My son is a good hitter with a quick, short strong stroke. Sometimes his shoulder, rather then his hands, will react when his back knee turns. This seems to cause all sorts of other detrimental reactions in his swing resulting in comments from him such as, I hit it square but am not getting any pop.
I have a theory to solving this problem that seems to work for him and wanted to get everyone's thoughts on it.
Kids, in their desire to hit the ball hard, will tighten up their forarms, wrists and grip at the time they are loading before the swing. When this happens it becomes necessary for the bat to travel through a relatively long arc to the hitting zone resulting in a lot of additional angular momentum that the hands must overcome while accelerating to the ball. (I think that barring the front arm is related to this however, my son does not do this.) Thus, the hands are late because they are in effect required to drag the bat around a larg arc to the ball. The back knee, hips and shoulder have already entered the follow-through phase when the hands finally get there.
My son doesn't always do this, but it does happen more frequently when he bats after a workout and he is tired. He's 14.
To demonstrate this, I had him get in his batting stance. With his bat in the ready position I had him then grip the bat as tight as he could. Then told him to swing the bat through as hard as he could. I then had him swing his bat over-emphasizing bat lag with very loose wrists. Comparing the two swings he said "it felt like I was swinging a super heavy bat on the first swing and a very light bat on the second." Therefor, I believe that loose wrists and bat delay is a major contributing factor determining if the hands and bat will be in the optimal postion at contact. Also, with loose wrists he can take the bat forward explosively on a straight line (~12 inches from load to ball contact position in his case) while stiff wrists force the hands to travel in a much longer arc. (Try it sometime.)
This seems to have really increased his contact consistancy and has almost done away with the over rotation problem entirely. If he forgets and swings 'bad' he reminds himself by thinking 'bat lag'. I have also noticed a positive effect on his ability to maintain balance through the swing as well as a better eye angle down the barrel at contact.
Am I all wet or do think that I'm onto something?
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