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Fix Front Knee Fast: 2025 Youth Baseball & Softball Hitting Drills to Stop Bent Leg & Build Power Swings

6 Shocking Mistakes Killing Baseball Hitting Mechanics for Youth at Stride Landing

What is the proper front foot stride, knee, and leg position when batting?  Baseball and Softball hitting drills to keep feet still during the swing.

After posting the “Fastpitch Softball Hitting Mechanics: Different Than Baseball? How?” rant on my Facebook fan page, I received the following baseball hitting mechanics for youth comments about the front knee behavior after landing…

“The locked out front knee is a more consistent method that results in a hard transfer of weight creating more power and less variation since it is the same every time. Coach Joe Brockhoff’s system is a great example.

I teach to lockout the leg when the heel hits the ground. I think if this method is causing too many ground balls there is something else going on with it. With the proper weight distribution and rotation throughout it is the most natural and consistent method.”

And I mostly agree.  However, I think there’s some confusion about what the front knee position should look like at landing.

In this baseball hitting mechanics for youth post, I want to address my top-6 reasons for landing bent:

  1. Engaging springy fascia in the legs,
  2. Pitch adaptability to off speed pitches,
  3. Shrinking the strike zone,
  4. Using Ground Reaction Forces,
  5. Getting eyes closer to lower pitches in the zone, and
  6. How humans change directions and planes of motion…

And, at the end, I wanted to clean up WHY I like my hitters to straighten their front leg at impact, however please note this IS NOT an absolute, especially when looking at a hitter like Cody Bellinger (he’s not the only one who does this)…look at the catcher’s glove which shows pitch location (down)…

Proper Front Foot Stride, Knee, Leg Position When Batting In Baseball & Softball | Hitting Drills To Keep Feet Still During Swing

 

1. Engaging Springy Fascia in the Legs

Watch Thomas Myers, from his book Anatomy Trains, explain the importance of fascia (said like Fashia).

If you aren’t analyzing baseball hitting mechanics for youth based on the rules of fascia, then you’re wasting your hitters’ time.

It’s not enough to base the swing off firing fast twitch muscles fibers.  Repeatable power is in how we load fascia and fast twitch muscles.

For our purposes in this post, a hitter MUST be bending the knees at landing to engage, what Thomas Myers calls, the Spiral & Deep Functional Lines extending down as a stirrup under the feet.

My friend Lee Comeaux, who works with professional golfers out in Texas, has studied Thomas Myers’s book more extensively than myself, and he’s found the amount of bend in the knees at landing must add up to 45-degrees.

Same with the arms.

But my baseball hitting mechanics for youth point is, there has to be some bending in the  knees at landing to activate the springy fascia contained in the legs.  And the amount of bend will depend on the amount of Forward Momentum, and whether we’re talking a fastpitch or baseball hitter.

2. Pitch Adaptability to Off-Speed

In the above baseball hitting mechanics for youth video, I use Hanley Ramirez to demonstrate how important the bending of the front knee is to making timing adjustments to off-speed pitches.  CLICK HERE for the full HPL post.

In his book Positional Hitting, Jaime Cevallos called the hitter bending into the front knee at landing, or to buy more time, the:

  • ‘Cushion’ (normal timing), or
  • ‘Double Cushion’ (off-speed timing).

JK Whited and Chas Pippitt of the Baseball Rebellion calls it ‘pushing the pause button’.

And we typically see this if a hitter is sitting fastball, and adjusting to off-speed or breaking balls.

 

3. Shrinking the Strike Zone

Watch the above baseball hitting mechanics for youth video I did February 13, 2014 of Barry Bonds ‘getting shorter’.  It’s received over 47,789 views on YouTube. You can also find this ‘getting shorter’, OR shrinking the strike zone, approach with (pay attention to the action of their landing knee)…

Josh Donaldson

Jose Bautista

Mike Trout

Bryce Harper

And, Dustin Pedroia

Please do a baseball hitting mechanics for youth experiment for me…

Go into your bathroom with a bat (don’t worry, I’m not going to make you swing it)…

Get into your stance facing the mirror, as the pitcher…

Now, draw a line on the mirror just above your head, using a dry erase pen.

Okay, so now stride and land with a straight front leg… (make sure you have an athletic gap between your feet after striding).

Note the gap between where the top of your head is now, and the line you drew on the mirror.

Now, stride and land with a bent front leg,

How much of a gap there?

If you observe this little experiment with your hitters, you’ll see how we’re effectively ‘shrinking the strike zone’ by landing, what I call, ‘shorter’.

4. Using Ground Reaction Forces

Watch Chris Welch from Zenolink give a simplified background on Ground Reaction Forces (or GRF’s).

Basically, you push into the ground, and the ground pushes back, with equal and opposite force.

It’s VERY difficult to harness GRF’s when your knees are straight.

Try jumping as high as you can with straight knees.

Try running as fast as you can with straight knees (you’d look like Forest Gump with his leg braces on!!!) lol

Try defending a forward in basketball…

…a soccer striker…

…and an offensive Lineman on “the line” in football…

…with straight knees.

My baseball hitting mechanics for youth point is, you have to be athletic to hit.  And landing with a straight front leg doesn’t allow the hitter to optimally use GRF’s.

This also goes for the hitter’s stance.  I like my hitters to start with bend in their knees, regardless of the width of their feet.

5. Get Eyes Closer to Lower Pitches in the Zone

Taylor Gardner of the Backspin Tee brought this to my attention.  Watch what happens to the first baseman’s head when receiving a throw…

The first base person strides forward toward the incoming ball, and bends the front knee (‘gets shorter’) to get the eyes closer to the ball.

A hitter MUST do the same thing, although the ball isn’t coming straight at them like the first baseman in the video.

The pitch is coming in sideways.

And to be more consistent with hitting the ball hard, we have to teach our hitters to bring their body – somewhat – down to the pitch’s level.

In other words, you don’t hit a low pitch consistently well by landing on a stiff front knee.

 

6. How Humans Change Direction & Planes of Motion

Pay attention to how Armanti Edwards and other NFL wide receivers change direction while doing a “Route Tree Session” with trainer Gari Scott…

Watch them run routes from a big picture point of view.  In other words, not looking for any specific arm or leg angles.

Watch them ‘get lower’ when changing directions, or cutting.

They land on a bent plant leg, then push off the same leg, extending it, to accelerate again.

Baseball Hitting Mechanics for Youth: Planes of Motion

Three main planes of motion. Photo courtesy: goldsgymwebsterny.wordpress.com

There are three main human planes of motion:

  1. Saggital – divides the body into right and left halves
  2. Frontal (a.k.a. Coronal) – any vertical plane that divides the body into ventral and dorsal (belly and back), and
  3. Transverse (a.k.a. horizontal plane, axial plane, or transaxial plane) – is an imaginary plane that divides the body into superior and inferior parts. It is perpendicular to the coronal and sagittal planes.

In changing from one plane of motion to the other, there MUST be a ‘getting shorter’ of the body’s stature, as the athlete plants and pushes off the ground to change directions.

The wide receivers above are changing from the Sagittal (front to back) to Frontal (sideways) Planes.  While a hitter changes from the Frontal (sideways) to Transverse (rotational) Planes.

In other words, just like an NFL wide receiver goes from a bent plant leg to straight at push off, a hitter MUST go from a bent landing leg, to a straight leg at ‘push off’.  You don’t see these wide receivers keeping a ‘slight bend’ at the end of their push off.

So this brings me to the million dollar baseball hitting mechanics for youth question,

Straight Front Leg or Bent at Impact?

First a little background…

CLICK HERE for a Zepp experiment I did where I looked at the Discus technique of ‘blocking’.  ‘Blocking’ is basically the action of going from a bent front leg at landing, to straight at impact.

I took 100 swings landing bent versus landing straight with the front leg…

Results?

Baseball Hitting Mechanics for Youth: 'Blocking' Experiment

As you can see, landing bent with the front leg, then moving to straight at impact, added an average of 6-mph of bat speed!

CLICK HERE for another HPL article I did on ‘blocking’ analyzing Edwin Encarnacion’s swing.

Okay, so now that you’re following me on this,

Let’s look at the function of the front leg at impact, and WHY I choose to teach my hitters to straighten it versus keeping it bent…

Homer Kelly wrote The Golfing Machine.  He was an aeronautical engineer for Boeing during the Great Depression, and fell in love with golf, and applied his engineering principles to the golf swing.

About ‘Knee Action’ Homer Kelly says:

“The slant is up in the direction of a straightened Knee. The slant of the Hips affects the degree of the Hip Turn.  Actually, the primary function of Knee Action – as with Waist Bend – is to maintain a motionless Head during the Stroke.”

There’s a lot going on in that statement that you can run with…

But did you catch the bolded part?

We slant our body up in the direction of the straightened knee.  And this is assuming we’re working with enough bend in the back knee during the turn.

In other words, the pitcher is throwing downhill, and also yes in fastpitch the ball is falling down by the time it reaches the last 20% of ball flight.

Baseball Hitting Mechanics for Youth: The Science of Hitting

Photo from “The Science of Hitting”, book by Ted Williams

So if the hitter wants to be consistent, they MUST match the downward pitched plane with a positive barrel attack angle (barrel traveling up to impact), not negative (or down).

And according to Homer Kelly, the front knee must get to straight before impact, in order to slant the hitter (or golfer) up.

This is WHY I teach my hitters to land bent, then straighten the front leg at impact.  Big Leaguers don’t all do this of course.

There are many BIG slugger examples of keeping a slight bend in the front knee at impact, Mark McGwire and Mark Teixeira to name a few…

But I work with A LOT of smaller hitters that can’t afford to be mechanically ineffective at driving the ball.  I base my hitting program on human movement principles that are validated by science.  Not on theory, philosophy, or what I think is right or wrong.

I hold my hitters’ swings to a higher standard.  A standard that’s validated by science.

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How To Use Legs In Swing Like Rizzo, Altuve, & Trout

Fix Stride Landing Fast: 2025 Youth Baseball & Softball Batting Drills to Build Power Swings Today

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Discover how to use the legs when hitting a baseball or softball in the 2023 year.  Does a powerful swing depend on footwork, hitting against a firm front side or a straightened front leg, front foot, or do the hips play a big role.  Learn batting drills to optimizing legs ARE NOT what you may think…

Answered: “How To Get My Kid To Stop Rising And For Him To Utilize His Legs More During Batting?”

 

 

 

Here’s what we cover in the above video:

  • Legs DO NOT equal power – water polo example,How To Use Legs In Swing Like Rizzo, Altuve, & Trout
  • What is leg function in swing & Adjusting to pitch height,
  • Distance between the feet equal more control over line drives,
  • GRF’s but not as much as you think,
  • Buying time – back foot sideways, directional force, & pushing the “pause” button, and
  • How to utilize the legs in the swing?

Hey, what’s going on. It’s Joey Myers again from ‘Hitting Performance Lab’. In this video, we’re going to answer the following reader question:

“How to get my kid stop rising, and for him to utilize his legs more during batting?”

Now this is a question that comes either through a form, survey, or email or even from my local lessons. The coaches out there in the high schools tend to meddle a bit too much, subscribing to the hitting myth that: ‘it’s all about the legs’, or ‘you need to use your legs more’.

In this video, I want to talk about what that means, and what is the function of the legs…

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Legs DO NOT equal power – water polo example

Legs are only 20-30% of the consistent power equation, and most of that is in the function of the pelvis.  If you’re a coach and power is the deficiency in your hitter’s swing, then it’s the spinal engine you want to focus on.  The Catapult Loading System is where 70-80% of consistent power is found.  The best example I like to share can be found in water polo.

And my favorite demonstration to do for hitters is showing what a beach towel and the spinal engine have in common.

 

What is Leg Function in Swing & Adjusting to Pitch Height

Now a couple things, one is they help to adjust to pitch height. If you’re looking at hitters like Cody Bellinger of the Dodgers, Joc Pederson of the Dodgers, Corey Seager, looking at Anthony Rizzo of the Cubs or some of the past players like Adrian Beltre or Pedroia. When the pitch is down in the zone, you tend to see them bend their front knee to go down and get it. They tend to do that consistently on those pitches, those lower in the zone pitches, not locking out their front knee like many teach.

I’ve seen these same hitters Rizzo, Bellinger, I’ve seen them with a bent front knee hit balls 440 to 460 feet.  So, locking out the front knee IS NOT all about power.  So, this raises a question of, if you want a hitter to use their legs more often because you think it has to do with power, well that is just not true – that’s not what we’re seeing. So, adjusting to pitch height, and you can study the hitters discussed as examples.

 

Distance between the Feet Equal more Control over Line Drives

Distance between the feet, this is a big one, that we can use the legs or utilize the legs to allow hitters to hit more line drives. The problem happens when, say if we are teaching our hitters to skip their back foot that they end up skipping their feet too close together.  Or it could be they don’t stride that much. They don’t skip at all and, so their feet tend to be closer together. What we want is what you see with the top 50, top 100 hitters in the big leagues….

You’re going to see distance between their feet. So, whether that is a longer stride and their front foot moves away from their back foot. Whether they don’t skip but they don’t stride as much, you still see that wideness of their feet. You see them scissor, you see different things like that, but what they all have in common, all the top hitters in the big leagues, is they have distance between their feet.  When the feet come close together, it makes the hitter taller, which this reader is asking how to keep the hitter from “rising”.  The taller the hitter gets, the more in the ground the ball is gonna get hit.

If the hitter knows better, and they try and get the ball in the air, even though they have narrow feet during their turn. Then they’re gonna do something unnatural with their hands to try and get under it, which we don’t want them to do either. Because that is going to cause uppercuts.  It’s going to cause inconsistencies in their swing path.

 

GRF’s, but not as much as you think

I just mentioned that hitters don’t have to lock their front knee out for power. When you think about ground reaction forces (GRF’s), they DO play a role. I’m not taking away from ground reaction forces, or saying “Oh, well the legs don’t do anything in the swing”.

No, they do. It’s about a 20 to 30% increase in power by using the legs. Most of that though is in the pelvis, and the rest in the spinal engine. I tell my hitters that the spinal engine, their combination of your shoulders and how you use them.  Neck, shoulders, and pelvis account for about 70 to 80% of the power. That gets you to the wall. The legs help get you over the wall. So, you do need the legs, and it’s like what Dr. Serge Gracovetsky, the author of the ‘Spinal Engine’ said, that locomotion, the arms and legs aren’t necessary for locomotion, they’re an enhancement, they help enhance movement of the spinal engine.

So, we’re not taking away from the legs, the use of the legs, and how they can benefit the swing. It’s just that they’re an enhancement to the spinal engine, the taller the player is, the longer the levers, the more the force multiplier at the end of that lever. So, guys like Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton are gonna have longer levers, if they lengthen those levers at impact. When we’re talking about the front arm shape, they’re gonna hit the ball pound-for-pound, apples-to-apples swings farther than Jose Altuve with the locked out-front arm. It’s just because the longer limbs enhance more, they’re more of a force multiplier.

Buying Time – Back Foot Sideways, Directional Force, & Pushing the “Pause” Button

Buying time. So, the lower half, the legs can help buy time. Jamie Cevallos in his book ‘Positional Hitting’ way back, I think it was in the early 2000’s or mid to late 2000’s. He talked about this idea of a ‘Cushion’. You’ll see a hitter especially, if they’re looking fastball, and they see a curve ball or changeup. You’ll see them actually bend, sink, or cushion into their knees. They use their knees by bending them to buy them a little bit of time to get on time a lot better.  It’s pushing the ‘pause’ button.

The other thing we want to do to buy time, is keep the back foot sideways.

We talked about this idea of directional force, Matt Nokes, he says that to hit a ball 400 feet, it takes 8,000 pounds per square inch of force in one direction. In hitting, both in baseball and softball, we have 90 degrees to work with. The other 270 degrees is in foul territory, it doesn’t do a hitter any good or a team any good to play in that 270 degrees outside of a fair territory. We have to stay between the 90s, we have to stay between the lines. If you think about a bowler, every single professional bowler out there, “scissors” their legs.

I’m not saying that all hitters have to scissor. I just give my hitters that option.  But if you think about bowlers, they bowl between a two-foot Lane. I don’t know if that’s correct or not, but it’s somewhere around that. They also put a spin on the ball, so if they over rotated their lower half, not keeping their back foot sideways, they’re over rotating their pelvis. Then what you would see is that ball bouncing into the outside lanes.  Try scissoring your legs, then try and open your hips up more, and it’s almost impossible.

You want to make sure that we’re creating directional force, and that’s another thing the legs do. They help us stay between that 90 degrees, and use all 90 degrees effectively. That comes in handy at the higher levels when hitting to the opposite field is a lot more important, and when we see shifts.  Most of the time, hitters are not very good about going the other way. You can see the hitters that do go the other way very well, their batting averages seem to be higher.

 

How do we Utilize the legs in the Swing?

Now again, if it’s power you want, this isn’t the place. You want to look at the Catapult Loading System, and harness the power of the spinal engine.  If you want a majority of power, 70-80% of consistent power.

Getting Shorter, Staying Shorter

To properly utilize the legs in the swing, you want to look at getting shorter and staying shorter.  You see most great hitters when you draw a line over their head before they stride, by the time they get to stride landing, you’re gonna see distance between where they started, and where their head is at stride landing. You’re gonna see what we call ‘Getting Shorter’.

Then as they swing, it’s almost like that bottom ladder rung they create at landing, they tend to stay under that line. What we do is, we could take a PVC pipe. We can put it at the start of the hitter swing, before they even stride…we can put it maybe at their nose or their chin, and we can have them practice getting the top of their head under that PVC pipe. As they swing, stay under that PVC pipe. I’ve also had my hitters get next to a piece of furniture that’s about the same height, then have them stride, and get their head to where, now they’re under the top of that, say dresser or whatever, or picture frame, could be anything around the house.

When they swing, do some slow motion swings, and they stay under that line. That’s a way to get shorter, stay shorter.

Okay to “bend the knee”

It’s okay to bend the knee, I also get my hitters to do this if necessary. We don’t really practice this, but I tell them it’s okay to bend the knee, if the pitch is down in the zone.

Distance between the feet

Also working distance between the feet, you can either get them to stride longer, or you can cut down on their skip. We usually try to manipulate one of those two things or both things to get that distance between the feet, so that allows them to hit more line drives or at least control their line drives.

Keep back foot sideways

Then keeping their back foot sideways. You can use the VeloPro, they use it in pitching a lot. But in hitting, we use the VeloPro.

We tell the hitter to make sure they keep their back foot, their back heel on the ground as they swing. Almost like you would see with George Springer, or Altuve, or Mike Trout, any of those kinds of hitters or in softball Sierra Romero. They keep their back heel on the ground and it turns sideways, so they stay sideways. They do a better job of staying between those 90 degrees.

One last thing on keeping the back foot sideways, as mentioned, scissoring helps with that as well. So, that’s something that you can play around with, and let your hitters’ experiment with.

Hope this answered the question of “How to get my kid to stop rising, and for him to utilize his legs more during the swing”. Make sure that we’re swinging smarter by moving better, and before I let you go…

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