Discover 3 tips to hit line drives farther with power and square the ball up instead of hitting ground balls for baseball, fast-pitch, and slow pitch slow pitch softball players.
Like Anthony Rizzo Swing Mechanics, You Too Can Optimize ‘Line-to-Line’ & Launch Angles By “Bending The Knee”?
We’ll be chatting about the following 4 things in the above Anthony Rizzo swing mechanics video:
- Anthony Rizzo quick stat chat,
- Bent front knee,
- Sideways back foot, and
- Spinal engine – pelvis opens, shoulders block…
There is a lot of misinformation out there that in order to have power, a hitter must straighten the front knee. When it comes to power, the causation-correlation of this is very vague. I’ve seen Rizzo hit a ball 460+ feet during batting practice with a bent front knee. He never straightened it.
Look, 70-80% of power is the spinal engine. Click Here if you don’t believe me. I go over a thought experiment where we look at a water polo athlete with the fastest throw in water, and compare him to fastest velo pitcher on the planet. Remember, the water polo thrower doesn’t have the luxury of Gravitational Forces.
Now, it can be argued the lower half (including and mostly because of the pelvis) is responsible for 20-30% of the power equation. Since the lower half rotates the least, I say the it’s priority is setting the direction of the hitter’s force. We achieve this through keeping the back foot sideways.
The spinal engine is at the heart of consistent power. The Thoracic and Cervical vertebrae act against each other like a wringing towel to pre-load the torso before stride landing. Then as the lower back and pelvis begin their limited rotation, they will complete the wringing towel effect on the lower half of the spinal engine – Lumbar and Thoracic.
