin as far as it can go, as far as the neck will allow the shoulder to go.
14:31
Wherever the shoulder stops, you got to stop, because then we start to pull the head off the ball. When we say neck pressure, that’s what we’re referring to. Head anchors show front shoulder comes underneath until it stops at landing.
14:47
At stride landing as you see what these hitters here, this is what they’re all doing. You can see what their head and I encourage you to go out on YouTube and go start looking for this. You’re going to see it, you’re going to see the head anchor, you’re going to see the shoulder coming underneath, that’s the first one of the big three in this perfect baseball swing webinar.
‘Downhill Shoulders’
15:03
The second one, we talked about the side bend or down shoulders. The experiment we did on this added on average when we had down shoulders versus flat shoulders added, on average four miles an hour of bat speed, and again, bat speed ball exit speed, they’re similar, not the same, but without bat speed, you’re not going to have ball exit speed.
15:23
You can see four these hitters right here, Miguel Cabrera, on the left, you can see JD Martinez in the middle, on the top Mike Trout in the middle, in the bottom and you got a new guy this last year, you probably all have seen him, he had a good year this year, Fernando Tatis Jr.
15:39
You have this slight downward shoulder angle, and I say slight. In golf, you’re going to see an extreme just because where the ball is. In baseball or softball, we can’t be quite that down because we got to be able to hit balls up in the zone.
15:52
When I say slight, I’m talking about 6 to 10 degrees down, it’s not a lot. I tell my hitters, this is 90 degrees, and then, 45 degrees, 22 and a half degrees, 12.25 degrees, it’s really small, but you can see the back shoulder is above the front shoulder slightly. You can see with Trout on the bottom, I know that picture is a little farther off.
16:15
You can see with Miggy, he’s about eight degrees, nine degrees. JD is probably around that six to eight degrees. Tatis is about six to eight degrees, and Trout is around that same.
16:27
Hiding hands, we talked about this already, so we won’t go too far into it. Hiding the hands here you can see also, we talked about being safe with the lower back.
Last but not least in this Perfect Baseball Swing Webinar: ‘Hollow Position’
16:39
What we do is we don’t like what we call Donald Duck butt or those of you that know Dr. Kelly Starrett from mobilityWOD used to be and now I can’t remember what he changed it to, but taking the pelvis acting like the pelvis is a bowl of water, and we don’t want to spill water on our front of our toes.
16:55
We don’t want to tilt our pelvis to water spilling forward, we want to tilt our pelvis or our water spilling on our heels. What you can see here, not so much with Betts, you can see Arenado you can see this belt loops are almost flat.
17:09
When you see the belt loops in more of an angle and that also depends on the hip hinge that the hitters taken as well but with Arenado you can see almost more of a flat, he’s taken the curve out of his lower back because he is spilling water on his heels.
17:23
Trout, you can see the same, he’s flattened it. Judge he might be a little bit curved. Altuve, you can see the same thing, and if I had a picture of Josh Donaldson, you would see flat when he gets at the height of his leg kick, his pelvis is flat.
17:41
If we go into a hyper extended position, what that does is that pushes the vertebrae of the lower back together. That’s not bad in itself, we see gymnast when they are swinging back and forth, they’re going from global flexion to global extension, flexion would be flexing the lower back, extension would be when they come through the bar and they’re extending into like a global arch position, that’s okay.
18:03
The problem is since we hit, we have to turn and rotate, we have to, so if you’re overarching, your lower back or your hitter’s back and then you turn, you arch turn, arch turn.
18:16
It’s not going to show up in your younger hitters, but as they get into high school, junior high, high school on up, they’re going to start experiencing back pain. What we do when we flex, when we spill water on our heels, and the term we use with our hitters is we take the belt buckle in the belly button, and we try and bring those two points together.
18:35
We hold those two points together through the turn, even into the finish because some hitters will release it into their follow through and they’ll get into that arch again, we’re still turning as we’re arching, we don’t want to do that.
18:47
If you can do the pinch, we call it the hollow pinch. If you look on YouTube and just look up hollow position, or hollow exercise, you’ll get some cool gymnastic exercises to strengthen that, but we want our hitters to maintain the short distance between the belly button and the belt buckle as we’re turning.
19:05
Now, when you do that, the opposite happens to the vertebrae when you’re arching, you give space or traction between the vertebrae, and now when you turn, you don’t have that friction you’re not bone on bone turning.
19:16
Over time, obviously it’s a lot safer, and it doesn’t take away from performance at all. The swing experiments we did on that, I think it added one mile an hour on average, it didn’t add a lot, but it makes the spine safe and when the spine is safe the brain is always about survival. It doesn’t care if you can hit a 4- or 500-foot home run or in softball, a 300-foot home run, it doesn’t care about your performance.
19:36
It cares about surviving, it cares about keeping your body safe, and if there’s an issue with your lower back or your knee, your ankle, your shoulder, it’s going to say, “You know what, Neil? I can’t let you go 100% on your swing performance, I have to cut you down about 80%”, depending on the severity of the issue, and Neil was talking about his lower back was hurting him in the golf.
To be continued in Part- to this perfect baseball swing webinar…
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…left field, right? Righties are always going to be showing their numbers more than lefties but it’s only because of the angle. If you see a lefty really showing his numbers like Robinson Cano… legit like him and Trout are probably pretty equal and how much of the numbers that they show. They say it takes the eyes off the ball, and then they call it false separation.
Joey Myers 00:29
They say you’re moving away from contact. And I’m like, well, they obviously don’t know how the human movement like looking basic locomotion, right? Because it’s all about spirals. It’s all about rotation, pre-loading the torso before you get to landing that’s what it’s all about. That’s how you take the slack out.
Joey Myers 00:46
And the other thing is, after they started to soften to it some of these guys that were teaching the guys, some of the stuff we’ve been talking about the philosophy, the barrel moving the body. After a while then it was like okay, well I see guys doing that I see guys showing their numbers but they can’t get to an inside pit like 97 in like that.
Joey Myers 01:06
So I went online I looked up Craig Hyatt’s page, I looked up videos of all those guys we mentioned in this video so far maybe and all these guys and I was looking for 95 plus inside and was trying to see because one of my hitters actually this was about three years ago. Hitter’s been with me since he was seven, he’s now driving, he’s got his license, he’s 16 now he’s pretty clean Catapult Loading System wise, like the stuff we’re talking about today.
Joey Myers 01:31
And he was having a hard time and I was teaching that deep barrel dump, that barrel in the zone super early, no matter if the balls in middle or away didn’t matter, barrel dump. We were throwing live and I’m throwing to him and he’s like, coach, I don’t feel like I can get to that inside pitch. He goes, am I showing my showing my numbers too much. I was like, ah, I don’t think so. But let me do some research.
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I went to Craig Hyatt’s page. I was looking at 95 plus inside. I was looking at those specific hitters that do this, where there’s a lot of them doesn’t take long to find them. On pitches that were fastball that hard inside, were they, the question was, were they still showing their numbers or showing their numbers less than if they would on an outside pitch? And the answer that came up was clear as day, was that they showed their numbers the same regardless of the pitch. It’s not something like a stride…
Jaime Cevallos 02:20
Showing numbers happens before you know where the pitch is.
Joey Myers 02:23
Yeah, yeah! You can’t like, adjust on the fly, right? You’re just loading your body and getting ready. That answered my question. I was like, okay, these guys that are saying, “Well, you can’t do it, inside, 97 in.” It was like, Okay, well, what, what’s the difference then. And what I’m going to reveal, this is a talk for another video, probably would have to go into this one.
Joey Myers 02:48
The difference was when the barrel entered the zone. If the ball was in, middle, inner third. What they did was they tucked the barrel closer to their shoulder…up, up, up, up, up, up… and then what we call the belly button catcher’s glove, they release the barrel… Imagine a catcher in line with the hitter’s belly button. If they release their barrel in line with the hitter’s belly button catcher’s belly, but like they’re knocking the catcher’s glove off that’s in line with the hitter’s belly button. Right?
Joey Myers 03:19
Barry Bond swings… A lot of times, he would hit pitches that seem to be like right here, and he frickin hit him into the, into the bay. Right? And he couldn’t do that. If he’s dumping his barrel early. It’s not going to happen.
Joey Myers 03:35
So that was what I found out again, that’s a talk for probably for another video. But that was what I found out. It wasn’t about showing numbers. There was no, all the objections they were raising, well, it pulls the hitters eyes off the ball. No, not if you use the head as an anchor. You know, you can’t hit 97 in like that. Well, no, we see them hitting 97 like that, but it’s something else. You’re not, what is in the way of view accepting this is we’re talking about something totally different has nothing to do with showing numbers.
Joey Myers 04:05
You can’t disagree that they don’t show their numbers. I mean, it’s right there clear is day, and their video, they’re big on video analysis and that’s what’s silly that’s what’s clownish about the whole thing.
Jaime Cevallos 04:17
What about a hand path? You could do all what you’re asking a hitter to do but then you could have the bar arm, the arm the front arm barred or you could come in like this. What would you say about that?
What about Hand Path? What would you say about that?
Joey Myers 04:46
So you got, again, the swing is a journey. It’s not a destination, right? So especially with younger hitters, so I have my hitters right now I don’t work with many that are below unless they’re online, below age 11 or 12. Because we do small private groups and it’s harder for the young ones to work into groups with older guys. Most of my guys are high school going into college and I have a few Junior highers going into high school and stuff like that.
Joey Myers 05:11
So the younger ones that tend to have a harder time with it, especially the ones you’re talking about that are very linear with their hands, they’re going here. And I have one right now who’s actually a junior in high school. He’s made huge strides. He was barely able to, he was knocking on the door to 70 miles an hour ball exit speed when he first started with him. This was probably about a year and a half ago, and he’s now at 83. I think he’s topping out off the backspin tee which is pretty impressive because backspin tee takes off about three miles an hour from a Tanner tee.
Joey Myers 05:44
Backspin tee, that’s equivalent to Tanner tees 86. In a game, he’s hitting 86 plus a plus five in a game. He’s hitting 91 in a game pretty good for a junior, right? But the problem we’re having with him and I’m thinking we’ve been doing some movement stuff with the RotexMotion and different things like that. And that’s where his improvements have come. And that’s, by the way, 83 with wood, not bad.
Joey Myers 06:08
And the big problem we’re having with him is that when he turns, we get him into a position where he’s barred out. But like you said, what happens if they bend and they come through this way, and that’s kind of what he’s doing. What we do and this takes a little bit of time, at least from my understanding, we’re doing what’s called a wrist snap, a deep tee wrist snap.
Wrist Snap: Supinating Snap or Pronating Snap?
Joey Myers 06:31
See if I can even try this on film, you can see what that is. Basically, what a wrist snap, choke up so i don’t hit my computer, so wrist snap would be… See we get into that barred position; you can still hear me Jaime I’m not too far away. You get into that position and then as I’m coming around, so what I’m going to do is, this is the other thing that you see on video, you’ll see the major leaguers, the elite hitters, you’ll see their knob stop at a certain point.
Joey Myers 07:01
And then this snap comes around. Yeah, I’m exaggerating it here. But in high speed, it actually looks like what the guys are doing. The knob has to stop at a certain point. And then we snap it around. Like when you throw a ball, you get that snap with the hand. What do they call it up? Pronating. Not supinating. Like a lot of these guys teach, they talk about supinating this way, right? This is actually pronating this way.
Joey Myers 07:26
Again, I’m exaggerating just because we’re going in slow motion here, but the knob will stop, and then the barrel comes around and pivots. Okay, so a lot of those kids you’re talking about are bend, and then the knob keeps going. And then what they do is they end up pronating, if when we learn how to do this, and that’s what this particular kid is doing, but they do it way out in front.
Joey Myers 07:50
They’ve already hit the ball, palm up, palm down, and then their balls going away and then they’re pronating. Instead of palm up, palm down at contact and then pronating right away like that. Pronation already starts before they even hit the ball. It’s not over though it’s not that we’re not rolling. It doesn’t look like it’s rolling over yet. They’re still here. But then you get that snap at the end like Hank Aaron would do, right?
Joey Myers 08:14
How I teach it is, at first it was imagining you have a red laser here and then coming out of the knob and a green laser coming out of the end here. What you’re doing is you’re replacing red with green, red with green. And if you watch Griffey, Griffey’s a big one, you watch him do it and everything just snaps right through.
Joey Myers 08:36
We evolved the laser part, the laser, they can figure that out. But to get them to physically do it, I found it was a little tough. So then what I tell them is I want them to snap the barrel past their hands. If their hands and their barrel were in a race, I want their barrel to win. And that seems to help, and I’ll change that up, I might say snap, so for some hitters, and this comes to what you’re alluding to the problem is, they’re over rotating their upper half.
Joey Myers 09:06
At contact, they’re in this type of position. Because they’re not taking slack out of the system or they’re not snapping, they’re not making the body move. Or their lower half is over rotated. We have to under rotate, their upper or lower half. So the deep tee snap, what we do is how we set that up, is we have them set up a tee, whether it’s backspin or Tanner, or whatever, we have them set the tee up slightly deeper than they would normally, middle middle of the plate, where the ball is lined up at landing with their front hip.
Joey Myers 09:37
Okay, so normally, if they’re going to hit that, they’re going to try and hit that to the opposite field, because it’s a little deeper on them. But what we challenge them to do in three phases. The first phase, we call it a 1.0 swing. We practice that red laser to green laser. We just have them sit on a chair or a bucket and we just have them practice that motion and practice that motion in a way where the knob stops at their rib-cage, and then they snap it around and switch it. That’s the first phase.
Joey Myers 10:05
Second phase 2.0, where they get to landing position, they get to their landing position create their tension in their neck, in their head, in their Catapult Loaded Position. And then from there, they got their tee setup deep. And then you’d have them snap it and they have to actually pull it, they have to pull it into the, for righties, left side of the cage, lefties right side of the cage, they can’t hit it oppo.
Joey Myers 10:26
They have to be forced to really snap it around. So those players that do this with their hands, they have a hard time with it because at first, they hit soft stuff to the opposite way until they get good, and part of it is getting good at it is a strength thing. We use a lot of heavy bat stuff because they have to learn how to maneuver that snap and be able to control it.
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And it’s like a pinball machine, the flapper right? If you want to hit a ball, a pinball, to the right side of the table, you got to hit it in a certain position and you got it the directions got to go that way. If you want to pull it You know, same type of thing. The snap is we can, I can practice my snaps to right. I can practice them to center and I can practice them the left. It’s getting familiar with the move, and the hitters that are opposite, they bat left, throw right or bat right, throw left, they’re going have a harder time because now they’re controlling that with their top hand. They’re going to have a hard time in the beginning, but usually takes those hitters about a week more to get it then then the right right or the left left.
Jaime Cevallos 11:29
Okay. I just want to be respectful of your time as well.
Joey Myers 11:35
Yeah, I got a little bit of time if you’re if you’re good, I’m good.
Jaime Cevallos 11:40
I actually don’t have…
Joey Myers 11:43
I’ll be respectful of your time today.
Jaime Cevallos 11:48
But I do want to ask really quick what is the worst thing that’s being taught out there right now, to be on the negative side of things.
Why ‘Barrel Moves the Body’ Approach is Wearing Holes in Low Backs
Joey Myers 12:01
I know there’s so much but you know, to prioritize that, I would say the worst thing is that barrel moves the body because…
Jaime Cevallos 12:08
And that you’re referring to, I believe, teacher man’s teaching where basically he says that this is a really interesting approach and I agree with you, it’s absolutely crazy to think that basically you’re the center of the swing is, is when you snap the barrel back like that. Okay, so that to you is…
Joey Myers 12:38
Here’s, here’s the thing, right? I’m okay with that. Middle away and middle down. I’m okay with that. That barrel entering the zone early is fine, because you’re making contact later in the zone. So again, like my player that got tested, and found out that he was maximizing barrel bat speed behind him, but by the time he got the impact, which was maybe an inside pitch, maybe middle in, maybe middle up. His barrel was slowing down but that time.
Joey Myers 13:04
You can’t teach all hitters to do that all the time because it depends. I like his approach. I love teacher man’s approach. I’m not I’m not trying to put him down. I love his approach middle away, middle down. And if I have a hitter who is a physically swinging down hitter, which I don’t have too many, most of them are barrel dropping type hitters, so we have to go the other way.
Joey Myers 13:27
I like his approach, middle away, middle down, or if the hitter is physically swinging down, like he’s got too short of an approach. I’m good with it. The problem that I have with it is that they’re teaching it to all hitter’s blueprint, blueprinting to all hitters. Regardless of pitch depth: inside, middle or away, it’s the same barrel path all the time doesn’t for one that’s not going to work middle and middle up. Doesn’t work very well. Not very consistently, let me say, consistently.
Joey Myers 13:56
The other thing is I see all these hitters arch their backs. I see them arching their backs in a way that is putting these hitters in harm’s way big time, like, of course, an 11 year old, 12 year old, they’re not going to feel it yet, but by the time they’re our age, they’re going to have a hole in their back, they’re going to have back spasms, herniated discs, all kinds of stuff. If they continue to do that swing after swing after swing after swing.
Joey Myers 14:17
I like the approach but being safe with it, meaning we call it the hollow position, taking your belly button and your belt buckle and pinching those two points together. That puts up more of a flex in the lower back. And if you can hold that flex and do what teacher man’s telling you middle down middle away, it’s a great approach. I love it. But I see too many back arching and turning and at that point, it just makes me want to puke.
Jaime Cevallos 14:47
I think it’s important that we talk about everyone, everyone’s theories of the swing and get it out there basically, I think right now a lot of it is just so hard to understand what exactly the people think, what do people think about the swing. I appreciate you coming on, I think we need to do this more guys who have popular theories about the swing. Come out and explain it. I think this is good. I would love to ask you more questions, but we filled up the time already. Let me give you a chance to tell people where they can find you.
“Where can People Find you?”
Joey Myers 15:46
Sure. Thanks, Jamie. I appreciate the time and we’ll do a part 2, 3, 4 whatever. But people can find me HittingPerformanceLab.com, you can go. There’s a lot information 300+ blog posts been doing that since like 2014 I think is when I came out with the blog, there’s a lot there use the search bar the top for whenever you have a query. I have it all in the navigation bar separated by popular blog posts and then I have it by blog posts that have to do it build more power, hit more line drives, get on time more often and then I have other blog posts in there too.
Joey Myers 16:20
That can help to filter the information so you can find out what you need. And then the other part and you can find me on the socials, either Joey Myers just type in “Joey Myers” or “hitting performance lab” and you can find me there on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn be Joey Myers and Instagram.
Joey Myers 16:38
I’m going to be doing some different stuff here in the next probably couple weeks I’m going to change around what I’m doing to make it a little bit more user friendly. So that’s where you can find me and then TheStartingLineupStore.com is where I have the… It started off as the nine best hitting aids on the planet but you know there’s a little bit more than nine so I couldn’t stick to that but it is the hitting aides that I use and others use and things like that. So HittingPerformanceLab.com in TheStartingLineupStore.com.
Jaime Cevallos 17:06
Awesome. Thank you so much, Joey. And till next time take care, buddy.
Joey Myers 17:10
Got it bud thank you.
Jaime Cevallos 17:12
All right.
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https://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/joey-jaime-interview3-youtube-e1594666926226.png281500Joey Myershttps://hittingperformancelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/hitting-performance-labs_c90c0362088ef1d3d528f3078f4f8ac1-300x75.pngJoey Myers2020-07-13 19:00:472020-11-23 06:23:08Do You Recognize The #1 Early Warning Sign Of Physically Harmful Hitting Instruction?
, I wanted to use the Scientific Method to analyze if the baseball swing mechanics “squishing/squashing the bug”, during the turn, increases or decreases bat speed. The term “squishing the bug” means rotating the back foot, on the ground, during the turn. Like you’re squishing a bug.
, he talks about a cotton candy like springy material that the bones and muscles float it, and what gives muscles their shape called fascia.
,
,
. These lines travel from the bottom three fingers (pinky, ring, and middle), across the chest, to the bottom three fingers of the opposite hand. It’s these three fingers that connect these springy fascial lines found within the torso to whatever we hold in our hands. It’s this hand tension, or finger pressure, that has fixed stubborn bat drag issues in my own hitters.
, the spinal engine can move in a vacuum.
.
describes, what he calls Tensegrity (Tension-Integrity), like this:
. It’s NOT a roll over, it’s like a “waggle” that golfers use pre-swing. Great defender against off speed and breaking pitches, AND increase BA by controlling the barrel. Keep main objective in mind: hit ball as hard and far as you can. (about 3:45 mark)
by Thomas Myers. Watch the following FunctionalPatterns YouTube video of Thomas Myers talking about the concept of Tensegrity, or Tension Integrity:
by Bill Jenkinson
by Thomas Myers, same last name. I’m sure on the family tree, we are related in some way, but I don’t know him like I would know my brother or my uncle or anything like that.
