Baseball Hitting Fundamentals

Baseball Hitting Fundamentals Gold [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:Baseball Hitting Fundamentals

  • “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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Joey Myers  00:00

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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Bat Tee Interview

Bat Tee Co-Founder: How To Make Adjustments [VIDEO]

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Backspin Bat Tee Co-Founder Interview: If One Of The Best, Mike Trout, Is Giving Up An Average 20-mph Of Ball Exit Speed, How Much Do Mere Mortals Give Up Doing The Same Thing?

 

Here are the Backspin bat tee co-founder interview with Taylor Gardner topics that we discussed:

  • What do bat tee adjustments mean to you when it comes to talking to your hitters?Bat Tee Interview
  • True or False: Hitters MUST straighten their front leg to be effective…
  • What if hitters used a more precision approach like golfers when operating between 90-degrees?
  • Instead of writing off the arm bar as it doesn’t work, why not ask how can it work?
  • Is there ever a time when ‘swing down’ or ‘barrel above the hands’ bat tee cues can work?
  • If one of the best, Mike Trout, is giving up 20-mph of ball exit speed, how much do mere mortals give up doing the same thing?
  • Where can people find more about you Backspin bat tee guys?

The following is the bat tee transcription of the video above.  This is a sneak peak at the expert interviews we’ll be including in Volume-2 of the Swing Smarter book series.  Enjoy!

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———-

Joey Myers  00:07

There he is.

Taylor Gardner  00:09

Oh,

Joey Myers  00:10

You hear me? Okay.

Taylor Gardner  00:12

Oh, yeah!

Joey Myers  00:13

Oh, there’s the baby. You got that mixed up? I don’t think that’s supposed to go in your mouth.

Taylor Gardner  00:21

Probably should.

Joey Myers  00:24

Look at you.

Taylor Gardner  00:26

Yeah.

Joey Myers  00:27

Causing your parents so much so many sleepless nights.

Taylor Gardner  00:30

Yeah, momma needed a shower time and dad had an interview here.

Joey Myers  00:38

Double interview.

Taylor Gardner  00:40

Yeah. Oh my

Joey Myers  00:45

Look at that, first time I think we’ve done a zoom interview.

Taylor Gardner  00:49

Oh it has been working out, better adjust my camera?

Joey Myers  00:55

No, I think you’re good. What do you need to adjust?

Taylor Gardner  00:57

All I was going to bring it down a little bit. I think I always fall down.

Joey Myers  01:01

Yeah, I think you’re good. Okay. Are you ready? Let me do the official bat tee start. Hello and welcome to Swing Smarter Monthly Newsletter. This is your host Joey Myers from HittingPerformanceLab.com and probably for the half a dozenth interview. I have Taylor Gardner here from Backspin Bat Tee. Welcome to the show. Taylor looks like you brought a little friend.

Taylor Gardner  01:26

That’s right. Yes. Yeah. She has been influenced by any good or bad and…

Joey Myers  01:37

there. There we go. You froze for a little bit. Say it again? Say No. So, she’s been influenced by what?

Taylor Gardner  01:46

I said. No, we got we got a fresh template here. She hasn’t had any good or bad instruction to start working with this.

Joey Myers  01:54

Yeah, yeah. Tie the right arm behind your back and… is your brother? Is he lefty? Or is he righty?

Taylor Gardner  02:03

He’s a switch hitter. You can do both.

Joey Myers  02:05

He does both. But what about throwing? Is he a righty?

Taylor Gardner  02:07

He’s righty.

Joey Myers  02:09

Okay, cool. Well, hey, I wanted to get you on the on the other side of the screen here and wanted to talk about making bat tee adjustments. So that we could go into the hitting side we could go into the strategy side we can go into any different things. So, what do adjustments mean to you when it comes to talking to your hitters?

 

What do bat tee adjustments mean to you when it comes to talking to your hitters?

Taylor Gardner  02:30

The adjustment is, must be understood and adjustment is something if a hitter is already attempting to be on time, it’s really hard to make adjustments if you’re not in the time window to start with. If you’re going up there to hit and you’re just purely reacting your adjustments are also reacting maybe even twice as long or twice as late as they should be.

Taylor Gardner  02:56

Within the understanding that people were syncing up release point we have the timing window of the pitch coming in. Maybe we’re sitting on fastball and all sudden we a pitcher throws a changeup, and whether you recognize the spin or the speed or the trajectory angle, whether an off-speed pitch, what do you do?

Taylor Gardner  03:15

Well, if your plan was there to help you your approach is there to help you not hurt you, so within your plan or approach if you’re on time for fastball, and oh no it’s an off-speed pitch. What do you do? Well, easy answer is, you don’t stop your swing. I know we get told a lot of wait, let that curveball get a lot deeper. Now we’re talking about changing depths and it’s really hard to change depths of timing on the fly. So as instead of being reactive to making your adjustment proactive and making your adjustment one thing that my baby down actually brought a bat here to show you…

Joey Myers  03:55

Use the baby as a bat…how cute she is.

Taylor Gardner  04:02

One thing that we see a lot with hitters. He was left-handed here. I do apologize. Is they’re sideways, they’re pretty lined up with a pitcher in some fashion bat tee stance, and then we start to ride and stride as they start to witness that. Okay, this ball isn’t a perfect fastball down the middle. What do I do?  Well, we see them not only continue to take their head and posture to the ball, but you see a lot of hitters start turn in and sit with the ball.

Taylor Gardner  04:33

As opposed to going uh oh, I’m a little early, let me pull out and then have to release my arms and hands to hopefully start to see hitters actually sit with that ball. Then because, you sit, any movement takes time. And if the plane is correct, you’re on time for the pitchers fastest pitch and then if you’re making an adjustment is to bite. This is where a lot of young hitters especially they don’t do a good job of buying time.

Taylor Gardner  05:00

They end up staying on their backside and opening up too soon and all they have left is like it with their own risk. And yeah, you can hit a ball and do that, and you probably get on base and feel good about yourself. But the faster you know that speed starts to go up and level and the more drastic change of off speed, you get a 90 mile an hour fastball and 80-mph changeup. That’s a little different than facing a 75 mile an hour fastball and 70 mile change-up.

Taylor Gardner  05:27

As a pitcher supposed to extend those timelines, adjustments and variables, the hitters have to as well. The ability to be ready for the fastest pitch and also be able to buy time while staying in a good posture position on the ball is something that we see really good hitters do and you know, quite frankly, amateur hitters don’t do as well.  Oh, sure at some level. Yeah, won’t be a good fastball hitter.  Every great hitter is known to be a great fastball hitter.

Taylor Gardner  05:55

If you’re looking off speed looking for that, that slow curveball every fast ball is going to beat you. On the timeline you got to be prepared for the pitches, pitchers fastest pitch as the fastest timeline. Therefore, your plan is there to help. Yeah, he’s going to be perfect every time, well of course not, it’s baseball. It’s tough. But at least the plan was in place to help you be on time for fastball and buy time for off speed.

Taylor Gardner  06:23

For example, this last weekend, my nephew, faced his first knuckleballer. 13 years old didn’t know this pitcher had a knuckleball it wasn’t his main pitch, so you know first at bat I don’t know hit a fastball for double, second a bat gets a strike or two on him a ball or two and then all the sudden, whack!  He hits a single, steals second base eventually gets to third base and the coach at third goes, “good job Maverick you know you really sat well in your legs on that change up”, he goes “wasn’t a changeup coach, it was knuckleball”. He goes, “Oh, when did you realize it was a knuckleball?”  “After I hit it!”

Taylor Gardner  06:59

It reminded me that he took a good plan to the plate, ready for fastball he happened to adjust instinctively to this crazy knuckleball, but it was more about controlling this contact depth. I’m not quitting on my swing. Did he sit more in his legs, sure.  Did he have a locked out-front leg? No. But he found a way to keep his spinal engine and posture on the ball. By the time he pulled the trigger. Sure, the ball got a little deeper, he barreled it up, he got a good hit out of it. At the end of the day, it didn’t fool him, this random pitch that he really has never seen, didn’t make him react and freeze.

Taylor Gardner  07:36

It didn’t make him react it to slow down and touch it, his reaction was to stay on the ball and give it a chance. And it sounds easy to do until you start seeing a pitch come flying at your body. For us older coaches that aren’t playing anymore, I think sometimes we forget that. There’s a little fear involved. And so, a good plan leads to good adjustments. And sometimes knowing how to get over that fear or filter out your situation really helps that plan starts to stick together better.

Taylor Gardner  07:57

And therefore, those bat tee adjustments really become valuable. As far as other types of adjustments. And that was one type of sitting in your legs, other types of adjustments. We’ve seen Mike Trout sit in his legs; we’ve also seen him bend over a little more at his waist a little side tilt. That’s another way of buying time. Adjustments to me, in our world is a place to buy time, every movement takes time. But unless you’re ready to line your posture up for the ball on time to begin with, adjustments are just going to slow you down. You’ve got to make sure those adjustments are there to help you not hurt you.

Joey Myers  08:48

Well, you said a couple bat tee things that would blow a couple people’s minds they were listening to this… number one is sitting on your backside and swinging from that position number one, and number two, that you don’t have to straighten out your front leg that you can keep that bent. And I love that and that’s something that I’ve learned from you and your brother and Matty, Matty Nokes that the legs really set direction like the lower half basically sets directional force, it does contribute to some of the power.

Joey Myers  09:16

And we’ve learned discussions on that over the last couple of years saying you know, probably between 20 and 30%, it probably contributes to the power of the overall power thing. But the idea that you can use your knees bending your knees at front knee to adjust to pitch height like those are bat tee adjustments that we can make that if you’re from a train of thought that says you have to straighten it you have to brace that leg out, right, I mean that’s really not… We’re trying to like you said buy time.

 

True or False: Hitters MUST straighten their front leg to be effective

Taylor Gardner  09:46

Right. Speaking while the bracing the front leg, the front leg can obviously we can see it YouTube it, Google it. Now of course you can hit with a straight front leg and even sitting in your legs may still turn out to be a brace straightening front leg, you still bend your knee and still walk and brace into that front knee.

Taylor Gardner  10:06

But I think a lot of times as coaches and instructors that usually come to… an issue that I’ve seen come around is their teaching to push the leg straight, as opposed to letting the hip pull the leg straight.  Pitchers do a really good job of this, they don’t just land in their front leg and then push straight up.  Is their vertical ground force? Of course, there is.

Taylor Gardner  10:29

Now in hitting though, there may be little more of that vertical into horizontal ground force, it sounds funny to say, but you’re not just going to push up away from the ball every time. Sure, could you get away with it, of course, and there’s nothing wrong if you are on time and you get the barrel to it, great job. But like you like to say Joey, if it happens too much to ignore, I’ll just start paying attention.

Joey Myers  10:52

Yeah, and on that note, that was the one big bat tee thing that I pulled from you, we’ve been friends for probably over 6, 7, 8 years now, was that idea of staying sideways and keeping that back foot from completely turning over. Like a lot of coaches will say pivot that back foot, pivot that back foot, and meaning, that back heel will turn towards home plate. And it’ll continue to keep rotating. And so, I think we’ve developed almost a generation or two of hitters that are over rotating the lower half.

Joey Myers  11:23

And you say, using Matt Nokes’s lingo is stay sideways, stay sideways, I think is a great one.  And to your point, or to our point that it happens too much to ignore, and you can’t just write it off. Some of our buddies in the past have said well, that hitter can do that because he XYZ that hitter can do that because it’s… no it happens if you take the top 100 hitters, 50 hitters, you’ll see half of them stay sideways and maybe the other half, get to this neutral with it. So that happens a little bit too often to be ignored.

Taylor Gardner  11:57

For anyone that’s listening, if you’ve ever played golf and if you haven’t fine taken a baseball bat take it slow, practice golf swing, go YouTube, Rory McElroy, Tiger Woods, anyone you want. Golfers have figured out how to stay sideways with their back foot.  Now, their balls on the ground and it’s generally between them. Like ball being on a bat tee for hitters.  They’re more allowed to buy but positions of contact with golf. However, you’re going to see baseball players do it too. But since the contact point in baseball can be further out front. Sure, you’re going to see that that back foot rotates a little more before contact. I get that told a lot. “Well, look at this hitter.”

Taylor Gardner  12:33

Yes, but look what happened the first 80% of his swing before contact, he was still sideways, he was still… now was he turning his shoulders, was he loading his core, the spiral engine. Sure, but the back foot was still sideways to hit, the back foot ends up becoming a bit of a rudder.  I won’t even take that too literal. But you wouldn’t start with your back foot facing the catcher, you wouldn’t face with your back foot facing the pitcher. There’s a reason, it’s a natural position for the body.

Taylor Gardner  13:05

The ball is thrown in front of us and quite honestly, ball comes in and it is in front and to the side of us.  If you’ve ever swung an axe, it makes sense to shift your weight and leverage up. That’s why we want to have a little more shift, not only for taking your head to the ball and be able to judge depth before moving very good and feeling your depth and putting a nice sense to it.

Taylor Gardner  13:34

But at the same time spinning against my back foot. Step on my dog… [laughs] spinning too soon. Now the ball is essentially to the side and behind us. Not that you can’t hit from here we opened up too soon. My swing’s wanting to go this way, I crossed my face this way, we want to cross our face into contact with the ball. Again, golfers understand this and their balls in front of them. They want to cross the face you don’t want to spin out and then cross their face too late that ends up turning into a slice and anyone who has played golf, probably vouch for that, my goodness I’m spinning off the ball. balls on never fixed.

Joey Myers  14:19

Well, and what I love the golf analogy is because in golf, you have a ridiculously small margin for error, you have we’re talking in hundreds of yards, not hundreds of feet and your little ball that’s got to get hit by this clubface and then the square center center contact with the clubface in the ball the straighter the ball is going to go. You can take that clubface and slightly like a couple of millimeters you can slightly pull it in like you’re going to hook it or slightly away like you’re going to slice it and those little, teeny millimeters by the end of that 200-yard journey is going to be way pull or slice.

Joey Myers  14:55

What I always tell my hitters, I say when we’re teaching this concept of staying sideways and keeping that back foot from over rotating is, we have to play almost like a golfer, where a golfer’s looking at one shot to the pin, I call it one degree of fair territory. And outside of that 359 degrees of foul territory, because in golf, the objective is the least number of strokes to get it in the hole. In baseball, of course, we have 90 degrees to play with, but we want to act like we’re doing like golf, we want to act like there is a smaller margin, and we have to operate within that smaller bat tee margin, right?

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What if hitters used a more precision bat tee approach like golfers when operating between 90-degrees?

Taylor Gardner  15:29

Along those lines, that it’s incredible you say that because the whole outside pitches, let it get deep, inside pitchers you’re magically allowed to pull for some reason, we’re talking about different depths there. Where in golf, obviously, the ball’s not moving, but to their benefit, they’re more precise, they have time to get their stance set up, time to adjust their face angle. So yes, maybe we don’t have that luxury in baseball, but we do have the luxury of knowing our contact depth.

Taylor Gardner  15:58

Do I like hitting the ball more? You know, some hitters like hitting the ball more off their front hip, some even further out front, some like hitting it a little deeper, more or middle of the other ball, whatever it is that you are super comfortable. That’s your decision. That’s what you’re going to battle with the best. And, again, based on your timeline. I have a lot of young hitters, and we constantly have to work on reminding them. Where is your preferred contact?

Taylor Gardner  16:29

And not to make them look like robots, but you’ll see them when uh, I don’t know, maybe like right there or up here. It’s like, Oh, you got to know, if you don’t know, you’re guessing, like your close, good job of being on time. We want to be on time with our contact point. This is a lot more precise. And as you know, aim small miss small, it’s may not always show up in baseball, maybe you had a day where you didn’t hit well. But you know what my plan was good. My adjustments were sound. And maybe I was just a little early or tad late, whatever that may be over under the ball.

Taylor Gardner  17:06

But you can sleep well at night knowing, man I had it at 99% today. And you don’t realize how much you haven’t figured out. You start thinking about more precision, besides movements. And then suddenly you go out three years ago, I was going to battle with a 50%. efficiency.  That shocks a lot of hitters and I really do think a lot of good college players get to pro ball and maybe it doesn’t pan out for whatever reason.

Taylor Gardner  17:32

I think a lot of them whether they can say it or not verbiage that happens to a lot of if they get exposed, we get told at every level of baseball, you better swing faster Jerry, you better figure out how to get that faster pitching, you better, have quicker hands, whatever. Of course, we must make those adjustments because we’re being exposed. What if we got ahead of that being exposed?

Taylor Gardner  17:56

I don’t know if you saw the video that I posted on the baseball Illuminati page. I was actually crow hopping of doing run and guns, a nine-year-old ballplayer shuffle stepping out 25 feet in front of them throwing the ball 60-mph our reaction time stupid fast. So never seen anything that fast in their lives. As far as timing wise. And you know what he did? It took him a bit. He filtered it out. He figured out when to go when to shift, how to track the ball.

Taylor Gardner  18:26

And yeah, that ball was getting to him quicker than any pitch he’s ever going to see in baseball. And he started barreling balls up.  Our brain’s a supercomputer y’all know that problem is if that supercomputer is putting in the wrong formula, it’s still going to, there’s still going to be a glitch. You still have to help it out.

Joey Myers  18:44

Shoot, I’d even go another step with the wrong formula and just saying that it’s becoming impossible, or you hear that from coaches? Well, that’s impossible, that’s not going to happen, or that’s not reality, or it’s not going to happen. And instead of saying that something’s not possible, why not ask why? or How can it be possible, right? We’ve talked about the front arm shape and trying to get that thing extended out. Whereas everybody in their mother seems to teach this bent front arm, right.

Joey Myers  19:13

The question that I always get when I put that post out there, people will go well, you know, I’ve tried to test it out and beer league softball and works there, but it doesn’t work in the big leagues and whatnot. And if you go way back, Joe DiMaggio and Hank Aaron, Ted Williams, Babe Ruth, all those guys locked out. So instead of saying, oh, that doesn’t work, today’s pitchers throw too hard and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Why not ask how can we make that work? Yes. How does that work? Right?

 

Instead of writing off the arm bar as it doesn’t work, why not ask how can it work?

Taylor Gardner  19:42

What if we made 90 miles an hour feel slower? Nothing’s any easier to hit. But what if? What if it wasn’t impossible.  And clearly, it’s not, people do it every day. It’s not impossible.  I’d like to say maybe the way we’re rationalizing it and maybe even practicing. Maybe we’re not doing our own job as a baseball coach, making, maybe it’s 75 miles. Now, if you’re struggling, maybe that’s what it is, whatever it is get ahead of that curve, not that you’re going to just start jacking home runs. But don’t be late. There’s no excuse for being late. There’s no excuse for not filtering out and understanding your environment.

Taylor Gardner  20:19

Maybe you don’t get to face a live picture every day or practice, that’s fair. I’m sure you have your work cut out for ya. But there’s no reason to get your doors blown off, when you have all of the potential to be as early as you want. Once you’re late, once the ball gets behind your timeline, and it gets behind your back. Pitcher starts in front of us. We as hitters, let ourselves be late. Maybe because we’re trying to do some crazy swing, like, oh, let it get deep and snap it or something, I don’t know.

Taylor Gardner  20:50

But whatever it may be, again, kind of back to the approach and those adjustments. Got to clean that up. And maybe you got to study more time. Maybe you got to study more spinal engine springy fascia and figure out where to get your running position. To your arm bar point… I think a lot of… uh oh, we have a wandering baby…

Joey Myers  21:13

Wait till she starts walking…

Taylor Gardner  21:15

I know I can’t wait!  I understand folding your levers and engaging muscles, getting correct shapes. That makes sense. But when you see arm bar, and it starts to walk out, or to do slow motion. Yeah, looks funky in slow motion to arm bar. When you engage the body and it starts out, it starts to feel a little more natural golfers do the same thing. Luckily for us that in golf, you get to start with it extended and just connected to your body from there.

Taylor Gardner  21:55

But this bat is heavy, I completely understand why people want to hold it close to their body, it is rational. And it’s still close to the body. It’s not like we’re arm barring out here. If you’re still arm barring across our core, this bat is behind you, want lag and you want leverage, leverage, and just loose and lever sometimes, your hands are so close to your body. And even so close this way to the middle of your body. By the time you do a swing, yeah, you’re getting the barrel off your foot. And it may be a strong position depending upon position.

Taylor Gardner  22:34

But if I never got the benefit of the lag, and a clearing, and time to speed up the bat, it takes time to speed up the bat. This is not an instantaneous thing. I know this swing only takes like point two seconds; I get it.  That’s slow through the world of everything happening, there is plenty of time and so that hand, grips on the bat. For most people they’re bottom hand is the weaker hand.  Not doing anything left-handed if I have to. But you want your dominant arm to do his job.

Taylor Gardner  23:09

Not that you have to do it all with a dominant arm. But you certainly don’t want your weaker arm to be your dominant arm. Now, how do you get them in position? Well, as you get a swing, if it happens to lock out, you’re getting the benefit of lag and leverage. How is that wrong? If I understand timing, if I understand off your positions and swing plane. And armbar is nothing in the scheme of arguments. I’m linked into the lever.  If I do it correctly, then of course, I have more leverage and more bat speed.

Taylor Gardner  23:42

But bat speed takes time. And so, when I see a lot of kids, they start here and the lever pull even more on their hands get across the face really soon, elbows way behind their hand and not even close to be slotted. And next thing you know, you’re chopping down or they slice it, and more important, their swing radius and swing arc may only go so far. Versus if I clear, I can get a further reach. And it’d be right within my wheelhouse of comfortability.

Joey Myers  24:13

If we go back to your contact points, right, knowing what your contact points are. When we work with our hitters on what we call our horizontal approach, or our line-to-line approach. Being able to hit the ball the other way, pull it, and go up the middle things like that. We talked about that there are two main things to be aware of… one is what you’ve already said is your contact point. But number two is when that barrel enters the hitting zone.

Joey Myers  24:38

And it’s going to be different for we call middle in and middle away. It’s going to be different. So middle away and middle down. That snapping early getting the barrel in the zone early makes sense. It’s a great middle down of the strike zone middle away approach. But when it comes to middle in the middle up, it doesn’t make sense, and I use those bad cues that I thought were bad about four years ago. Swing down, barrel above the ball, we do use those but only for middle in, middle up.

 

Is there ever a time when ‘swing down’ or ‘barrel above the hands’ cues can work?

Taylor Gardner  25:05

But right. Speaking along those lines… Yes, have you ever had a kid trying out a new baseball bat and Oh man, he’s struggling with the weight or it was too long for him. But that’s some of the stuff you’ve been told, just remember that when this bat is laying horizontal, is heavier, as far as where the balance is. There’s a reason we stack the barrel. And there’s a reason we hold this bat up, you can hold it with one finger.

Taylor Gardner  25:34

That’s how life, if you will, work how to control the bat, Matt Nokes talks about this, why, the barrel above the hands, it’s taken me a while, the feel can be down, in fact there is a down move in the swing, hold your posture. It’s called your head. The balls is below you. Yes, we want to swing on plane. Of course. But how you get to that barrel entering the zone. And before it starts that actual upswing? That is paramount.

Taylor Gardner  26:07

That also was still wrong with the down early method. Yeah, you’ve got there. But did you give up timing, to get to position at contact.  Did you give up adjustments, because your only move is to get there. If you were able to just keep your hands and be ready for that high and inside pitch, as Perry husband would say we get to focus on EV tunnels.

Taylor Gardner  26:34

If I’m ready for that, then great. And then I can always adjust if I need to.  Wait adjustment patterns, that kind of dynamic plan. Not everyone would agree with me on this, but just from a third party perspective, if the high and inside pitch is the ball that we have to get the barrel out there quickest to, it makes sense to me to be on time with that and adjust down and away with that, because you have more time or space, ball is further away from me to do so, obviously, you get in the baseball stuffs like, well, if you’re looking middle middle, and then that gets tougher if you’re looking away if you’re looking wherever.

Taylor Gardner  27:19

I don’t want to get into the approach part of it. But it just makes sense to me that you can practice, play around practicing with looking high and in, get that pitch locked in, and then we’ll work it down to middle middle, get that adjustment pattern locked in. Maybe for some people, it’s not so much that they have to change their approach, maybe they just need to be comfortable getting to all these pitches vertically, you might not have to worry about what my timing is good, I’m swinging at the right pitches, just getting jammed a lot on high.

Taylor Gardner  27:51

Well, maybe it’s just because you’re dumping your barrel too soon.  It’s okay, you got to find where that issue is, and not fight it. But again, let your plan help you get there. The barrel above the hands is a great plan. It helps me already be ready for that movement pattern… sure, maybe you get to that pitch well maybe you’re facing speeds you can handle and you’re struggling with low and away. So maybe you do have to think about releasing that barrel sooner. Okay, nothing wrong with that.

Taylor Gardner  28:23

I would give everyone hesitation to just go out and put out a YouTube video saying this is the one and only way, of course it’s not. But we must understand all of it so that when you hear someone say something, to filter through what they’re saying, you’ll see why he’s doing it, that makes sense.  When you come out and some of these instructors say just one swing plane for every pitch. And if I just wait longer than I can see it longer. We know that’s not exactly be true.  Eyes don’t see the ball much longer just because we’re not swinging.

 

If one of the best, Mike Trout, is giving up 20-mph of ball exit speed, how much do mere mortals give up doing the same thing?

Joey Myers  28:56

Well and what’s also interesting is what the actual hitting operating system is when you can watch somebody, when you have been around the block and you’ve seen a lot of these different teachings, you can see what their main operating system is. And I know you and I were similar in this and we want to maintain high ball exit speeds.

Joey Myers  29:16

When you get a hitting guy that’s talking about a certain thing like hey, we need to get that at high and inside pitch with the bend in the front arm we need to get there, well we know that Perry Husband said Mike Trout, one of the best in the world will go down is one of the best top five probably, ever top five top 10 and down and away average ball exit speed is 101 miles an hour, not his top out but his average. And that’s where he’s locked out with that elbow at contact.

Joey Myers  29:45

And then at up and in, he’s reduced to a high school baseball player at 80 to 83 miles an hour. So he’s losing almost around 20 miles an hour ball exit speed that’s 80 feet. That’s 80 feet of batted ball distance that he’s giving up by looking away and adjusting in. Well, some people go well, that’s fine. But here’s the deal. And this is what I tell my players I say, Mike Trout is a once in a lifetime player. He’s just one of those people that we will look back on when he’s done with his career. And we will say he’s one of the best. One of the best ever is giving up 20 miles an hour ball exit speed.

Joey Myers  29:50

20 miles an hour.

Joey Myers  30:24

You know what the amateurs are probably giving up. 30-35 miles an hour ball exit speed?  He’s one of the best he can get away with it. You’re going to be given up a lot more.

Taylor Gardner  30:34

Yeah. I can’t remember if it was you or someone else had brought to my attention. It was before COVID happened. I think it was the baseball season before. And they asked, who hit their highest exit speed most often? Try and word that correctly. And I was like, Oh, I don’t know. And there’s Jose Altuve. And Aaron Judge. I was like, oh, okay, wow, two different types of hitter’s sizes body length. They said, Oh, you know how often they hit their hardest exit speeds?

Taylor Gardner  31:06

And at first, I’m like, Oh, these big leaguers? Oh, man, I bet 20% of their hits or they’re popping out near their top exit speeds. It was less than 2%. Wow, less than 2% of all of their hits, on miss hits in the realm of hitting is as hard as you can. What does that mean, though? Does that mean maybe they’re slowing their swing down and touching the ball? No, I don’t think so. And in my opinion, obviously get fooled on some pitches. Okay, fine.

Taylor Gardner  31:33

But I think most of their base hits that they reported, I think their miss hits are that powerful. And once you start to realize that homeruns are the best result, okay, but maybe your best result is a hard line shot, single or double, whatever. However hard you get whatever type of hit is your hardest hit, which for most people is a low launch angle, I dunno, maybe 0-5, maybe 10 degrees. And then that makes sense. Balls coming down about 5, 7, 8 degrees.

Taylor Gardner  32:03

And you can imagine that plane, you’re going to give up exit speed when you raise or lower your launch angle. And I see a lot of people don’t understand that. Oh, no. My hardest hits home runs.  Not exactly. I want to say the highest ball ever recorded was a ground ball. Double play.  It’s okay. It’s okay that if your exit speed fluctuates, based on how well you struck that ball for a single, double, triple based on how high or low you hit it, that’s fine. And you want to start tightening those windows up.

Taylor Gardner  32:33

But Backspin tee, you know Taylor, Joey, you can’t control your launch angles, not saying you can control your launch angles. It’s just like I’m not saying you can even hit why I’m saying though, is you can work on the precision of contact and work on your precision posture and swing plane. And when it lines up, you smoke a ball at the pitcher’s head, you did your job. And when the next at-bat, it probably feels the same and you hit a homerun, guess what you did your job. You hit the ball far. But more importantly, your plan gave you the ability to fall as hard as potentially could that swing.

Taylor Gardner  33:08

And that’s Oh man, how many young kids have you seen? You throw them one change-up… They’re crushing balls… you throw them one change up. And then the next 10 swings are crap. They just can’t find it… it just ruins their world. It’s like, oh, man, you got to filter that out. Trust the plan and get to the next pitch. It’s okay.

Joey Myers  33:29

Yeah, exactly. That’s crazy. Yeah, that’s a good one to end on. And that’s another call for another day. I want to be respectful of your time because you’ve got a little one that’s down there. And she’s been great. By the way.

Taylor Gardner  33:40

She’s sleeping now.

Joey Myers  33:41

She’s asleep. Yeah, she’s asleep. I’m talking too loudly. I’m talking to you loudly. But hey, I want to let you get back to the baby and get back to the family. hopefully get some sleep. Maybe she’ll take take a nap with her. But hey, where can people find you? socials, website, any kind of deals that you got going on right now? Go ahead. And…

 

Where can people find more about you guys?

Taylor Gardner  34:04

Yes, so find us on Google backspin bat tee to find backspintee.com, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, we have a 20% off code at the moment. If you use the code BATBROS. For those of you that follow the baseball bat pros, I’m very good friends with them. They are great people Bill Taylor and them and they’re amazing people. But you’re also going to find our bat tee in Dick’s Sporting Goods here soon. So be on the lookout.

Taylor Gardner  34:28

Hopefully, Academy is a follow that as well for those that maybe that’s closer to here. And we’re trying hard to get Mark word shields and some other big retail stores. But the Dick’s Sporting Goods we’re shipping that out here in a couple days. Extremely excited to make that next jump to the big retail because we’ve done so well on the individual bat tee sale and it’s time to make that move.

Joey Myers  34:50

Yeah, congratulations, buddy. I’ve been with you for a lot of this bat tee journey. I think we jumped on probably we start building our relationship maybe your second year I think you guys are. So, so I’m just excited for you guys. And I know you guys have been just like all of us been through our ups and downs and stuff and it sounds like you guys are starting to starting to rise again. So yeah,

Taylor Gardner  35:12

Yeah, it all started with Joey Myers experiment video, my bat tee versus the other tee, and we didn’t know each other so you have to watch that video.

Joey Myers  35:20

Again. See how they turned out? Yeah, it was in a very bias thing, I was probably, we had run into each other a couple times. We talked on the phone maybe once or twice and I was like, you know what, let’s try this out. Let’s do a bat tee experiment on it. I think it turned out well for you guys.

Taylor Gardner  35:34

Yeah, I think well back to the precision of contact, just changing that visual. You had a more funnel effect with the Backspin Bat Tee, and with the traditional tee, it was a little more scattered and it just makes you wonder, not promoting my bat tee over another tee… Tee just are you working on your precision and in your vision obviously has a lot to do with that so, pick up a Backspin Bat Tee, give it a shot, if you don’t like don’t like it, then I’ll give you your money back. Yeah, definitely.

Joey Myers  36:01

Right. Then percent off and you get 20% BATBROS. B-A-T-B-R-O-S, and that’s all caps, correct? Cool. All right, brother. Well, thanks. Keep up the good bat tee work. Congrats on everything and congrats on the little girl. My first time seeing her.

Taylor Gardner  36:13

Thank you bud.

Joey Myers  36:14

Alright brother. Take care of yourself.

Taylor Gardner  36:16

Have a good one.

Joey Myers  36:17

Have a good Easter.

Taylor Gardner  36:18

Thank you.

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STOP Athletic Performance Training? [VIDEO]

Athletic Performance Training – STOP? [VIDEO]

Athletic Performance Training Interview With Jeremy Frisch: Is It Smart To Shut Down Overhead Shoulder Development?

Here’s what we go over in the athletic performance training interview with Jeremy Frisch:

  • What do you feel the biggest mistake is when those kids are being trained by strength and conditioning coaches?
  • What do you think about something like that, where you’re totally shut down any overhead shoulder development for baseball, softball players?STOP Athletic Performance Training? [VIDEO]
  • When you do an athletic performance training evaluation of a hang, what do you look at? How long if a player is poor in that, versus is good in that? How long can they hang for?
  • When you get a kid like that a high school, junior high school on up, what do you do with that kid? Do you have to go back in
    time, work that out? And how long does that usually take?
  • “…you had them wrestling or something similar?”
  • Are you looking to do some franchising or something like that, to where people can have access to that around?
  • Is there a certain athletic performance training formula like maybe the four or five things that you look for that we make sure in one hour that we’re getting done?
  • Where can people find more about you? And so that’s number one. And two, are there anything new? Any kind of projects you’re working on right now?
  • Any other parting thoughts before we go?

Here’s the athletic performance training video transcription… (estimated reading time is about 30-minutes)

 

Joey Myers 

Hello and welcome to Swing Smarter Monthly Newsletter or Newsletter Monthly, I say it both ways. This is your host Joey Myers from hittingperformancelab.com and I have the honor today, finally, to get Jeremy Frisch and it’s Frisch, right? Not Frisch.  I have Jeremy Frisch on with me. He is the owner of Achieve Performance Training.

Jeremy Frisch 

It’s at achieveperformance.net.

Joey Myers 

.net. Okay, cool. Then it reroutes? The big thing Jeremy is a big, like, if you go onto his Twitter is @JeremyFrisch and Frisch spelled F-R-I-S-C-H. If you go on there, and his Twitter says, strength conditioning, long term athletic development, which we’ll be talking a lot about in this call. He’s a physical education youth football coach at Clinton High.

Joey Myers 

I see that, I think he’s actually out though, I know you’re at the elementary school, huh? Elementary, that’s where all your training is?

Jeremy Frisch 

Yes.

Joey Myers 

Clinton High, Bridgeton Academy, looks like Worchester State University. So welcome to the show, Mr. Jeremy.

Jeremy Frisch 

Fire it up. I’ve been a big fan for a long time and read your books and your live drive baseball package that I bought and watch those videos. This is exciting for me.

Joey Myers 

What I love, is the very thing that you do to help kids get into, is the biggest component i think that is not put in or at least it’s put in wrong, it’s plugged in wrong. My first question to you is, what do you feel on the strength conditioning side with the kids that you’re talking about? Say, maybe through elementary school? What do you feel the biggest mistake is when those kids are being trained by strength and conditioning coaches?

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What do you feel the biggest athletic performance training mistake is when those kids are being trained by strength and conditioning coaches?

Jeremy Frisch 

I think over the years, you got athletic performance training started up with professional and college level, and it’s trickled down and it went through the high school and then and now it’s at the middle school. And I think with private facilities, people try to make money so they’ll have some type of like, kids’ program, right? And what happens is that, I think a lot of facilities may not have the experience of working with kids, so they just default to what they know.

Jeremy Frisch 

They’ll put on training programs that are made, probably more for adults, than for kids. They sort of watered down a little bit, and try to make them kid friendly, but they’re really not. You know, what I mean?  The elementary school age, what we’re really talking about is physical education, right? And we want to get those kids to be able to move around as much as possible.

Jeremy Frisch 

I think the most important part of that is you could say move around a lot. And you can get them to do jumping jacks, and hops and stuff like that, and all that stuff’s great. But to get them in an environment where they have to think and react and move, and that’s why that age, games are the best, right? You get them in an environment, playing tag, or chasing each other things like that, or playing dodge-ball, those type of things develop kinesthetic awareness, they develop spatial awareness, they develop their ability to track with your eyes, which talking about baseball, right?

Jeremy Frisch 

I mean, that’s the name of the game right there. And so those things lead to, being able to track not only is awesome for baseball and other sports, but it’s also awesome for reading, right? Because we all know we need that, too. Any activity that allows us to track a ball or track a person, or be able to have to react to a ball or a person or auditory signal or anything where we have to react to something in front of us. It’s probably the best thing that you can give to a child that age.

Jeremy Frisch 

The other thing that they really need to be able to do, is to be able to handle their own body weight. And like people think about that it’s like, “Ah! We’re going to get them to do pushups and squats and lunges and stuff.” And it’s not that.  It’s more like can they climb up a tree? Or can they climb on a bar and hang? Can they do a forward roll? Can they bear crawl? You know what I mean? Can they jump off a box and land without totally collapsing and hitting the ground? You know, what I mean?

Jeremy Frisch 

When I was a kid, we used to jump off stuff all the time. You know what I mean? And we did it in like a play type atmosphere, but those type of environments really developed the athleticism, and we didn’t even know it. You know what I mean?

Joey Myers 

Right. And, obviously in baseball, we’re talking, hitting and things like that, but throwing and one of the things that I thought, I didn’t know really much in junior senior year of college coming out, but one of the athletic performance training programs I think was University of Texas, it just won the College World Series. I think that was my junior year and then my senior year, their strength conditioning program almost got rolled out to every D1 all over the country.

Joey Myers 

And one of the things that they did not do was anything over shoulder, no vertical shoulder, anything. We weren’t allowed to do any vertical shoulder stuff. And to me at the time, I remember thinking to myself, wait a minute, don’t you need to be strong in every position possible? I understand that we’re overhand a lot. We’re doing a lot of overhand throwing and stuff. But what’s your opinion? Or what do you think about something like that, where you’re totally shut down any overhead shoulder development for baseball, softball players?

 

What do you think about something like that, where you’re totally shut down any overhead shoulder development for baseball, softball players?

Jeremy Frisch 

Yeah. The old saying, if you don’t use it, you lose it. You know what I mean? You’re asking these guys to pitch and they’re going through an extreme range of motion at a very high velocity.  You better be strong to be able to do that, you better be strong when you start doing it. And I think when we’re talking about kids, there’s probably thousands and thousands of kids across the country that pitch every weekend, probably can’t hold himself up, like hanging from a bar for more than 30 seconds.

Jeremy Frisch 

They don’t have the grip strength in the hand, they don’t have the strength in the shoulder to be able to hang, to hold themselves there. But you’re asking them to pitch a ball as hard as they can, or swing a bat, as hard as they can. I think when you look at it that way, too, it’s no wonder that I think some guys have trouble teaching kids how to hit or how to pitch because the physical abilities aren’t there. Right? The physical abilities aren’t there, to be able to teach them how to swing a bat fast, or how to throw hard.

Jeremy Frisch 

I think there’s needs to be a foundational level of strength for kids before they actually get into their first few years of playing sports.  I’m a huge fan of hanging or pull ups or climbing all that stuff for kids is awesome. And I test because my kids play baseball, so some of their friends come in, and we get kids from the surrounding area that are supposedly really good players. And the first thing I test like, how long can they hang from a bar?  And it tells me right away what they got going on up top.

Jeremy Frisch 

It’s a really good sign, obviously hitting and pitching and throwing, and a lot of that comes from the forces through the ground, too. But it’s important that their shoulders are strong, scapula is strong, has good range of motion. I’m a huge fan of when those kids start to hit like their tween years, like the 11, 12, 13-year-olds, we do tons of one arm dumbbell presses, we’ll do stuff where they’ll hold the dumbbell overhead and walk. I’m a huge fan of that stuff. Huge fan.

Jeremy Frisch 

And for power development, we do a lot of medicine balls, most kids will throw medicine balls between probably four pounds to eight pounds, 10 pounds, but we have these medicine balls that are 15, 20, 25, 30 pounds, and we do a lot of vertical throws with them. The kids are going to do a push press when they launch the ball in the air. And will let it go and hit the ground, and they’ll repeat. We do a lot of that stuff.  So yeah, I’m a big fan of trying to get as strong as you can through a complete range of motion.

Joey Myers 

I love that. You mentioned the hang. When you do an athletic performance training evaluation of a hang, what do you look at? How long if a player is poor in that, versus is good in that? How long can they hang for?

 

When you do an athletic performance training evaluation of a hang, what do you look at? How long if a player is poor in that, versus is good in that? How long can they hang for?

Jeremy Frisch 

I want to see the base level, like 30 seconds. I remember that summer, I had like three or four kids that were between the ages of 11 and 12. And thought they were, and these kids play a lot of baseball, and they’re pretty good. But they were struggling at 30 seconds. But you know what the great thing is, is if you practice that every day or every other day, you could get really, really friggin good at it. It doesn’t take a long time to get stronger. And I use that as proof for the kids like look at, if you work at this, just like swinging a bat and pitching a ball…

Jeremy Frisch 

You work at this every week or every day you’re in here, you’re going to get better and we got kids that went from like barely getting 30 seconds to well over a minute.  It’s a huge part of my program when I first have kids that come in to my facility and I love the younger kids, not only just hanging but get them to like shimmy across the bars, back and forth where they have to sort of like navigate across the bars. My kids, I set up years ago, and they’re still in there, they’re like the gymnastic rings like monkey rings, so they have to swing from ring the ring go all the way down the rack and back.

Jeremy Frisch 

I tell you, I think it’s great not only for shoulder strength, but grip strength as well. And I think that’s another thing that so many baseball players, I think leave on the table is grip strength. I mean, you’re literally holding a bat. The bat is in your hands, right? And everyone overlooks grip strength. You have so many nerves in your hands, and it connects all the way up into your shoulder. And I think that’s another thing that’s totally overlooked in a lot of training programs is grip strength, you know?

Joey Myers 

You know what’s crazy is that people now have to pay strength conditioning people, athletic performance training yodas like yourself to do this kind of stuff instead of like you and I, when we were younger, we went to the playground, and we did all the monkey ring stuff and all that. And now we have to pay a Yoda like yourself now in order to get that kind of training.

Jeremy Frisch 

Yeah. And I think too, if you do it early, like my son, my oldest is 13. He’s a big kid. He grew up got six inches over, he hit his growth spurt over COVID. And he’s just sprouted up. And he’s not skinny. He’s pretty solid kid. Right? When he was little, we did rope climbs all the time. He used to climb that rope all the time. And I swear, even though he’s grown a lot, developing that grip strength and shoulder strength when he was that age, allows him to be able to still do chin ups at his size, and stuff.

Jeremy Frisch 

I feel like he developed that strength when he was younger. And now that he’s gotten older, even though he’s grown, he’s been able to hold on to it, because he’s trained through that time period. And he’s able to do those things. I think for younger kids, it’s just huge to be able to get… and it’s fun, right? That stuff is fun. We’re not like making them do one arm dumbbell rows, and like SCAP pull ups, we’re not doing corrective exercises.  That gets fun, you’re climbing on bars, you’re hanging, you’re trying to get from ring to ring, it’s like you’re playing but you’re training at the same time.  I think it’s huge.

Joey Myers 

That kind of stuff in the gym, the monkey bars, and the whole gymnasium type of thing in the parks that we play in, it was tag, we were walking on, like I see your kids doing walking on little, whether they’re beams that are above the ground, or you’re having to balance, you’re having to, all this kind of stuff. And that’s what I really like.

Joey Myers 

One of the athletic performance training questions I actually wanted to ask you, you did the strength conditioning episodes on your site in the about section, like bottom third of the page, and they were talking about some things they asked you about the older kids that you get, whether they’re high school, maybe even college guys that come back, or maybe just started to work with you. And that there were some developmental holes in their past. When you get a kid like that a high school, junior high school on up, what do you do with that kid? Do you have to go back in time, work that out? And how long does that usually take?

 

When you get a kid like that a high school, junior high school on up, what do you do with that kid? Do you have to go back in time, work that out? And how long does that usually take?

Jeremy Frisch 

That was a big change for me with my programming. And when I really started working with the kids and realize like, these are the things that kids need. And these are the things that will help them to develop to be a better athlete.  I sort of took that idea and morphed it into using it with the older kids. And the idea came, well, let’s try to fill in these developmental holes with these kids during their warm up period. Right?

Jeremy Frisch 

10 minutes a day, 15 minutes, they’ll come in, we’ll do a little bit of crawling to work core strength and stability of the shoulder. Because we know that’s good, it’s a little bit more structured.  It doesn’t look as fun as the kids do it.  But it would be like, alright, we’re going to do 50 yards of total crawling, broken up into small parts.  We’re going to do some foundational… we might do hanging, we might have them use a bar, where they’re going to work on their typical strength exercises.  Just to get them in the right positions to be able to do a squat or bench press or shoulder press, whatever.

Jeremy Frisch 

We’ll do a lot of stuff on the balance beams.  We’ll get them walking sideways on a balance beam, maybe doing a low lunge on a balance beam.  We’ll get a medicine ball in their hands and get them throwing the ball different ways. That’s another big one, like just side throws, overhead throw, slams to the ground, get them in circuits like that, so they get to move their body through a bunch of different ranges of motion, directions and stuff.

Jeremy Frisch 

Stuff they’ve never been used to. And for me, that’s where I fill in those developmental holes. We use the warmup period to go back and maybe touch on the things that they may not have developed when they were younger.

Joey Myers 

Correct me if I’m wrong, I think I’ve seen an athletic performance training video on your Twitter before, where you had them wrestling, or some sort of wrestling. I know you guys can roll out the wrestling mats out in the hall I think you were saying, and then you had them wrestling or something similar?

 

“…you had them wrestling or something similar?”

Jeremy Frisch 

Yeah, so sometimes we have them do… they’ll get in a bear crawl and face off. And they’ll have to grab each other’s arm and have to try to pull the other one over. Or we’ll do plyometrics where an athlete will jump in the air. And then while he’s in the air, the other athlete will whack them, sort of push them, so they land a little bit awkwardly. We’ll do stuff like that.  We’ll do where the athlete boxes another guy out, like in basketball, a box out drill.

Jeremy Frisch 

You have to work on like they’re pushing each other back and forth. Yeah, so I love that stuff. Because I think it’s a different type of strength. Right? You ever have a buddy that wrestled?  He grabbed you, and you’re always knew, shoot, this dude. It’s just a different type of… because he’s used to just pushing and pulling with someone and he knows, the moment you try to make a move, he knows how to counteract that, that type of motion.

Jeremy Frisch 

It’s like you always knew when one of your buddies wrestled because they just had that extra, this sort of sixth sense in strength. I love that stuff. And you’ve probably seen it, the younger kids wrestle all the time. And I tell the parents listen, your kids are going to wrestle when they come in, they’re going to push each other, we’re going to put the mats out, we’re going to roll around, we’re going to play games that forced them to tackle each other.

Jeremy Frisch 

I’m a football guy, too. I coach football. If I can get kids to get used to that physicality of the game. I think you can’t beat it, because those skills are going to use later on.

Joey Myers 

Yeah, and because I focus on the hitting side, I don’t have… we have a few places there’s a parkour place that we have our son at, we have a place called Little gym that they do beginning gymnastics. Both my son and daughter were in that for a couple years. They do a lot of cool… a lot of things we see on your videos, not everything, but a few of those. And then with the whole COVID thing, the little gym shut down.

Joey Myers 

We were trying to find another place, so they do parkour. So a lot of the things that you’re doing, so we don’t have a ton of that here, which I wish there was, but what I usually suggest to my hitters, is to get in things like martial arts, for the females dance, even swimming is good, you just don’t get the ground reaction forces in that.  Those kinds of things are gymnastics, obviously, are always good as developmental things to do, if we don’t have access to something like what you’re doing.

Joey Myers 

Are you thinking? …Are you looking to do some athletic performance training franchising or something like that, to where people can have access to that around? Have you given that thought?

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Are you looking to do some franchising or something like that, to where people can have access to that around?

Jeremy Frisch 

I’ve had so many people contact me about, do you have a facility in: Georgia, Florida, Texas, California, I’ve had people ask me.  If I could have an entrepreneurial side of my life, like a group of people that could do that stuff, I would do it in a heartbeat. But I am way too unorganized. I’m just getting by every day, just having my own place as a businessman, you know what I mean?

Jeremy Frisch 

I’m like the idea guy, I love going to the gym and coming up with all the different ways to do it. Laying that out on a national scale. I think for me, it’s way above my head. But it would be awesome. Because I think you’re right, there’s not enough places around like that. And I think for me, even thinking in an even broader scale, like you just said, I would love to have a place that catered to, you have your gym, where you have your older athletes so they can lift and do your traditional training.

Jeremy Frisch 

You have your PE slash transition into strength conditioning that I do. And then you can also have that area where kids can just go and play and do parkour, or Ninja Warrior. You could even take it one step further and have a big space where you had a batting cage, and a basketball court and a little turf area where kids can play seven on seven football, or play hoops or play baseball. You know what I mean? That’s my dream. My dream facility.

Jeremy Frisch 

We have yet to find the space because I think if you can have something like that you have kids have access to so much athletic development. And I’ll tell you what to, and I wanted to say this before… watching my kids go and transition from Little League into a higher-level baseball, right?  Definitely jumping from like a USA bat to a BB core bat. And seeing kids who are not physically developed or strong enough to struggle, because they just went from a drop 12 to a drop three.

Jeremy Frisch 

Its kids get up and they’re swinging a freakin tree. Yeah. And one of my athletes, he’s actually a football player, but he likes baseball. He doesn’t put full time, like a lot of attention into it, he just plays. But I was blown away this summer watching him be able to use his athletic ability on the baseball field, running the bases, running balls down in center-field, just making contact where he put the ball where he needed to so we could get on first.

Jeremy Frisch 

It just got me thinking, man, just having those skills is so big for baseball, you know? And so for me, I’m always backtracking, how can we develop those skills with kids, so when they do get to this level, there’ll be successful?

Joey Myers 

Yeah, I agree. And like I told you, at the beginning of this athletic performance training call, that everything you’re doing is a piece of the puzzle that a lot aren’t doing. And I think a combination of what you’re doing with that transitioning side, you talk about this football player, is just an absolute athlete, been working out with you doing that kind of stuff. He’s got the foundation to be able to just step in.

Joey Myers 

Then the next piece of the puzzle are the movement principles, the human movement principles that are validated by science, we apply them to hitting a ball. And those are the things… I’m a big spinal engine guy, love springy fascia and as you know, and that is the next step once you get moving correctly, and you can take out ankle mobility issues or shoulder mobility or thoracic spine once you take that stuff out. Then it’s all hands-on deck.

Joey Myers 

Now they have full range they can create things like neck pressure where they wind up the head in the shoulders and things like that. Ever since we connected, I wish I could have, Frisch heaven, about all these surrounding developmental things. One of the biggest things I wish I had was a Jeremy Frisch next door to me that I can tell my hitters, this is a must you need to go to this. That’s going to make what we do in the cage or on the field so much better.

Joey Myers 

I just wish we had a Jeremy Frisch next door. But maybe that’s something that we can talk about. Because we’re working on things that we could talk over the phone, on the franchising side of it. There could be something there, we just have to take your brain and formulate how that would look and would be really cool. Something like a little gym. Right little gym is very formulaic. You don’t have a little gym out there, a little gym, just a smaller version of gymnastics, right? They’re going to do the flips and all that. But it’s all building up to the back-flips and all those things.

Joey Myers 

But maybe that’s something we can talk to you… one thing before I let you go, I wanted to ask about where people can find you. But before that, what is your kind of formula for… when we do a workout, we want to make sure we’re doing a roll, we’re going to make sure that we’re doing sort of a hard press a jump? Is there a certain athletic performance training formula like maybe the four or five things that you look for that we make sure in one hour that we’re getting done?

 

Is there a certain formula like maybe the four or five things that you look for that we make sure in one hour that we’re getting done?

Jeremy Frisch 

Sure, yeah. And I can even give you like… so a lot of the athletes that I train with are probably between the ages like 10 and 14, 15. Right. And so that’s a great age, because there’s so much development going on. And that’s really the golden age of when you start to see their athletic skills start to blossom.

Jeremy Frisch 

When an athlete comes into my facility around that age, we spend a tremendous amount of time, we’re going to spend a good chunk of time when they first come in, we’re going to move.  Before we do anything, we try to increase our body temperature. We move.  We have circuits where we’re working on smart fundamental movement skills, so that’s a great time. So we’re going to do 20 yards of skips, 20 yards of shuffles, 20 yards back pedaling, 20 yards of hops, stuff like that.

Jeremy Frisch 

Another series, we do in place, where we just do jumping jacks, or skips and hops side to side, but we want to move, and when we do move, we want to do everything. When we’re skipping, we’re doing arm swings.  When we’re backpedaling, we’re holding our arms overhead.  When we’re hopping, when we’re doing side shuffles, our arms are making big circles. We’re trying to integrate the entire body and make it awkward and weird for the kids.

Jeremy Frisch 

Just because we know all that movement is going to lay a bigger foundation, the more movement you do, the better you get at it.  The first thing we always do is movement, to warm up, and usually fundamental movement skills. Then from there, we usually move on to two things, we work on stability, and then range of motion.

Jeremy Frisch 

Stability would be like getting the kids on the ground doing short stints of like bear crawl, or crab reaches where we’re really focusing on the core and they have to lift an arm off the ground and stabilize themselves in a good position or lift a leg off the ground, or crawl like maybe 10 yards really slowly with their knees close to the ground. It’s hard work.

Jeremy Frisch 

But you’re really focusing on staying stable and not moving much. Or moving very slowly over a short range of short distance. And then to go with that, I usually do them together, we do these, what we call it’s, the name of the company is called stick mobility. But we do like these big ranges of motion with PVC pipes. We’re asking them to overhead squat, we’re asking them to do a lunge with a bar overhead, we’re asking them.

Jeremy Frisch 

A big one I do with the pitchers, they get in a lunge with the stick over their head, and they create a lot of tension in the shoulders. And they’re going to bend side to side, at their waist, we’re going to do big side bends, we’re going to do laterals ups, we’re going to do step ups and single leg work. We do this stability slash flexibility at the same time. And that happens in every session.

Jeremy Frisch 

The next part of our workout, we do plyometrics. We always do jumps. And again, we pair that with… this is where we get into, I guess more specific throws off the wall where we do our plyometrics, like medicine ball work, side throws, similar to like, I want to see the kids loading.  Try to get that upper body rotation while they’re stepping forward, I want to see how they look almost similar to how they swing.

Jeremy Frisch 

We do a lot of that stuff, overhead throws, heavy slams. One arm punches, all different… we have medicine balls, that we do drills that are two pounds, we have medicine balls that we’re all the way up to 30 pounds. So that’s a huge one for us. And then from plyometric work, and their jumps. So I should backtrack, after we do our throws, before we do our jumps, we’re always going to do something double leg, and we’re always going to do something single leg, so we’re always going to be hopping off on one foot, we’re always going to be jumping up at two feet, just to make sure we cover all our bases.

Jeremy Frisch 

The last thing in our movement series, after plyometrics is we’re ready to go. This is when we’re going to sprint. We’re going to do short sprints, we’re going to chase each other, we might do resisted runs, we might do some type of agility, where we play tag and run each other down. Or we’re going to do some type of high-speed work. Where we’re really moving. Yeah, so and then from there, it’s all your basic stuff from in the weight room.  We teach our kids how to Olympic lift, we’re not scared of teaching getting the bar on the kid’s hands, we definitely teach our kids how to squat, dead-lift, hinge, get strong on one leg, they do plenty of pull ups, lots of rows, really basic, basic barbell dumbbell movements.

Joey Myers 

I love that dude. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. And again, we got to figure out how to get you a lot more outside of the Massachusetts area, Clinton, Mass. area. But before we get there, I appreciate your time today. Where can people find more about you? And so that’s number one. And two, are there anything new? Any kind of projects you’re working on right now?

 

Where can people find more about you? And so that’s number one. And two, are there anything new? Any kind of projects you’re working on right now?

Jeremy Frisch 

Yeah, so you can find me, there’s a bunch of athletic performance training articles that I’ve written, I think five or six on simply faster. If you just type in Jeremy Frisch, simply faster, all those will come up. You’ll see a lot of the things that you and I just talked about; you’ll find a lot of those things in those articles. And there’s a lot of great videos in there, too. Some good examples for parents looking for ideas to use with their kids, or coaches looking to do stuff with their athletes.

Jeremy Frisch 

And then, I’ve been slowly just trying to take videos of the things that we do, and sort of database them. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, if I can present it to a group of coaches that want it, or say you want it and say, Hey, give me the, I need 10 exercises for my baseball players, boom here it is.  I’m trying to put that together, there are so many exercises, it’s a little overwhelming right now.

Jeremy Frisch 

Once I get that athletic performance training database growing, and explain it all… the other part of it is too is, you see the games that we play, I posted about the games that we play, but I’ve never really, there’s never enough space on Twitter or Facebook, and I don’t really have the time to explain how they work.

Jeremy Frisch 

How the games work, and what are the rules. I’d love to put together a database of games that athletes can use and how do you play this? What are the rules? And what are we working on? That’s my current project.

Joey Myers 

Very cool. Well, we’ll talk more about that you and I just do a phone call. I showed you some things there that we can… whether that’s an online thing or franchise thing is going to take a little bit longer because that’s going to take into account creating some standard operating procedures and operations manuals. You know, that kind of thing.  That’s going to take probably a little bit longer, but an online thing might be something worth looking at right now as the low hanging fruit.

Joey Myers 

And we mentioned your athletic performance training website, you said was AcheivePerformance.net? People want to find you there. Twitter. Where can people find you? What’s your handle? I know we discussed earlier, but just as a reminder.

Jeremy Frisch 

Yeah, it’s just that @JeremyFrisch. And I posted, I love Twitter. I love being able to come up with my ideas and little short phrases. It’s way easier to do it. Do that then have to write an entire article or book.  Obviously, videos can truly show what you do. I love posting on there.  Mostly, just because I think there’s a lot of people out there that could use it.  There’s a lot of mom and pop coaches, there’s a lot of Phys ed teachers, there’s a lot of different people that could look at that stuff and find it useful.

Jeremy Frisch 

So yeah, and then I’m on Facebook, too. It’s mostly people from my town, that are college friends and stuff like that, but I do post some stuff of the things we do with the kids on there. The rest of my time, if I’m not working, I’ve got four kids. I usually coach football in the fall and basketball in the winter and baseball in the spring. So yeah…

Joey Myers 

Busy guy, dude, busy guy. Well, hey, thank you for everything that you do out there. And we’ll see if we can touch more people besides over there in Clinton, Massachusetts, and appreciate your time today Mr. Jeremy, you guys have a Happy Thanksgiving. Any other athletic performance training parting thoughts before we go?

 

Any other parting thoughts before we go?

Jeremy Frisch 

Well, thanks for having me on. Really appreciate it. Like I said, I think I read both your books, and they were fantastic. And they’ve definitely helped us. My kids help me as far as coaching goes, but also giving me an understanding of how, I didn’t understand all of it with the hitting book, and then you said, Oh, I threw the shot-put in college, and I saw shot-put and I’m like, Damn, like, That’s it. That’s it, it’s there, I understand what he’s talking about. It was really great. It was really great for me that I could take what I knew about shot putting, and I could put it back into teaching my kids how to hit, which is great. Awesome stuff. I appreciate you having me on.

Joey Myers 

I love it, dude. All right, man. Well keep up the good work again. Happy Thanksgiving. And we’ll talk soon. I’ll reach out and we’ll have a conversation about some of the other stuff we were talking about.

Jeremy Frisch 

Sounds great. Can’t wait. I’ll talk to you soon.

Joey Myers 

Alright brother.

Jeremy Frisch 

Bye.

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Baseball Hitting Trainer: Curtis Nelson Interview

Baseball Hitting Trainer VIDEO: Random Pitch Training?

Baseball Hitting Trainer Interview: How To Transition Cage Swings To The Game With Curtis Nelson

 

Here’s some of what will be discussed in this baseball hitting trainer interview with Curtis Nelson:Baseball Hitting Trainer: Curtis Nelson Interview

  • Rapsodo getting used as a paper weight?
  • What are the top two mistakes that you see coaches doing when they’re teaching hitting?
  • Random pitch training. Explain that a little bit, how you guys do that, and how that looks…
  • How to transition grooved cage swings into the game
  • Do you teach your hitters any kind of plate or pitch approach?
  • How do you evaluate hitters and teach them to make an adjustment?
  • How do you get a pull happy hitter go oppo, and how do you get an oppo happy hitter pulling the ball?
  • “Curtis, so and so said that timing cannot be taught?” What do you think about that?
  • What are some of the adjustments you have hitters make to slow pitchers?
  • Where can people who want more information find you?

The following is the above video’s baseball hitting trainer video transcription.  Let’s get to it!

 

Joey Myers  00:27

Very cool. How did today go?

Curtis Nelson  00:30

It went well. I got a couple guys actually in town from AZ, that was fun and got some good work in, so today went well. My internet was not working at the end there, so always fun but I’m not a big tech guy so the tech stuff for me sometimes gets me a little fired up.

Joey Myers  00:50

What were you using the internet for? Were you just showing them some baseball hitting trainer video and stuff?

Curtis Nelson  00:54

Yeah, so I send a lot of videos from here. When I make either a voice over video or I make myself showing a drill or something, I send from the cage. I try and get most of my work done here. We got a nice little like 6000 square foot cage here.

Joey Myers  01:10

Beautiful.

Curtis Nelson  01:11

370 foot cages with 20 foot ceilings and 25 foot nets. It’s kind of a fun little one. It’s kind of our little home, it’s old school. My boss played at LC state, he has been doing this in the state of Washington for years and years and years and years. He’s got a little bit of that old school, so “you don’t like that cookie cutter” kind of look, you know?

Joey Myers  01:32

Yeah. I agree you guys don’t have HitTrax or any baseball hitting trainer like that either.

 

Baseball Hitting Trainer: Rapsodo getting used as a paper weight?

Curtis Nelson  01:37

Conforto bought me rapsodo, I’d say four years ago now, kind of when it first started coming out. He went out and bought it for me and just kind of gave it to me and I use rapsodo occasionally. I think that you know for some of my young ends or some of my high school guys, I want to go to a PAC 12 school and I don’t know any Pac-12 guys that are below 90 miles an hour on their exit velocity. I think it’s good to be able to show them that obviously with recruiting videos nowadays and in a lot of these colleges are asking for it right? I think that is an important metric.

Curtis Nelson  02:12

Obviously, if you make a swing adjustment and your exit velocity drops a big amount, there’s probably something behind that right so I think that there’s a time and place but in my experience with hit with rapsodo I’ve seen a lot of really good-looking swings and then when they go on rapsodo it starts becoming a little bit more of a slow-pitch softball home-run Derby, but as long as we’re using it the right way.

Curtis Nelson  02:35

I like to use it when I’m doing mixed BP. I like to do it when it’s more of a live setting. You know, we have our pitching rapsodo set up in our hitting rock solo setup in the same cage and we’re doing live stuff, you know, closer to the season time. I think there’s a lot of value there but most of the time a rapsodo is kind of getting used as a paperweight.

Joey Myers  02:52

An $8500 baseball hitting trainer paperweight?

Curtis Nelson  02:57

Yeah, I think that the first one we got was like five grand or 4500. Whatever. Not the second one, but that’s a very expensive paperweight change.

Joey Myers  03:06

Exactly. I’ll keep this in, sometimes it depends on what we talked about before just to get warmed up. I’ll keep it in. I think I’ll keep that stuff in. But are you ready for an official start?

Curtis Nelson  03:18

Yeah.

Joey Myers  03:19

Alright, let’s do it. Hello, and welcome to swing smarter monthly newsletter. This is your host Joey Myers from hitting performance lab dot com and with me today is actually our first intro. We had a little phone call earlier today but I’ve heard so much about Curtis Nelson, through a mutual friend Daniel Robertson, I call him D. Rob and Daniel was hitting with Curtis quite a bit in the off-season, this past season that he played in not just last year, but the year before. I think the year before, I think it’s been a couple years but I’ve heard Curtis through D Rob and there’s a lot of mutual hitting minds that surround Curtis. First of all, I want to welcome you into the show. Welcome, Curtis.

Curtis Nelson  04:01

Thanks for having me on. I look forward to it.

Joey Myers  04:02

Thanks for coming on, man. Okay, cool. We had a little conversation, which I’m going to keep in like I said, about rapsodo and different things and got to see your cages, just kind of cool. One of the questions that I wanted to ask you since I’ve seen a lot of your stuff on Twitter, and I agree with I think most of it. You’re one of those guys, we call them lone wolf, mad scientist and the guys that tend to think for themselves and don’t follow others lockstep, right?

Joey Myers  04:06

You take a little bit of something, somebody’s saying, “Hey, I think that works. Let’s go try and experiment with my hitters and see if that’ll work with them”. If it does, you keep it, if it doesn’t, you throw it away. I’m really looking for those lone wolves, the ones like myself, who are on like a passionate curiosity journey to try and find what the truth is what really works. My question to you is, what are the top two things, baseball hitting trainer mistakes that you see out there on whether it’s Twitter or social media, that you see coaches doing when they’re teaching hitting?

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What are the top two mistakes that you see coaches doing when they’re teaching hitting?

Curtis Nelson  05:05

I think the first one to me kind of goes back to at a very young age, kind of what is the typical things taught with very young hitters.  You’re typically going to see, you know, take the weight back, take the hands back, as a pretty generic kind of thing taught. I think if you look at a lot of really good swings, there’s so many different guys out there, I love all their swings and their different commonalities but at the same time, I think you see so many hitters that have this certain sequence involved in when they get to a certain position.

Curtis Nelson  05:40

You see, some hitters might have a certain movement in their swing that might be different, but it works for them. I think at a young age, you see a lot of hitters with a big movement backwards, a huge hand load getting outside the body.  It just starts to create these habits at a young age that can really start to affect us as we get older and pitching gets better.

Curtis Nelson  06:02

I really like to see limiting the amount of move, we go back and allowing our hands to kind of get to a good hitting position. More on the forward move, we don’t want it to be rushed, we don’t want it to be something that kind of jerky, it might feel that way for someone and feel smoother for another person. That’s the individuality about it.

Curtis Nelson  06:23

Ultimately, I think that that would be like my number one thing, I see is so many hitters come in, and they’re constantly with a big shift back, a big hand load on the way back and they’re constantly fighting their bodies. That’s the number one for me. We talk a lot about not chasing results and chasing exit velocity. I think at the exit velocity side of things is something that’s important for hitters to know and understand the end.

Curtis Nelson  06:25

Like we were saying before, if you see a big drop in exit velocity, you see a big drop and how the balls coming off the bat, and then there’s some rolls there for us but I see a lot of hitters, a lot of young hitters nowadays on the internet, that are trying to chase results instead of chasing the process that brings about the results.

Curtis Nelson  07:09

Everything for me is about getting hitters better in the game, we have to be better hitters in the game, whatever we’re doing inside in terms of training that needs to translate to the game. If whatever you’re doing, whatever style or thoughts you’re doing, or however your training is translating to the game outside, and you’re a better hitter because of it, then great, we’ll work our way around those things to a certain degree and make sure we understand the difference.

Curtis Nelson  07:35

I think those are my top two things right now, it’s making sure that whatever we’re doing is going to translate to the game. That’s all that matters. We don’t want to be caged hitters; we want to be gamers.

Joey Myers  07:43

Right. I know one thing when D Rob was training before his last year in independent ball, he was doing with you guys, you mentioned it here too, it’s the baseball hitting trainer random pitch training. Explain that a little bit, how you guys do that, and how that looks.

 

Random pitch training. Explain that a little bit, how you guys do that, and how that looks…

Curtis Nelson  07:58

I started doing it as a player when I was young myself and one of my good friends, Cody Atkinson, he’s with the Texas Rangers as a coach now. We started doing it as players and it was just our best way to emulate game pitching. It was just doing mixed BP, we always call it dirty from 30, about 30-35 feet away, we’re not trying to throw as hard as we can, it’s just a crispy BP fastball. We’re just mixing and breaking balls and really just kind of playing games against each other, you go play nine inning game and you get three outs and you will be judging jury and it brought about some good competition between us.

Curtis Nelson  08:34

Ultimately, it taught us how to have an approach, how to be on time than the fastball, how to adjust off the fastball, on some breaking ball stuff. I think it really shows the holes in the swing, it shows where the weaknesses can become and some guys that it might even just be the mentality change, that might be the difference.

Curtis Nelson  08:51

You can see a lot from just doing just kind of a mixed BP, can I cover the fastball away and still cover the breaking ball? Can I cover the fastball in and still take the curve-ball down in a way and it shows this a lot. I’m a huge proponent of it.

Curtis Nelson  09:06

We do our machines, we do our challenge stuff, because I can’t throw the ball 90 miles an hour, but at the end of the day, we do need to see it, that live arm and that kind of mixed it in having to make a decision rather than to seeing a fish down the middle every time on a machine.

Joey Myers  09:21

Very smart and there was a baseball hitting trainer study that was done, I can’t remember the guy’s name offhand on YouTube, but it was a video, not sure. I think it was maybe in one of the books that I’d read but it was a Cal Poly study. It was Cal Poly baseball guys, and it took half the hitters out in the field hitters, they worked with what they call mass practice.

Joey Myers  09:42

They did 15, they took BP where they took 15 fastballs, they hit 15 fastballs, hit 15 curve-balls, hit 15 change-ups and they had the other half of the hitters, fielders, did what you’re talking about a mix of BP and even though the second group that got the mix BP early on wasn’t very good, they’re showing a BP wasn’t very good.

 

Baseball Hitting Trainer: How to transition grooved cage swings into the game

Joey Myers  10:03

What ended up happening is they got better as the season progressed, and their numbers were better, which you’re talking about transitioning into the games, which I hear I’m sure you do, too, from parents and even players, how do we transition these mechanics into the game? Because we’re seeing a great swing in the cage, but then in the game, they’re not really performing and that baseball hitting trainer study what you’re talking about mix BP, I think it’s one of the most important things and that’s a study that shows right there. That was just one season but I bet if you took it over three, four or five seasons, you get the same result, it would just obviously look a little bit different.

Curtis Nelson  10:40

It comes down to kind of open skill and close skill environments, right. In golf, the balls not moving, it’s a very close type skill. We kind of know our outcome before it happens and it actually leads in this to one of my pet peeves, and I grew up hitting like this. You see the outside pitch, and you immediately are trying to go off with it and manipulate that result, where the only thing that dictates where that ball goes is my timing.

Curtis Nelson  11:08

One of the first things I tell hitters, when they walk in the cage with me is, I’m never going to tell you the pull of the inside pitch, I’m never going to tell you to hit the outside pitch the other way, your timing will tell you, your job is to hit through it, and just kind of see what happens and then you can make adjustments off of that.

Curtis Nelson  11:22

That open skill environment of having to basically variable change, you have to have the ability to be on the fastball and then adapt and adjust. I think so much of hitting is about that adjust-ability because how often are we right on time? How often are we perfect, guys in the big leagues, there might be perfect 30, 40, 50 times in a year, and getting paid a lot of money for it, but we’re not getting five 600 at bats, so we have to be a little bit more adjustable, to a certain degree at a younger age level.

Curtis Nelson  11:52

He’s breathing that into them and a younger age level, to have that ability to naturally translate over to the game. A lot of hitters that I see that struggle on that transition from cage to game, they’re doing a lot of machine where it’s in the same place every time, they’re doing a ton of Tee work, a ton of flips, we don’t typically use these in here very often, very, very rare.

Curtis Nelson  12:15

With younger guys, I will, but a lot of times with my college and my professional groups that are coming in, we’re really not using Tees at all, because we want to see the ball moving, sometimes we’ll use a tee for a feel and kind of maybe a specific drill. As a whole, we want to see that thing moving and having to make a decision soon. Just hard, soft flips, or fastball, curve-ball, mix BP or full on, dirty from 30.

Curtis Nelson  12:41

Anytime you get an opportunity to do that, you’re going to be playing the game of baseball in that environment much more like outside, right? It’s going to translate over better. When it doesn’t translate over, now you can start looking at some of those pieces within the swing that might play a role with why it’s not translating over or in the head, you know what I mean in terms of mentality.

Joey Myers  13:01

Do you guys do any kind of baseball hitting trainer approach? You were mentioning, if the ball is away, you don’t have to spray it away, you can pull that ball and my last year in college at Fresno State, we got the new coach, Coach Batesole. Now my last year is 2003, I wasn’t a part of the 2008 College World Series team, but he was a coach at that time.

Joey Myers  13:22

My last year was his first year and one of the things he told us, and the first time I had learned this, was to have two thirds away or two thirds in approach. Two thirds of the plate away or two thirds in, now we just go half, we go half away or half in. That’s how we do it now with my hitters.

Joey Myers  13:38

That was the first time I had heard that to split the plate into two thirds and he said if you’re looking two thirds away, as a righty, he said you can work left center-field all the way to right field. Anywhere in there, you can hit the ball, you don’t have to hit it straight to right and the opposite is true. If you’re looking two thirds in, then you can work right center all the way to left and that was the first time I heard that because most of my coaches would say if it’s away, boom, hit it over there. Hit it where it’s been, you guys do any kind of approach like that?

 

Do you teach your hitters any kind of plate or pitch approach?

Curtis Nelson  14:08

Through the years of doing this now, you’ve seen them all right, there’s so many different approaches. I think that as long as whatever we’re thinking is working, then great, do it but at the same time I think that thinking in general, we talked about open skill, close skill environment, hitting is one of the most purely reactionary sports there is, in terms of hitting a baseball, it’s moving, that can change direction and speed and everything.

Curtis Nelson  14:33

Sometimes approaches, it’s almost too much thinking for some hitters. We’ve done the whole look away reacting, we’ve done the even counts, you’re looking middle away, the positive counts, you’re looking middle in. In the past, I’ve talked about going to your strength is you got a positive count, if your strength is middle out, then look there, then drive into the big part of the field. If you like pulling the ball in your better middle, middle in, in that count looking at those places that you have success.

Curtis Nelson  15:03

I think the best hitters in the world in terms of the best swings and approaches, they can game plan their approaches off the pitcher. If you don’t have any holes in your swing, now you can go off of what the pitcher’s weakness is. Generically, people tend to look at what the pitchers out pitches or how he’s trying to beat you. We try and counteract that instead of going well, how is he going to get ahead of me to get to that point?

Curtis Nelson  15:27

If I’m looking middle in because he’s going to beat me there, but he actually gets hit up in a way then maybe I’m looking up in a way, and I’m going to own that zone based on the guy I’m facing. Now, when you start getting into game planning based off pitchers, you got to have spin rates, you got to have a scouting report of how he is, as a pitcher in general.

Curtis Nelson  15:46

If we don’t have that information, we got to keep it pretty simple. With driveline and what they’re doing with the pitchers nowadays, in terms of tunneling pitches, and making pitches look the same for a longer amount of time, the game is not getting any easier. We want to know where to look.

Curtis Nelson  16:05

We talk a lot about arming pitchers way off to the side more three-quarter arm slot, you should be looking up and out for that guy, you facing Bumgarner, and he’s throwing the ball from second base, we want to be looking up and out, because the ball is coming from that direction, and I think a lot of people make the mistake. It works at a younger age level when the ball is not moving as fast but a lot of people make the mistake of looking at the plate, because not always where it starts is not always where it’s going to finish based on what kind of movement they have.

Curtis Nelson  16:34

Oftentimes, you’re looking middle in and out a hand it looks middle in, and then it’s going to hit you in the hands, or you’re looking middle away, the next thing you know, you get a slider into the batter’s box that you chase. We try and kind of counteract what we’re facing, by how and where we’re looking, to a certain degree, obviously, that depends on the level you’re at.

Curtis Nelson  16:53

With some of my younger teams, we’re trying to keep it as simple as possible. A few years back with one of my teams, we had some pretty darn good hitters and some good swings, we ended up just kind of taking the approach of doesn’t matter what count it is, if it’s a strike, let’s smash it, and just kind of the old see-ball, hit-ball approach, and just make sure we’re on time and adjustable from that point. We had a lot of success with that.

Curtis Nelson  17:16

We basically said, we’re going to flat out own the zone, and we’re going to take balls, and the guys were mature enough to go do that, some hitters need to be a little bit more specific about how they think. I always go full circle with things and making them more individually based for the hitter, right? If I got a hitter that flat out pulls the ball, like there’s no tomorrow, and is a really good pole hitter, then that’s probably where we’re going to look because probably something that you can pull to a certain degree, especially early in counts but that also limits him on his ability to adapt and adjust to what he’s facing to a certain degree.

Curtis Nelson  17:50

To kind of get that complete hitter, the swings got to be able to kind of withstand different zones, different timings and different angles of pitch, to be able to game plan fully, I think the better the swing, the easier it is the game plan off the pitcher and that’s ultimately what we’re trying to do.

Joey Myers  18:06

With your young hitters, and I know you when you say that, if you got a hitter, that’s just dead pole and if that’s a strength, you’re probably talking about the older guys, whether it’s high school, college, on up. What about the younger guys? Do you have more of being able to use all field approach, and if so, if you have them set up like what we do, we do small private groups. We have between two and four hitters in a group, with the whole COVID thing, we used to do six, but I try and keep it to four at the max and we’re pretty spread out outside and stuff.

Joey Myers  18:38

What we do is we set up the tee at the beginning, we take our baseball hitting trainer ball exit speeds, but what I’m also looking for is not only the number, but I’m looking for we set that tee up, it’s center center. They should be hitting it right up the middle, right? What I’m looking for and I’m observing is if they’re pulling all five swings that they’re going to get or they’re going the other way, all five swings, where it’s center center, do you do anything like that and eval and try and get them to make an adjustment?

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How do you evaluate hitters and teach them to make an adjustment?

Curtis Nelson  19:05

Not so much of the tee. We film everything, I’ll film a rear-view angle, so I can kind of see ball flight, I can see timing, posture, hand path and we’ll do a side view. I’ve always gone to the film, you look at contact points, you look at when the barrel is coming out, you look at timing, and then you look at what’s coming off, right? You’re taking middle pitches, and you’re just hooking them every time into the net, the film is going to show you that you’re around and outside that ball pretty early.

Curtis Nelson  19:34

Ultimately, we want a hitter that can cover the line. I want somebody that can drive a ball, dead straight off, and the ball flies straight with backspin, and then all of a sudden that pitches inside or they’re a little bit early and they can pull it with true fly. Especially in Washington state, we get a lot of hitters that only hit when they’re inside until the game because there’s just not a lot of fields out there that you can hop on and just a lot of hitters are just doing indoor lessons and practicing inside. They just don’t see the ball flight as well.

Curtis Nelson  20:04

That’s where the wraps around the hit tracks can be nice in terms of being able to really truly see where that ball is going. Also, with how cages are built, right, we have these tunnels in cages where we get this tunnel vision going, where a lot of hitters will come in and just pepper their back-net pepper right center, and not pull a single ball into the net.

Curtis Nelson  20:13

We had a lot of hitters in Washington that just pushed the ball in the right field. Learning how to pull the ball correctly, or learning how to drive the ball opposite field correctly. It’s different for everybody, but ultimately, I rely on the film, in the flips. I’m not doing a lot of the tee stuff but if you find value in something, by all means, do it.

Joey Myers  20:45

Now, if you were going to teach a guy, if he was pulling everything into the left side of the net, or even going off way too much, how do you get an Oppo person to learn how to pull the ball? How do you get a pull person to learn? What’s your go to drill for that?

 

How do you get a pull happy hitter go oppo, and how do you get an oppo happy hitter pulling the ball?

Curtis Nelson  21:00

It depends on what the reason is, whether it’s just a mentality thing. That’s where I tapping into each hitter, in learning your hitter and understanding what their thoughts are, what they’re trying to do. You can compare that to the film, we have something called a deep dive, where you kind of dive into the analytics a little bit in terms of professionals. You go look at all the analytics, then you compare it to game film, then you compare it to the indoor cage routine stuff.

Curtis Nelson  21:28

If you have all that information, it starts to paint the picture a little bit of why they might not pull the ball in the air as well, or why they might be pushing the ball off. Ultimately, I think that I’m going to look at the film, I’m going to look at how they’re moving. Obviously, like what you were talking about is putting them on that tee and getting a feel for.

Curtis Nelson  21:49

This was D Rob’s argument to me about the tee stuff because he loves the tee stuff. That’s where I told him, at the end of the day, if that is a routine that has built you, you’re finding comfort in a certain position, that maybe you’re not feeling when the ball is moving, by all means getting on a tee and feeling that contact point out or hitting the ball deeper in the ball more out in front, based on what you’re trying to create, you can gain a feel in that atmosphere.

Curtis Nelson  22:14

I’m not saying that I’m against tees by any means but I’d much rather see the ball moving and how they respond to it moving with some film on it, so we can kind of see that overall picture. I think it’s going to be different for every hitter based on what they’re thinking, based on what their mechanics are and then obviously comparing that to the results or any kind of data that we do have, but that’s a good question, I like that.

Joey Myers  22:38

One of the baseball hitting trainer things I hear a lot of what you’re talking about is timing. There’s a lot of people out there, believe it or not, that say that timing cannot be taught. What would you say to that coach, instructor, parent, that hears that, comes to you and says, “Curtis, so and so said that timing cannot be taught?” What do you think about that?

 

“Curtis, so and so said that timing cannot be taught?” What do you think about that?

Curtis Nelson  22:58

I teach timing every day, every single day. Some hitters are going to grasp some concepts better than others, and some hitters have that ability to be on time more consistently, whether that’s because of their swing, or because of their athleticism, their hand eye coordination, whatever it is, they have a gift to show up on time more than others.

Curtis Nelson  23:23

I would say 95% of the hitters that come through my cage, getting them aware of their move, whether it’s improving the move first, and then making them aware of their move in relationship to time and space, is one of the most important things that I do. I truly believe there are hitters out there that just time naturally, and it’s very natural for them to do so.

Curtis Nelson  23:46

They don’t need to understand their timing, they just show up on time more often than others. For every one of those guys, there’s 150 to 1000 of the other guys that need to understand their timing. We do a lot of timing stuff in here, just really a lot of rear-view films to kind of show hitters, when are you picking up in relationship to where the pitcher is.

Curtis Nelson  24:06

When I was growing up, it was all about getting your foot down early, get your foot down early, get your foot down, and that’s all we ever heard when we were late, that can breed a lot of issues. If you got a swing like Rendon, or Nelson Cruz or Paul Goldschmidt, that is a different type of stride.

Curtis Nelson  24:22

You still see them have a good feel of time, they get that foot down and then the body shifts back to center to a certain degree to hit, everyone’s a little bit different on that aspect. Ultimately, I think rhythm and flow, that we talked a lot about flowing, a lot about dancing with the pitcher. Those are some pretty simple terms that can apply to timing but if you can arrive on time to a good fastball and then you can still have adjust-ability on breaking balls, we got a great opportunity to hit in the game and having markers in the swing or the pitcher.

Curtis Nelson  24:53

Whether it’s some guys like to go on handbrake or some guys like to make their move on arm up or other guys like to just game plan off of “Hey, I’m ready to pull the fastball, even though I’m not trying to.” There’s different ways around that to get somebody on time but making hitters more aware of their timing when they’re on and when they’re off or when they’re late or they’re early, is a really, really crucial piece to what we do here.

Joey Myers  25:18

Before we get to where people can find a little bit more about you, we’re kind of closing in here, I want to ask you just one more question on that. If you got some young hitters that come in, think about the team that you’re talking about that have the young guys where they’re just basically swinging strikes, take balls, if they’re facing a really slow pitcher, which tends to happen quite a bit where the pitcher can break a pane of glass, what are some of the baseball hitting trainer adjustments that you have them make or go through?

 

Baseball hitting trainer: what are some of the adjustments you have hitters make to slow pitchers?

Curtis Nelson  25:42

It’s such a good question. I love answering this question. I think that when I was younger, the generic and you still hear it with hitters, you still hear with coaches, whatever ones taught against that soft lefty. I remember showing up to the field, and we’re facing a PAC 12 recruit throw in 93-94. I’m like, we’re going to score 10 runs today, because we hit this guy like there’s no tomorrow, we prepared for this. You show up, and you face that soft lefty throwing 75 and I’m like, I don’t know, if we’re going to have a hit today, it’s a bad feeling.

Curtis Nelson  26:11

When I was growing up, you saw the slow guy warming up and you’re like licking your chops. Well, I’m about to be free for a couple doubles and a home run and that guy usually didn’t make it out the first ending. I think it goes into kind of training nowadays is a lot of machine, a lot of velocity, a lot of that stuff. We’re better against firm, but I do think that the approaches, and the way we’re taught against those guys can really play a role.

Curtis Nelson  26:12

Growing up, we were all taught to hit that guy off and push that ball into right, hit it off, let it travel, see it, the start your rhythm later, make a forward move later in the process, however you want to say it. That actually is what the lefty pitcher wants you to do, I want you to be defensive, he wants you to push them all off. He wants you to weight back on him.

Curtis Nelson  27:00

The best approach against the soft guy is to shrink the zone, make the zone smaller. He doesn’t have the ability to strike you out unless you chase his pitches, and you’re going to see his pitches better because the ball is moving slower, we see the ball better when it’s moving slower, you can’t argue that.

Curtis Nelson  27:16

At the end of the day, if you shrink your zone and go, “Hey, I’m going to be here, this is my goal zone against this guy. I’m not chasing those pitches out there”. Even if they look hit-able moving slower, I think we’re going to have a lot more success doing that, we’re not necessarily trying to go off, but we’re not trying to go up there and roll over to third first pitch either, I think it’s really just commanding your zone and kind of going back to the simplicity of just trying to hit through the ball and see where it goes.

Curtis Nelson  27:41

I think we tend to manipulate the swing because of what we’re facing, that slow guy is like, “I’m hitting a home run against this guy”. We’re spinning off that slow when away, but we tend to beat ourselves more than maybe they beat us. We try and stay away from the generic hit the ball up against the slow guy kind of mentality. The end just kind of stick to say, “Hey, this guy only beats me if I chase, so we’ve got a good pitch to him.”

Joey Myers  28:07

That’s funny you say that because that’s the same with the same lefties that we’re seeing, that can’t break a pane of glass, you see the guy throwing 93-94. 93-94, it’s Friday night, and then Saturday night, you see the guy can break pane of glass and the way I’m going to just pepper it to the opposite field, but one thing he is slow anyway, so you can have to wait longer and then now you’re saying that you want to hit it the opposite field, and now you got to wait even longer. You got to see it even deeper, it’s almost like it’s two double negatives there. I get that. You’re chasing your tail, basically.

Joey Myers  28:42

Curtis, I appreciate your baseball hitting trainer time. Where can people find you? I know you’re on Twitter, because that’s where I’ve seen you. If you guys have a website, where you guys are in Washington, if anybody wants to come out and check you guys out, where can more people find you.

 

Where can people who want more information find you?

Curtis Nelson  28:58

Our cage out here it’s called Atkinson Baseball Academy. It’s out in Kirkland, Washington. I know there’s a website for the cage. I am separate from that in terms of my hitting instruction. I am on Twitter, it’s @Nelson_Hitting, used to be cheat hack nation. That was kind of a joke that we threw together when I first developed because of all the swings we’re seeing that were a little bit aggressively big. I don’t have my own personal website, I probably should by now, but I spend majority of my time in the cage with hitters, so the internet and social media side of things, I’m still relatively beginner at that. I would say Twitter is the best way to reach out if you have anything, just shoot me a DM and I’ll get back to you as soon as I possibly can.

Joey Myers  29:49

Maybe not 100% probability but you can take a baseball hitting trainer like yourself who’s always in the cage doing stuff. You can take where somebody like you, you think he’s got 20,000 or 100,000 followers because it’s great stuff, if you read your stuff, you watch the videos that you put up and think it’s awesome stuff and you should have like the 50,000 100,000 but the reason you don’t is because you’re not on Twitter all the time, you’re in the cage, working with hitters, so that’s always not always a sign of a good hitting coach but I would say more likely than not, guys like Matt Piers and Jeremy Johnson, they don’t really have big followings but they got great gyms that they put out there and can really help hitters. I really appreciate what you guys are doing out there in Washington, keep up the great baseball hitting trainer work.  If you see D Rob before me, say hi to him. I think he’s up in Seattle, he still lives in Seattle?

Curtis Nelson  30:45

Yeah, he’s over in West Seattle. They got a bridge out so that is a pain in the butt to get out of West Seattle right now, but he’s over there. He pops in the cage, he comes, he hangs out. His experiences and his knowledge is just bar none. He’s been doing it for so long. It’s a lot of fun getting that guy in the cage and kind of just talking.

Joey Myers  31:05

He’s a baseball hitting trainer Yoda for sure. I know he wants to be a GM and I can see that he’s got the chops on the field, he understands intellectually the game and like you said, it’s fun to talk with him. So, tell him hi for me if you see him before me. How far is Kirkland from Seattle? How far are you guys away?

Curtis Nelson  31:27

Very close, if you take away traffic. Right now, with COVID and everything, the freeways aren’t as crazy out here right now. You take away traffic, I can get over to West Seattle, it’s kind of over by the airport, you can get over that direction in 20 minutes, 15 to 20 minutes, but you throw in the traffic of the normal out here, you’re looking at probably more like an hour and a half.

Joey Myers  31:50

Got you. Cool. All right, Curtis, well, I’ll let you go, man. Thanks again for your time and Merry Christmas to you and the fam.

Curtis Nelson  31:58

Merry Christmas, you guys take care. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Joey Myers  32:01

You got it.

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Mobility Exercises

Mobility Exercises: ‘Stretch What’s Tight, Strengthen What’s Weak’? [VIDEO]

Mobility Exercises: Gain an Average Of FIVE To SIX-mph Ball Exit Speed In A Couple Sessions Using Square1System

Mobility exercises interview with Shawn Sherman of Square1System discusses the following:Mobility Exercises

  • What is the origin of the Square1System?
  • What is your elevator pitch for the Square1System?
  • Where was that mobility exercises aha moment where you saw the rabbit hole, then you started digging?
  • Why is the traditional model of ‘stretch what’s tight and strengthen what’s weak’ not so effective?
  • What does the mobility exercises timeline look like using your system? When do you see the benefits?
  • After using your system, what are you seeing on the ball exit speed increase for hitters and the velocity increase for pitchers?
  • What does the fixing movement compensation look like?
  • What has your experience been with Tommy John, maybe athletes that are looking at that or have that?

This interview is one of twenty-four featured expert interviews in my new book, “Swing Smarter: Science Based Hitting Training Built To Understand How, Why, & Reasoning Behind It”.  The following is the transcribed video of the above mobility exercises video.  Enjoy!

 

Joey Myers  00:06

Hello, and welcome to the Swing Smarter Newsletter Monthly. This is your host Joey Myers from hittingperformancelab.com. With me today, this is the second time that we’ve talked in person, we did a phone chat, I think for almost an hour or maybe a little bit more, with Shawn Sherman, so first of all, I want to welcome you to the show.

Shawn Sherman  00:25

Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here, it’s great to get reconnected with you, and I’m looking forward to this conversation.

Joey Myers  00:30

Very cool. Shawn’s website is square1system, system or systems?

Shawn Sherman  00:36

Singular

Joey Myers  00:38

Square, the number one, without the hashtag, square1system.com. I want to dive in a little bit to what Shawn is doing, because I think it’s very interesting when it comes to moving better to perform better.

Joey Myers  00:54

It is something I think that is new to a lot of you out there. There are some mobility exercises that are similar, but I think Shawn’s doing something. What’s cool is he’s found this out on his own in his own curiosity.

Joey Myers  01:08

As most of you know, I love finding passionate curiosity within other coaches and things like that out there. First, Shawn, explain where square1system is, so people can remember and put your website and figure out where that origin was. What’s the origin of that?

 

What is the origin of the Square1System?

Shawn Sherman  01:26

The origin of the name or the whole system?

Joey Myers  01:29

How did you come up with that name first?

Shawn Sherman  01:30

I came up with the name because I used to have a name for the system called reset, and a mutual friend of ours, Brian Eisenberg. He was the one that said, “Hey, this is awesome”.

Shawn Sherman  01:40

I was at Pitchapalooza, this would have been about four years ago. It worked on Brian and his son, and it worked on Chris Bryant’s dad, we helped him with some pain.

Shawn Sherman  01:50

We were all sitting around, having a little powwow after the first day at pitchapalooza. Brian’s a very complimentary, such a helpful guy, such a cool dude. He was like, “Can I give you some criticism?”

Shawn Sherman  01:59

I’m like, yep. “Is the name reset? You need a better name”. I thought that’s the only thing that was complete, and so he encouraged me to get a new name. I had a group of my clients and friends that are really into marketing, and it wasn’t going anywhere.

Shawn Sherman  02:15

My one friend, Patti, she checked back in, we hadn’t communicated about three or four days. She asked, how’s the name going? And I’m like, “nada”. She went “Oh, it’s back to square one”. Sounds like a happy accident.

Joey Myers  02:30

Wow, that’s cool.

Shawn Sherman  02:31

Yeah

Joey Myers  02:32

I did not know that. That’s cool. I like that. I liked reset before, after we talked to have a good idea of what you do when it comes to mobility exercises, but that makes sense, when you say back to square one, square one systems. I love it.

Joey Myers  02:45

Now, let’s go into that a little bit. What’s the elevator pitch of what you’re doing? Like a Pitchpalooza, you have a booth there, and somebody comes walking up and says, “What is square one system?”

 

What is your mobility exercises elevator pitch for the Square1System?

Shawn Sherman  02:56

That’s the hardest question that everybody asks me, it seems so easy, but I think since we’re kind of tapping into some new grounds, that’s a really difficult question. It’s one of the things I’ve been struggling for years.

Shawn Sherman  03:05

I would say as briefly as I possibly can, my mobility exercises elevator pitch would be, we are basically trying to identify where your sixth sense proprioception, this internal feel, where there are deficiencies with your proprioception.

Shawn Sherman  03:23

We’re able to identify and pinpoint where you are individually, having an issue between your brain, your body parts and the ground, and we’re able to restore that perception from unsafe back to safe.

Shawn Sherman  03:38

When we restore unsafe perceptions back to safe, there’s less of a need of the human body and the brain to compensate. Therefore, we’re able to help people that are post-surgical and have rehab issues to the best athletes in the world, because all of us have some flawed perceptions in this area of proprioception, we’re able to restore that, get it back closer and closer to our optimal design.

Shawn Sherman  04:02

The ramifications of that are, you know, increase exit velocity for hitters, increase throwing velocities for throwers, and less aches and pains, better mobility, and all the other good stuff that we all want to get out of exercise.

Shawn Sherman  04:16

What we’re doing is we’re not a replacement for exercise, we’re just this missing prerequisite step, we’re just kind of moving this continuum of movement from left to right.

Shawn Sherman  04:25

We’re just adding on a little bit in the front end, where we’re just going a little deeper than we think other systems that are currently existing out there. That’s a long mobility exercises elevator speech, sorry.

Joey Myers  04:35

That’s okay. It was interesting. What were some of the aha moments where you know you’re in the strength conditioning field and I don’t know if you started down that path of where you’re at now, I’m sure maybe you’ve stumbled on to it like a lot of us have.

Joey Myers  04:49

Where was that aha moment where you saw the rabbit hole, then you started digging? What was that? Where you saw the rabbit hole?

 

Where was that aha moment where you saw the rabbit hole, then you started digging?

Shawn Sherman  04:56

It’s so funny. Absolutely, that we’ve had these different moments. That on very well, that’s awesome.

Shawn Sherman  05:10

My moment was, I was using this other mobility exercises system, and that other system was very much centered around this idea that restrictions and range of motion are always protective muscle guarding.

Shawn Sherman  05:23

That’s true, a lot of the time, protective muscle guarding is a very real issue that we all have.

Shawn Sherman  05:30

The system I was using, I was helping a lot of people with that, but I had this one client, that was not getting good results with that system. I was always trying to help them, and I just really kept doubling down and tripling down, and doing it with more gusto, but we weren’t getting anywhere.

Shawn Sherman  05:47

What happened was, I took the opposite mobility exercises approach. I started thinking well, this isn’t working, why not just do the polar opposite of what I was trained to do?

Shawn Sherman  05:56

This guy’s name is Alan, instead of viewing Alan’s issues as protective muscle guarding, I don’t, at that point, I didn’t know what the other side of the coin was, but I did kind of pursued the other side of the coin, now I would say, it’s probably like a joint impingement would be the polar opposite of protective muscle guarding.

Shawn Sherman  06:12

I didn’t know that at the time, I just knew I got to try something different. Let’s just do the polar opposite, and when I did that with him, he had a pain alleviation. He had this issue of back pain, hip pain for over 20 years. All his pain was gone.

Shawn Sherman  06:24

He started standing two or three inches taller, and he played golf that next morning, it took 12 strokes off the best round of golf he’s shot since the late 80s. I didn’t believe in that verse, I thought he’s just calling me up and just yanking my chain, but that was the impetus moment.

Shawn Sherman  06:40

Wow, I did the opposite of what quote unquote, they told me to do, and end up having the best result I’ve ever had with a client.

Shawn Sherman  06:48

Basically, the reality of “whoa, you’re really onto something here” just slapped me right in the face. I didn’t know what was going on, I just knew the opposite mobility exercises approach, and that just pushed me to dig in further and further and try to come up with an explanation as to what I unwittingly kind of happen across, it’s how it happened. It was a happy accident.

Joey Myers  07:10

I think the traditional model, and maybe what you’re talking about is the stretch, you know, when you have a joint that’s being protected, and then you get a tight muscle on one side, and then you get to the muscle that gets really long.

Joey Myers  07:24

It’s this relationship between length and length-tension relationship. The traditional model is typically to stretch out the tight muscle and to power up the weak muscle or the muscle that’s been stretched too much.

 

Why is the traditional model of ‘stretch what’s tight and strengthen what’s weak’ not so effective?

Shawn Sherman  07:43

Everybody thinks “it’s stretch what’s tight, strengthen what’s weak”. It sounds good on a T-shirt, but that doesn’t work on a lot of people. If that works, then why are these rehab cycles taking months and months to relieve back pain?

Shawn Sherman  07:54

Why does someone have a recurring restriction issue? Like, why don’t I stretch this guy 300 days in a row? Why is it still coming back?

Shawn Sherman  08:02

It is all about length tension relationships, but what we’re uncovering more and more is if we can get the brain to perceive that all of our joint actions are safe in relationship to when there’s ground contact, we’re going to get this effect to last longer.

Shawn Sherman  08:16

Stretch what’s tight, strengthen what’s weak, that’s not saying that it’s wrong, it’s just that it’s not always correct. How’s that?

Joey Myers  08:24

Yes, I like that. Like you explored every different mobility exercises avenue and all that kind of stuff. The stretching and it just takes forever, if anything, to get there.

Joey Myers  08:34

I know, there’s a couple of gymnastic programs that are online and major stretching stuff, and you got to spend 45 minutes to an hour, and you’re stretching, and you got to do it like two times a week, like a split stretch where you’re working a lot of hamstring stuff, and you got to do it two times a week, and those are brutal.

Joey Myers  08:54

When you take your system, how long are you talking? Like hour long sessions? How many times a week?

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What does the mobility exercises timeline look like using your system?  When do you see the benefits?

Shawn Sherman  09:03

It depends on the population I’m working with. I have a little studio in the suburbs of Chicago, so my clients, the word of mouth primarily, they said they find me, I do hour long sessions with those folks.

Shawn Sherman  09:18

Versus if a team hires me to come in eight-hour day, I might have to work on 25 guys, then it might get 20-minute session. We do a lot of anywhere from 15-20 minutes up to an hour-long session.

Shawn Sherman  09:31

In private practice, people come in and see me, a lot of times they have pain, I typically start everybody off with a three-session package. I start off our relationship with three one-hour sessions, and then if they want to hire me to take him through some exercise stuff, that’s great.

Shawn Sherman  09:46

Just for the square one stuff, we’re making some really killer progress and somewhere between one and three hours. When teams hire me, these guys are young, they’re younger, they’re healthier population who find me personally, we’re seeing fantastic results in 15 minutes-20 minutes.

Shawn Sherman  10:04

Because once we change that perception, what happens is the brain doesn’t have to govern back the throttle, it literally can make that true athlete gets to come out.

Shawn Sherman  10:14

Kind of back to what we were saying earlier, it takes a long time, 45 minutes to change tissue. 45 minutes a day for six weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks to start changing tissue for a more long-term basis, but if we can get the brain to not perceive that the ground is a threat, the changes are pretty much instantaneous.

Shawn Sherman  10:32

We start seeing range of motion changes occur within the first two, three minutes with the mobility exercises. As we work through layers and layers of compensation, the effect starts being longer lasting probably after 20 or 30 minutes session.

Shawn Sherman  10:47

Again, not a long answer for you, I’ll say anywhere between 30 minutes and two or three hours, we have a person in a pretty good place, and that’s really on a maintenance program.

Shawn Sherman  10:55

That would vary on the individual what maintenance might look like. Most of my clients, I see them a couple, two-three times a year, and I’d say “hey, come back in”, because they might be working with another strength coach or another personal trainer.

Shawn Sherman  11:07

I’m not trying to take anybody else’s business; I want to be the guy that’s kind of fill some gaps and be a resource for these other professionals out there.

Joey Myers  11:14

Yes, and what I want people to understand, when I went into training people and fitness and things like that, I took more of the corrective science route. I know it’s fun to help people lose weight, and all that kind of stuff, but I think there’s more problem solving and things that go on.

Joey Myers  11:30

I like to use the brain power a little bit more when people come in, they got a shoulder issue or whatever. Going through that mobility exercises rabbit hole, I feel is a lot better.

Joey Myers  11:42

When you’re working with somebody, just to give people an idea of ball exit speed, like on average, what you see change wise. How much work that you work on somebody?

Joey Myers  11:51

If it’s 15 minutes, half hour, and you don’t have to break it down that much, but just as an overall ballpark? What are you seeing on the ball exit speed increase for hitters and the velocity increase for pitchers?

 

After using your system, what are you seeing on the ball exit speed increase for hitters and the velocity increase for pitchers?

Shawn Sherman  12:02

Specifically, baseball players, I used to be on staff with the Chicago Cubs. My last year with the Cubbies, that occurred right after that impetus moment. Those guys in a 09, because my impetus moment was in 08, and that Cubbies team, they had access to the early version of this.

Shawn Sherman  12:21

Most of our data that we’ve collected has been on high school and up to D1 hitters and throwers. We’ve gone in there, and we’ve given each of these guys 10- or 15-minute sessions.

Shawn Sherman  12:34

Typically, with exit velocity, which we’ve seen more of, we haven’t done as much on throwers, but on exit velocity, I know with this one community college, I think we worked on 12 or 13 hitters.

Shawn Sherman  12:45

Of those 12 or 13, we had one guy where there’s no change, it didn’t get worse, it just stayed the same, but the other 11 or 12 guys all improved somewhere between two mile an hour exit velo and 15.

Shawn Sherman  12:57

I think there were two or three of the guys who were double digits. It was not the majority; our expectation isn’t everybody’s going to hit 10 or 12 or 15 mile an hour harder. But about 20 or 25% of the guys are going to probably experience eight to 12 mile per hour harder.

Shawn Sherman  13:11

We averaged, I think it was five or six miles per hour. We’re talking some really serious changes.

Shawn Sherman  13:19

Before you’re rolling here with Ryan Johansen, who’s with the White Sox, he has his own private studio. We’ve had, we’ve had some crazy numbers there. We’ve had guys that after two or three sessions, where we’ve seen 12-13-14 mile an hour increases.

Shawn Sherman  13:33

We had a thrower there, there’s a high school kid, and I’m more about movements, I don’t care if I’m working on football, basketball, grandma just had a hip replacement, I’m just really going to help people move better, so I might be mistaken here.

Shawn Sherman  13:48

But we had just one high school thrower, and I believe he was kind of an average high school kid, probably an average starter. This guy is not getting looked at by pro teams or anything.

Shawn Sherman  13:58

His average throwing velocity was I think at 81.3. That’s probably good, but not amazing. Is that accurate?

Joey Myers  14:11

Yes.

Shawn Sherman  14:12

If he can get a little few more mile an hour and have some opportunities in college probably, but it was 81.3, so we started working on them, and we did a 20 or 25 minute session, and there were multiple coaches around the table.

Shawn Sherman  14:24

What we started doing was, I’m explaining what I’m doing. In 25 minutes, I probably only did about 10 or 15 minute mobility exercises work as I wanted to educate these guys as well.

Shawn Sherman  14:32

We had a bullpen, we threw I think 35 or 38 throws, and I might be off by a smidge, but I think it was his first 17 throws were all PRs. Everything he threw was 81.4 or higher.

Shawn Sherman  14:46

In that bullpen, out of those 35 or 38 throws, all but three or four were personal best. He hit like 83 on change, 84 on change. I proceed to see him for a session maybe 10- or 15-minute session once a week.

Shawn Sherman  15:01

Within five weeks he was up to, I think it was 88.9, about eight mile an hour.

Joey Myers  15:06

Wow

Shawn Sherman  15:09

Maybe he had four to six, 10-to-15-minute sessions. Maybe an hour and a half, two hours of work spread out over four to six weeks. That was at Johansen’s place there in Elgin, Illinois.

Joey Myers  15:22

That’s taken a guy from NAIA at that 81 miles an hour up to 88. Now we’re talking D1, I don’t know if he’s a lefty or a righty.

Shawn Sherman  15:32

I’m pretty sure he’s a lefty, too. I could be mistaken, but quite sure the left versus man is extra excited too.

Joey Myers  15:38

80-88 is a lefty, it’s definitely D1 and possibly professional. I want people to understand what that shift in that, I guess the ability for them to move better without compensation.

Joey Myers  15:54

What first caught my attention, I think Brian Eisenberg, he retweeted something that you had tweeted, and it was to the effect of the best hitters or the best athletes will do things with less compensation or less getting off the path, and the more amateur athletes, compensation wise, will put numbers to it.

Joey Myers  16:15

If something like 55 different pathways outside of the most efficient were the best, like LeBron James and probably Miguel Cabrera, and Mike Trout, those guys end up around seven different deviations off the normal. Can you talk about that a little bit?

 

What does the fixing movement compensation look like?

Shawn Sherman  16:30

I can’t remember if those numbers came from something I had posted or if I was using some arbitrary numbers, I can’t remember.

Shawn Sherman  16:40

I use the analogy all the time, like the GPS, so guys like us, we’re not that old, but we can remember when we first got our licenses. If you want to drive out of state, you get a roadmap, and you have your buddy with you on the road trip, and he’s telling you to go here, to go there with this GPS thing.

Shawn Sherman  16:56

What we do is we pop in our destination, and bounces these images, these signals off satellites, and it says, check it out, there’s some traffic ahead or there’s construction, it’s going to take longer, but it’s still going to give you the most efficient course in light of the obstacles ahead of you.

Shawn Sherman  17:12

That’s how we all operate. We have all sprained ankles, we’ve all fallen out of bed, we’ve had different stress exposures over life. That’s really at the core and heart of what causes us to rewire around these optimal efficient pathways. None of us are immune to it.

Shawn Sherman  17:27

If we have to take the long way around the barn, or you have to take the long way to get from point A to point B, you have really one choice, all you can do is just drive faster, and get more skilled at driving on the back roads, but if we can actually get rid of the obstacles and traffic jams, you think there’s more optimal routes, instantly the athlete is better.

Shawn Sherman  17:46

It doesn’t take practice, it doesn’t take motor learning, but we’re not anti-rehearsal and repetition. We’re just saying, why don’t we clear out the hardware, let’s get these pathways open. You can get more goodies out when you take your athlete through skill sessions, or however you practice.

Shawn Sherman  18:03

It’s really about just reducing, given the best option to the athlete. The brain, I would say is not stupid, it doesn’t want to go the long way around the barn, it does so because it thinks it has to, but once you remove those obstacles, it’s going to take the most efficient pathway. That’s why we see posture improvements and we see pain alleviation.

Shawn Sherman  18:24

I’m not a baseball coach, and we work with these guys, and they’re up to three-four mile an hour and their exit velocity. It’s not because I gave him a good pep talk or technique, we might inadvertently change our technique, but we didn’t really change their approach. We just give them more options to solve these movement problems.

Joey Myers  18:43

I love that mobility exercises analogy, that GPS analogy. It’s not exactly the same, but what I use with my hitters on the movement side, when you address the physical movement moving better to perform better versus the strength conditioning to make stronger, and you know that stuff is good, but I use the analogy of the car getting brand new tires on misaligned front end.

Joey Myers  19:05

The dealer will tell you, you got 80,000 miles for these tires, and it should last you 80,000 but if they don’t fix the front end, and you still got these wheels, the wheel system is pointing this way where it should be straight, with those tires you’re not going to get 80,000, you’re going to get 40,000.

Joey Myers  19:21

You’re talking about installing a GPS system that will coordinate the right direction but will also address the system itself— the hardware, like you said.

Shawn Sherman  19:35

It’s almost like we have this magic button where it was really cool instead of, I’ll take the best route, we’re saying, no, you have a button on your GPS and just got rid of all the traffic, that’s what square one is doing.

Shawn Sherman  19:45

It instantly gets rid of stuff like that. It’s even better than GPS, it’s like the secret sauce magic button, you hit it and there are no silver bullets. We’re not doing magic, but it looks like magic, like you said before, we’re not anti-strengthening and rehearsal. That’s huge, we need that.

Shawn Sherman  20:07

But what if you’re missing this piece? There’s so much low hanging fruit that the industry hasn’t taken advantage of, yet. That’s what this represents, and also to the early adopters are the ones who get to really reap the benefit, because the coaches and the teams are taking advantage of what we’re doing right now.

Shawn Sherman  20:25

It’s an advantage over whoever they’re competing against. Down the road, everybody’s playing catch up, you got to keep up with the Joneses, just like I was thinking back to strength coaching.

Shawn Sherman  20:34

I think it was Boyd Epley at the University of Nebraska, he was like the first strength coach, this is back in the late 60s, early 70s. For 5,10,15 years, the University of Nebraska had a major competitive advantage over their competition, because they’re doing strength training, and the Steelers were doing it, but they weren’t competing in the NFL.

Shawn Sherman  20:50

You had Nebraska and you had the Pittsburgh Steelers; they are the early adopters of strength and conditioning back in the day. What we have is this missing piece that is such an awesome complement to what you’re already doing.

Shawn Sherman  21:02

That’s what we tell people, you don’t need to burn the bridges on what you’re doing. This is just representing that there’s some rocket fuel for what you’re doing when you want to add this to what you’re doing. This is just a unique and cool way to extract more performance from all your athletes.

Joey Myers  21:19

Yes, big mobility exercises competitive advantage. When I see a product or service, I get it, of course, I’ve had my head in this and I get it probably a little bit quicker than some coaches. This is something that my coaches that follow me and my parents and my instructors, this is something that they need to look into.

Joey Myers  21:42

One question before we get to where people can find you, I want to be respectful of your time. I know you’ve probably heard, being over at Ryan’s place, about the Tommy John dilemma.

Joey Myers  21:54

What do you feel from the square one system? I don’t know if you’ve seen guys that are maybe thinking about getting the surgery or whatever. What has your experience been with Tommy John, maybe athletes that are looking at that or have that?

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What has your experience been with Tommy John, maybe athletes that are looking at that or have that?

Shawn Sherman  22:10

I am going to go right back to your mobility exercises analogy, you talked about when the tires and the front-end alignment is just off a little, not only are you going get 40,000 instead of 80,000, with that 40,000 miles, but you’re at a increased risk of also wrecking your car.

Shawn Sherman  22:27

It’s not just lack of performance and longevity; we’re talking about increased risk of injury. Tissue gets placed at mechanical disadvantage position based on poor perception. There we have an altered length tension relationship. That’s going to be poor positioning of all of our joints, we’re going to become more susceptible to becoming injured.

Shawn Sherman  22:50

Now, throwing a baseball, little I know about baseball, I don’t really know as much as probably most of your coaches about baseball.

Joey Myers  22:58

You know human movement.

Shawn Sherman  23:01

I know that throwing a baseball, it might be the most aggressive thing that you can do in sports, besides contact sport, like football running back, you’re running a smash again, and another guy, that has its own set of wheels.

Shawn Sherman  23:16

In non-contact things, you can do athletics, it’s crazy, because you’re literally doing as much high velocity as you can, and you don’t have to put the brakes on. You’re relying upon your tissue to decelerate the limb.

Shawn Sherman  23:30

Things better be perfect, or it’s going to go awry really quick, or you might get away with it for three years or five years or 10 years, but how many D1 and professional throwers get to avoid Tommy John, not many of them.

Shawn Sherman  23:47

If you don’t have pristine mechanics, it’s just a matter of time. I don’t have a specific story to share with you about Tommy John, we avoided it.

Shawn Sherman  23:59

I just think if it’s before Tommy John, there’s going to be the benefit of cleaning up your neural mechanics, so that you inadvertently just make better decisions, more efficient decisions. At least buying yourself more time.

Shawn Sherman  24:12

If I was a baseball guy, I’d rather have Tommy John at 32 than an 18 or 21. There’s that piece, I have to theorize that we’re going to help people go longer before they would get into some situation like that or post-surgical.

Shawn Sherman  24:26

We have all kinds of post-surgical stories on name and injury. We probably have seen people post rehab for hip replacement, even Tommy John, I know some guys that used to work with the Cubs, with some guys that had those issues.

Shawn Sherman  24:39

By getting that perception change better, it’s going to just get your rehab mobility exercises, your conditioning exercises, you’re going to get more goodies out of whatever it is you’re trying to do.

Shawn Sherman  24:50

I don’t have a specific “oh, yeah, here’s exactly what we’re doing, Tommy John”. I just think if we can get those neuro mechanics better, that’s going to be nothing but positive for the athlete to have a longer, healthier career, whether you’re just in high school, you’re trying to make the high school team, trying to get a college scholarship, trying to get to that next level where you actually get a paycheck.

Shawn Sherman  25:11

This isn’t going to do anything except for better efficiency is better movement, it’s better performance, it’s very generic in general.

Shawn Sherman  25:20

We’ve seen some really cool stories with all kinds of different injuries. I don’t have a specific time of John’s story in my mind right now to share.

Joey Myers  25:27

I have one kid that that I’m working with. Over the last year, he’s been having a hard time, he’s a lefty thrower but a righty hitter.

Joey Myers  25:33

I work with him hitting, my buddy who’s a pitching guy, but he just came off of a surgery where they took, I guess, the nerve in the elbow here, and they moved it because he was having numbness of his hand anytime he was in a straightened position or in a real bicep type position.

Joey Myers  25:52

He would have this numbness into his fingers. Anyway, they did the surgery and shifted that nerve up, and now he doesn’t have the numbness.

Joey Myers  26:01

He doesn’t have the pain he was having before, but when he’s throwing, he’s still having the pain, because he’s young, he’s got up here.

Joey Myers  26:09

What was interesting is when he got his post-surgery, met with the doctor, he was like, “I still have pain when I throw” and the doctor who went in, and decided when he went in and did the surgery originally, he didn’t need Tommy John.

Joey Myers  26:23

He was like, I don’t think you need it, I think you’re good. Then, his post-surgery, he said, I still got the pain, and the doc goes, “we can go in and do Tommy John”. He already told you, you don’t need it. Why would he even advise that? The doctor doesn’t really know what’s going on.

Shawn Sherman  26:41

You know structure, they’re at the top, they’re the kings of structure. The whole thing is, if you’re not paying attention to function, that’s only part of the equation here.

Shawn Sherman  26:53

I’m not trying to shine a light on square one, but it’s almost like what we’re doing is kind of the kings of functions, they let us make sure that the brain perceives that all these joint actions can handle load, if it can handle load, the body can make better decisions.

Shawn Sherman  27:08

There has to be a functional and structural base, and we need doctors, and we need people that are dealing with structure in our corners. This isn’t magic and great coaching isn’t magic.

Shawn Sherman  27:18

We need skill, we need motor learning, but we need this motor control and we got to improve this functional piece. Sometimes things go sideways, and you need a structural interventionism.

Shawn Sherman  27:31

Asking a surgeon functional questions, they might not be that well versed in throwing mechanics or just human movement. They’re phenomenal, clearly at structure, but that’s like asking your accountant how to make a cake.

Shawn Sherman  27:48

What is the role that we each play, and we all have our own unique roles. That’s why all athletes, all coaches, we need a team around us because everybody has different pieces of this whole human movement and human performance puzzle.

Joey Myers  28:00

I love that, Shawn. Well, I want to be respectful of your time, we got two minutes over. Where can people find you? What kind of mobility exercises projects you got going on now? Just let people know.

 

Where can people find you? What kind of projects you got going on now?

Shawn Sherman  28:11

Thank you again for having me on your program and giving us opportunity to be in front of your audience. I’m honored to be here, so thank you for reaching out. I love hearing your talk about my stuff, we haven’t even met in person, you haven’t seen it, so it’s really a huge compliment having me on.

Shawn Sherman  28:29

You already mentioned our website, Square1System.com. I have the same handle on Instagram, @square1system, that’s where I’m most active, if people want to kind of come and check our stuff out.

Shawn Sherman  28:42

The projects we have going on, we got a lot of information now in an online format. We kind of sell two different programs, we have one for people who want to become a student of our system, where there’s a whole skill developmental piece, that’s called square one at square one.

Shawn Sherman  29:00

We have this other piece called signal six, and that’s much more affordable. What’s cool about it is, it requires no skill, it requires very little understanding. It’s designed for coaches who are working with teams of athletes, and that product is under 100 bucks. It’s called signal six.

Shawn Sherman  29:16

It’s kind of like a mobility exercises no-brainer, no skill, you can implement it really quick with groups of athletes. I think that a lot of baseball coaches a lot of strength and performance people, that would be a great product to test the waters with us and see some cool things happen. Those are big projects.

Joey Myers  29:32

That’s an online video training, right?

Shawn Sherman  29:34

Yep. The signal six is an hour and a half program. If that’s too long for you, there’s like two videos within it, the bracket will be jumping ahead.

Joey Myers  29:43

I hope you can take the time

Shawn Sherman  29:47

If you want to hear me talk and blather for an hour or 10 at all the other video, there’s like two videos in there. You just do that, emulate that, you’re golden.

Shawn Sherman  29:54

There are other projects and stuff we’re not allowed to talk about. I can’t mention specific teams that we’re working with. We got a couple teams in the major leagues looking at us right now.

Shawn Sherman  30:05

Individual coaches there, a couple teams in the NFL already. We got US Special Forces that reached out over the last few months. I’m not talking about that yet, but we got some really cool stuff. I can’t wait till we can talk about that.

Shawn Sherman  30:21

It’s just more behind the scenes, we got some really cool things bubbling and some really high-level people are looking at our stuff, and guys like you, because what I find is once you get to know a guy like you, you start running in the same circle, all these D1 professional and special force guys, you guys all know each other, it’s kind of fun. You guys are starting to let me in the cool clubs.

Joey Myers  30:44

It took a while for me to get into the mobility exercises cool club, I know how it is to be able to go from the bottom of the heap and it’s not bad or anything, it’s just that no one knows who you are, yet.

Shawn Sherman  30:54

Once they see you’re doing good stuff, when you get there, you get their thumbs up and they want to tell their buddies because most of us like to help other people, and that’s really what it’s about.

Shawn Sherman  31:06

I think you’re trying to help people with your audience and having me on, and I appreciate you helping me, it’s all about win-win-wins. I got to win, you got to win.

Joey Myers  31:17

That’s why I want to have you on, the big thing is helping kids, especially if it comes to pain, get out of pain. Nothing breaks my heart more than having a kid come in with lower back pain or like the hitter-pitcher that I work with, talked about with the ulnar nerve thing, it just breaks my heart and I just want to be able to help them out.

Joey Myers  31:37

There are many other coaches, parents, and instructors, just like us that want to do that. I really appreciate your time, and thank you for coming on, Shawn. I know you’re a busy guy.

Joey Myers  31:47

You got the Pennsylvania-Chicago, you’re going back and forth in two different headquarters. I appreciate your time, brother, and maybe we’ll do a part two at some point. It’s got to get the game out for you.

Shawn Sherman  32:01

I really appreciate what you’re doing, man. Thank you so much.

Joey Myers  32:04

You got it, brother. Have a good rest of your week.

Shawn Sherman  32:06

You too, man. Thanks.

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Perfect Baseball Swing

Perfect Baseball Swing Webinar? [VIDEO]

Where Power Secret is & Where to Find it: Perfect Baseball Swing Webinar Part-2…

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.

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Here’s are the three parts:

  1. Baseball Trainers Near Me? Part-1,
  2. [YOU ARE HERE] Perfect Baseball Swing Webinar? Part-2, and
  3. COMING SOON!!

The following is the continued transcript to the perfect baseball swing webinar part-2… (about 18-minutes reading time)

‘Showing Numbers’ and ‘Neck Pressure’Perfect Baseball Swing

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.

Perfect Baseball Swing Webinar: Spinal Engine Mechanics

03:59

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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12:53

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…

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.

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Hitting Training For Baseball & Softball Swing Trainers | Hitting Performance Lab

Best Baseball Hitting Net EVER? [VIDEO]

Backspin Tee Baseball Hitting Net: 4 Mistakes Traditional Nets Make

 

 

A baseball hitting net isn’t sexy, I know.  They’re boring actually.  Like the batting tee was before Backspin Tee came along.  They have changed the game AGAIN!!

Before watching the video above, consider how Backspin Tee frames their new ‘Launch Angle’ baseball hitting net:Baseball Hitting Net: Backspin Tee

“We know what your thinking, why does this net have a top pocket? The answer: Because that is where line drives are hit. Don’t believe us? We put up the hits that went into the top pockets and the bottom pockets. Every ball got into the bottom pocket was a ground ball….all line drives were hit at the top pockets. This may be a shocker to some people….but this is where line drives have always been. Not re-inventing the game, simply showing it more clarity.”

BREAKING NEWS: “Launch angles” are a data point.  Check out this Fangraphs.com article titled: “Misconceptions About Launch Angle”

A lot of these coaches don’t like the launch angle swing. Well, launch angle is a number. The launch angle is the angle of the ball coming off the bat. It’s hard for hitters to control it.

However, hitters can control their barrel Attack Angle.  The angle the barrel takes to the incoming pitch.  Launch and Attack Angles don’t have to be the same. And most likely they aren’t going to be.  But hitters can better control the latter, not so much the former.

Backspin Tee changed how we use a batting tee.  Now they’re changing the baseball hitting net…

The Net that Helps to Hit More Line Drives

Think about some of the challenges you’ve faced with regular baseball hitting nets?

  1. Takes too long to setup,
  2. Not high enough – balls sailing over the net,
  3. Not wide enough – balls hooking or slicing outside the net, and
  4. Having only one “sock” target to hit into that promotes low level line drives or ground-balls.

#1: Takes too long to setup

Backspin Tee’s Launch Angle baseball hitting net takes 3-minutes to setup… connect the poles, slide them through the sleeves, then connect to base poles…

#2: Not high enough – balls sailing over the net

Many of my local hitters have done damage to garage door windows and masonry because of this.  I know my online lessons located in cold parts of the country, have done damage to inanimate basement objects.

This net is 10-feet tall!  With the low level line drive “sock” target above the typical baseball hitting net one. Typical Bownets are 7-feet tall.

#3: Not wide enough – balls hooking or slicing outside the net

Baseball Hitting Net

Easily portable and comes with a handy-dandy carrying case.

Same as #2, but my young hitters have to thread the needle when practicing their middle in or middle away approach.  Not a lot of margin for error with traditional hitting nets.

This baseball hitting net is 7-feet wide!  Bownets are 7-feet wide as well, but with Backspin Tee’s hitting net, the extra 3-feet of height will catch any high hooks or slices.

And last, but certainly not least…

#4: Having only one “sock” target to hit into that promotes low level line drives or ground-balls

If you do hit a ground ball, there’s a sock net there for you.  And if you do happen to pop up the ball, there’s a better chance the ball won’t sail over the net and do damage.

Look, I teach my hitters to hit the ball back through the “tube”.  If hitter is working off the batting tee, and has the ball set at 4-feet from the ground, then ball should come off bat 4-feet off ground.  If the ball is 2-inches from the ground, then ball should come off bat 2-inches off ground.  Same with a pitched ball.  Hit the ball back through the “tube”

What’s cool about the Backspin Tee baseball hitting net, now there’s a way for your hitter to have ‘launch angle’ target practice.  This Joey Votto interview post titled: “Why Coaches SHOULD NOT Be Obsessed With Launch Angles” talks about the value of barrel control.

Here’s a great example of this, using their Angle Control Drill…

Quick stats on Backspin Tee’s launch angle baseball hitting net:

  • 7′ Wide X 10′ Tall.
  • Double stitched wrapping around the poles,
  • Carry case,
  • Easily portable (goes up in LESS than 3-MINUTES!!),
  • 30-Day Money Back Guarantee, and
  • If you do hit a ground ball, we have a sock net there for you, and if you do happen to pop up the ball, its great at being tall enough to catch it.
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Best Wooden Baseball Bats

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

Amazon’s Top-10 Youth & Adult Model Wooden Baseball Bats

Here’s a good wooden baseball bats article from JustBats.com titled, “Wood Bats or Aluminum Bats?”

I often get asked by my parents whether their player should be hitting with wood.  My answer is YES!!!  Especially overloaded wood bats, which I’ll share my favorite shortly.

As of this writing, here are the TOP-10 wooden baseball bats on Amazon, according to average star ratings, youth or adult models, and number of reviews…

Youth Models

#10 – Big Drop Youth Maple Wood Bat, 5-8 Drop, 2.5″ Barrel

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

#9 – Brett Bros. Maple/Bamboo Wood Youth Bat

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

#8 – SAM BAT Youth LL CD1 Maple Wood Bat

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

#7 – Louisville Slugger 2020 Youth Legacy Maple Wood Bat Series

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

#6 – Marucci Andrew McCutchen Maple Wood Youth Bat

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

#5 – Rawlings Adirondack Ash Wood Youth Bat

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

#4 – HARD 2 THE CORE Maple Wood Bat, Big Barrel I-13 Bat

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

#3 – Marucci Albert Pujols Maple Wood Youth Baseball Bat

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

#2 – Wilson Louisville Slugger Youth Ash Natural Tball

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

#1 – Louisville Slugger 2020 Youth Genuine Baseball Bat Series

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

 

Adult Models

#10 – BARNETT Baseball PRO Maple Wood Bat

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

#9 – Rawlings Velo Ash Wood Bat

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

#8 – Pinnacle Sports Adult 30 Day-Warranty Wood Bat

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

#7 – Mizuno 2014 Maple Carbon Composite Wood Bat

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

#6 – Easton 34″ North American Maple Wood Softball Bat

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

#5 – EASTON K2000 White Ash Wood Bat, 2021, Balanced, Traditional Knob, Handcrafted in USA

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

#4 – Wilson Louisville Slugger Genuine Series 3X Ash Mixed Wood Bat, 32/29

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

#3 – Wilson Louisville Slugger Genuine Series 3X Ash Mixed Bat, 33/30

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

#2 – EASTON White Ash Wooden Bat, Balanced, Traditional Knob, Handcrafted in USA

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

#1 – Wilson Louisville Slugger Genuine Series 3X Ash Mixed Wooden Bat 34/31

Best Wooden Baseball Bats

(Please note: clicking any images above will connect to Amazon.com.  These ARE affiliate links.  If you don’t want to click on the links, then that’s okay.  Just copy bat titles and paste into Amazon directly)

Aside from this top-10 wooden baseball bats post, here’s a complimentary Hitting Performance Lab post you might like, titled: “Baseball Training Equipment: Where The Best Is And Where To Get It”

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Hitting Training For Baseball & Softball Swing Trainers | Hitting Performance Lab

Do You Recognize The #1 Early Warning Sign Of Physically Harmful Hitting Instruction?

Jaime Cevallos Part-3 Interview: How to Turn Harmful Instruction into Safe & Effective

 

 

In case you missed any of the 3-part series…

Here’s what we’re going to discuss in Part-3 of the Jaime Cevallos interview:Do You Recognize The #1 Early Warning Sign Of Physically Harmful Hitting Instruction?

  • To show the numbers or not to show the numbers?
  • What about hand path?  What would you say about that?
  • Wrist snap: supinating snap or pronating snap?  And,
  • Why ‘barrel moves body’ approach is wearing holes in low backs.

The following is the transcription of the above video.  You can find Jaime Cevallos at the following places:

Enjoy!

 

To Show the Numbers or Not to Show the Numbers?

Joey Myers  00:05

…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.

Joey Myers  01:50

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.

 

Joey Myers  10:46

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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Hitting Training For Baseball & Softball Swing Trainers | Hitting Performance Lab

How To Wind Up The Body To Deliver More Force

Jaime Cevallos Part-2 Interview: What are the 3 most Important Things to Consistent Power?

 

 

In case you missed any of the 3-part series…

Here’s what we’re going to discuss in Part-2 of the Jaime Cevallos interview:

  • What are the BIG-3 for consistent power?
  • How do you wind up the body to deliver more force?
  • What is the Main Thing that Separates the Great Hitters from Average?
  • What are the 3 most Important Things to Consistent Power?

The following is the transcription of the above video.  You can find Jaime Cevallos at the following places:

Enjoy!

 

What are the BIG-3 for Consistent Power?How To Wind Up The Body To Deliver More Force

Joey Myers  00:06

…the application of it basically. And in the beginning, there was the big three is what I call it. So that was showing the numbers, so hitters showing their numbers to the pitcher, there was the downhill shoulder angle. So that’s the side bend side of it. And then there was the hiding of the hands.

 

Joey Myers  00:20

And I know you came to kind of a conclusion about that front arm shape being barred out or even slight bend, but pretty close to being barred out. So, the hands don’t necessarily they used to teach walk away from the hands, right? So that to me is translated as the hands going back towards the catcher, but it’s actually should go back at an angle back where we say hiding the hands from the pitcher. So, the hands should end up at landing somewhere above or behind the back heel.

 

Joey Myers  00:49

So if the pitcher is watching this hitter, and again, go look at Mike Trout, go look at JD Martinez. Go look at Mookie Betts. Look at all these guys and you’ll see them number one, showing their numbers. Number two, not all of them have a downward shoulder angle but many of them do; Miggy Cabrera, Ted Williams if you want to go back in the day, a lot of hitters in the Stan Musial, they used to say that it looked like he was a little kid peeking around the corner. Right.

 

Joey Myers  01:16

And it was that the showing numbers part of it. And you see them all hiding their hands. So, from the minute they start to at landing, you see their hands disappear. So those are the big three and what’s happening fascia wise is we’re taking the front shoulder, we’re taking the front shoulder and we’re bringing it down and in towards the back hip.

 

Joey Myers  01:37

So that gives you that slight down angle and it gets you… we’ve evolved showing numbers to more creating neck pressure. Because every hitter is different, you and me being a little bit older, although we do a lot of movement work on our own body so we probably move better than people our age. But a lot of hitters are different in how far they can get their head here because one of the biggest…. one of the biggest things that people hated was showing the numbers was that, well, it pulls the hitters eyes off the ball.

 

Joey Myers  02:04

And yeah, if you do it too much, but the head’s got to anchor down in a position, so if I go sideways, so the head’s got an anchor in a tracking position, not necessarily square off to the pitcher, but intercept where the balls coming in.  All Dr. Peter Fadde’s stuff and head anchors and then we just pull that shoulder underneath as far as you can. And that’s going to create some tension in the neck.

 

Joey Myers  02:28

So it’s like a wringing towel, like we’re wringing a towel out. So, where your head is on top, the top hand and that your shoulders are the bottom hand, and we’re just wringing as far as we can. We’re taking that spine, that section of the spine, and we’re just bringing it as hard as we can until landing and then we just let it go.

 

Joey Myers  02:44

So it’s kind of like, I call it more of a spring than some people call it rubber bands like get the rubber bands really tight and then let them go like a rubber band system. Kind of but it’s more it’s more spring, springy. So those are the big three if you connect the dots between what fascia is what the spinal engine is, it’s easy way to think about it is a wringing towel, like you’re wringing the towel, it’s loading that system up and then letting it go.

 

Joey Myers  03:10

And like I said, I ran quite a few swing experiments that proved that showing numbers versus not showing numbers, you add between four to six miles an hour bat speed, and I can’t remember if I did a ball exit speed one, but bat speed and ball exit speed are very similar. They’re like first or second cousins. So it’s very translatable. The down shoulders added four miles an hour of speed. And the showing numbers I think was three miles an hour, or one to two wasn’t quite as much. The big one was showing the numbers or creating that neck pressure.

 

Jaime Cevallos  03:41

So what this does is it winds up the body so that you can then deliver more force…

 

How do you Wind up the Body to Deliver more Force?

Joey Myers  03:48

Yes, yeah, it takes the slack out of the system. So slack being a little different than what how the human body because we talked about it’s more compression tension forces that’s taking slack out, but it’s almost like If you think about a car that goes into a ravine and then you have a Jeep with a winch on the front that you can take the cable, hook it up to the bumper of the car that’s been dropped in the ravine and to pull that car out, right, so you turn the winch on…

 

Joey Myers  04:15

And if you have slack in the cable that’s connected to the bumper, and you turn that winch on right away, because there’s slack in the cable, it’s going to just pull the bumper off, it’s not going to pull the car out of the ravine.

 

Joey Myers  04:25

So what you have to do first is after you hook it, hook the bumper, is you got to slowly take that slack out of the cable of the winch line and then turn it on and it’ll pull the whole car out. So that’s slack versus no slack. Some people out there have been on a what a toboggan on the lake, and you’ve been on a boat pulling you along, and you’re holding on to the ski line or whatever you hold on to the ski bar, right and they’re pulling you along.

 

Joey Myers  04:52

And we had a buddy who did this with us. And at the time, I was super strong. I was lifting a lot and he goes I’m going to do it as hard as I can to you, alright do it, bring it, bring it, man. So, he got it to where he’s pulling me at first. So, there was no slack in the line; line was nice and tight. And then he got me to where I started coming up to the side of the boat. So, he kind of slowed it down a little bit. And then I started kind of floating up and started putting slack in the line and then he floored it! And boom, and that I held on and there was one time I think I ended let go, but that amount of force all at once. It was a slack in the line.

 

Joey Myers  05:30

Oh my gosh. So what happens is…

 

Jaime Cevallos  05:34

You’re lucky you didn’t hurt yourself.

 

Joey Myers  05:36

Right? Yeah, dude, we were like 25 years old, right? ever get hurt. But that’s the thing. So when youth hitters, a lot of times what I see is these coaches say, keep your shoulders square. Don’t show your numbers to the pitcher for all these different reasons we can go into some other time, but they want the shoulders square. They don’t want you tilting them. They don’t want you turning them in. They want them square and then they want the hips to do everything.

 

Joey Myers  06:04

And so what’s happening is it’s putting slack in the system. Because to take slack out we just talked about is like that wringing towel, we have to wring the towel and then let it go. And that’s where you get a nice powerful move, consistently powerful move, and it’s safe on the spine versus the opposite where the coach wants this shoulder square doesn’t want any turn it in or down or anything like that. And they want the swing powered by the pelvis or the hips, they say explode the hips, load and explode the hips.

 

Joey Myers  06:34

And what happens there is you’re taking the equipment of the lower back, the set of five vertebrae is in the lower lower back, who actually are not made to rotate. They’re not made to, they’re not built to rotate the bones. Okay. All they can do is flex and extend. The rotation that you see is about seven to 12 degrees and this is via Tom Myers, and a pretty prominent, I can’t remember his name right now, physical therapists been around forever in the strength conditioning world [Charlie Weingroff, DPT, CSCS, a physical therapist, a trainer in New York City, and is pretty high up on the human performance food chain], seven to 12 degrees of rotation is all it’s allowed because of the muscles surrounding those bones.

 

Joey Myers  07:13

So that’s the rotation you see is that set that seven to 12 degrees rotation, you see, is because of the muscles surrounding the bones.  The thoracic spine, so shoulders and then the rest of it that attaches up to the top of the lumbar, the lower back is made to rotate is actually made to rotate 40 degrees, four-zero in both directions.

 

Joey Myers  07:34

So I should be able to do a good moving human body can move 40 degrees to the left and rotate 40 degrees to the right. So when you employ a part of the body that isn’t allowed to rotate, to rotate and to not only rotate but explode, like absolutely explode. Now what happens is we start wearing holes in the lower back, we see back spasms. We see herniated discs. 

 

Joey Myers  07:35

We see all kinds of stuff in the swings we were referring to earlier about the barrel moves the body, not the body moves barrel. So those ones that are teaching barrel moving the body, what I see in those swings is I see these hitters on Twitter where their back is arching their arching and you can almost draw for righties, you can draw a reverse C shape. And for lefties, you can draw a C shape like from their head, down their back and out their leg because they’re arching so much you can see this kind of C shape going on.

 

Joey Myers  08:32

And the problem with that is extension is okay, so if you arch your back in just a normal, a normal sagittal plane like a front to back plane, like you do a lunge or squat in a normal extension is fine. An arching of the back is fine. You see a gymnast when they swing the bar when they’re swinging under the bar, right? You’ll see them go into a globally flexed position where their spine kind of looks like this and then as they swing through, they go into a globally arched and global just means the whole body is arch. There’s not one little point that’s arched, say like in my head if I went and I just dropped my head back and I went into an extended position with my neck and not using my body as well, that’s that would be a local extension.

 

Joey Myers  09:17

Those aren’t usually good when they’re coupled with their rotation. So, when the hitter is going into an arched position, that by itself isn’t troublesome. But the minute you add a rotation in with that, now, when you arch you’re pushing the vertebrae together in your back when you arch. Okay, now that again isn’t a big deal, but the minute you start rotating, now you’re grinding and that is a problem and that’s what I see when you teach hitters the barrel moves the body and to snap the barrel back way back here.

 

Joey Myers  09:51

When I see those swings, I see those hitters arching their back and turning and it just makes me want to throw up because these coaches either, they’re, it’s like a cat, right? Cats are either really, really smart or they’re really, really stupid. And to me, it looks like those coaches don’t know any better. And they’re getting their information from some guy who doesn’t know any better, who knows better, but he’s not teaching the right thing and it’s just it’s horrible to see these young hitters doing that.

 

Jaime Cevallos  10:25

So, what you would say is the main thing that separates the great hitters from the average or the just the good has to do with this sort of building tension not creating slack in the torso area and the upper legs basically, of the body.

 

What is the Main Thing that Separates the Great Hitters from Average?

Joey Myers  10:51

Right, exactly. So if you go back and Ted Williams you look at Stan Musial, you look at even Babe Ruth, and not all of them have them have every single principle like they could have and they could have done better. You could even look at Tony Gwynn, right? There was an article I do that every time I put it up on social media, I said something in the article or in the headline to the effect of, could Gwynn have had more power?

 

Joey Myers  11:16

And I just did an analysis and took a look at his swing and pointed out areas where he could have maximized or optimized power. A lot of people don’t like that. You know, Tony, how could you be? You know, how many hits? Did you get the big leagues in? How could you take on Tony, when you don’t know what you’re talking about?

 

Joey Myers  11:31

I was like, no, it’s dude. It’s a thought experiment. I’m not going after the guy, right. He didn’t want to hit for power. Although, when he had his talk with Ted Williams, his power numbers sure went up a little bit because Teddy told him, Hey, you might want to pull the ball and own your pull field a little bit more. And that year after he had that talk with him, I think he went from like 11 home-runs a season I think he hit maybe 20 or 18 or something like that.

 

Joey Myers  11:54

But this idea that Ted Williams is probably one of the best one of the best at it, you see the showing numbers, or his in his case “the number” nine, you see his down shoulder angle. You see him hiding the hands. You see this locked out front lead arm when he started his swing.  Like he’s got it all, all of it.

 

Joey Myers  12:14

The only thing I don’t agree with that it’s not a bad thing per se. Extra motion, is the idea where he turned his hips in slightly. So, he kind of turned the hips in like he was turning towards the catcher. And I did this read a book you know that in high school and college and stuff like that because that’s where I thought power was in the pelvis.

 

Joey Myers  12:37

But if you think about, when I turn my hips in and I’m creating my neck pressure showing my numbers and I’m pulling the shoulder in well if my hips going away from my back hip, which I’m supposed to be taking my front hip and bringing or my front shoulder and bringing it to my back hip, with my back hip is going away and my front shoulder is chasing what you’re continually chasing. So, you never get to that point. Right?

 

Joey Myers  13:00

So if we just keep the pelvis in neutral, so belt buckle, pointing at home plate we don’t inward turn or anything, and just let the shoulders do what they do. Creating neck pressure showing numbers going into that position there. Then now we’re compressing where we need to and what happens is when you inward the pelvis and we’re seeing data on this, ZenoLink.com – Chris Welch.

 

Joey Myers  13:26

So he does a lot of experimentation. He’s kind of physical therapist guy, and very, very knowledgeable and he’s got a lot of data. He’s got force plates he’s got all this different stuff. And so, I had one of my online hitters went to him, Chris’s on the East Coast, went to him to go through all his testing evaluation stuff.

 

Joey Myers  13:45

And Chris was saying that this particular hitter’s barrel speed was super maximized behind him, which is again, the same people that teach barrel swings the body right so the barrel speed was increased or was maximized behind him, but by the time he got to impact it was slowing down. So answer that, how are we teaching something that’s actually slowing down your barrel by the time you get to impact…

 

Joey Myers  14:15

And there’s a couple different factors in that we can go into if you want, but that was the whole thing he was in inwardly rotating his pelvis and he was a lefty. So he was taken in rotating his pelvis in towards the catcher and then get to landing and then he would he would rotate, he would rotate back, you know the pelvis back and explode into the ball, but that was causing him to have a premature maximizing of bat speed. It wasn’t helping him it wasn’t maximizing his ball exit speed.

 

Jaime Cevallos  14:46

Now, so the most important thing, you mentioned three things, say those, again…

 

What are the 3 most Important Things to Consistent Power?

Joey Myers  14:54

The spine, of the spine?

 

Jaime Cevallos  14:57

Well, just that I think there were just three things that were…

 

Joey Myers  14:59

You’re talking about?

 

Joey Myers  15:02

Oh, oh, oh…the three things the big three, okay, so showing numbers or create neck pressure.  If I’m here, I’m here. So, my head anchors in a tracking position, shoulder comes pulling underneath as far as I can just like you’re wringing a towel out right, my head and my shoulders. I’m bringing that towel out, creating pressure in the neck. So that’s number one that’s showing numbers neck pressure.

 

Joey Myers  15:27

Number two is downward shoulder angle. From this view, is more of a slight down shoulder. So, it’s like you’re doing a side bend. So, the shoulders the back shoulder goes up, the front shoulder goes down. And with that, you don’t want it to be too much. The sweet spot there is like six to 10 degrees down so it’s not a lot, but what helps a lot of times is controlling where that elbow goes.

 

Joey Myers  15:54

I back this up a little bit, give you guys a little bit more room. If I can use my elbow to pull the elbow or pull the, or bring the shoulders down, steer the shoulders down. That’s a way to do it. But you can also focus on taking this front shoulder down and then towards that back hip that’ll help to create this down shoulder. Right.

 

Joey Myers  16:14

And what’s interesting in the swing, if we want our body to accelerate and decelerate properly, is we want the shoulders to start down. And then as we swing, then they’re going to tilt. This front shoulder starts down, left shoulder, and then as I swing, it’s going to go up. And then in my finish, think about the Ted Williams pictures and Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth and all these guys, how did they finish they end up finishing in this position.

 

Joey Myers  16:45

So what we should see is we should see… left shoulder starts down, pops up, and then it should end down. So down, up, and then down on the finish. You know those Ted Williams pictures where he’s like, position right. It’s this one, it’s his left shoulder as a lefty starts, or he starts here. His left shoulder here starts up, and then it goes down. And then it finishes up. Right. So that’s a proper accelerating decelerating into the spine. So that’s the second thing that’s the down shoulder.

 

Joey Myers  17:23

And then the last one is the hiding hands from the pitcher. One more time again. We got so if I start my swing, this way, you can see my hands and the minute I get to landing, I’m creating what you see this back elbow peeking out behind me. So that’s they call it a SCAP row, or SCAP load, SCAP pinch wherever you want to call it. So that’s the move there. Where now you can’t see my hands.

 

Joey Myers  17:49

And now what I’m doing is this front shoulder for those those Kines geeks out there. The front shoulder is a Scap protraction so the scalp is coming in the scapula is coming this way coming across. And then my back SCAP is retracting. They’re doing the opposite of each other protraction retraction, right?

 

Joey Myers  18:10

So if you watch any gymnastics, or Olympian doing a spin, ice skater, if they do a spin, that’s what you’re going to see. And a lot of people out there will say, Well, I like to scap pinch, but I don’t want this front shoulder coming in. And like you’re not, that’s not how the human body works, dude, you’re not getting 100% optimization out of the rotation.

 

Jaime Cevallos  18:35

So the showing numbers has been something that people didn’t want to do?  I was not aware of that…

 

Joey Myers  18:41

It was and still, yeah, it’s crazy.

 

Jaime Cevallos  18:45

Why did they say you didn’t want to show numbers?

 

Joey Myers  18:47

Good question. The irony by the way, these same people that don’t like it, swear by video, swear by video analysis. They say well we’re going to look and see what the best hitters do and that’s what we’re going to do.  And you see them do it. You can again look at Miggy look at Ted Williams look at Trout look at just look at the top 10 power hitters right now and even in the in the day, and you see all of them do it.

 

Joey Myers  19:13

So I don’t understand why they’re all about video analysis, but they choose to see what they want to see. Right. So what they say is the problem they say with it is that it takes the hitters eyes off the ball, but I just talked about, we create neck pressure. The head is the important part. That’s the piece that’s the anchor. It’s like a boat and I ask my hitters, what does an anchor do on a boat, it either stops the boat or it slows it down, right?

 

Joey Myers  19:37

So the head is the control piece. Wherever the head goes, the body follows. So the head takes a tracking position and anchors down and then it’s the shoulder that comes in as far as it can while we’re wringing the towel out. And that’s what’s going to get you to the show numbers.

 

Joey Myers  19:53

Now lefties if you watch lefties because the camera angle at Major League ballparks is slightly off center towards left field right… (To be continued in Part-3…)

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