Using the readerboard, we can quickly determine the correct bat angle, and where it should be, according to where the ball is pitched. The readerboard is simply a peg board (it can be found at any local home depot or lowes), 9 baseballs with holes drilled in the middle and using a screw and bolt to hold it on the board.

Ok – let’s look at some baseball hitting drills that we can use in our baseball training and immediately see improvement in making better contact.

We’ll start out by popping the bat at the cutlines. Each cutline is set up (red tape for right handed hitters and black tape for lefties) to line up the barrel of the baseball bat to make the best contact. We have found that using the readerboard is one of our best baseball hitting drills and will help hitters get from point A to point B in the fastest, most efficient way possible.

We can work outside cuts and outside pitches, which includes using the stride for everything. Baseball training does not have to be difficult – using simple and effective hitting tools is the key to using our baseball hitting system. One of the questions we hear the most is this – is the baseball swing linear or rotational? We believe it is a combination of both… linear (straight line) to the ball and let our turn (rotational hitting) swing after contact.

We also use our fench baseball hitting drills to wipe out our looping or sweeping action. At no point, we don’t want our hitters to have a loop or sweep – it causes long strokes and usually results in a ground ball or pop up, depending on if the hitter is late or early making contact with the ball.

Another one of our hitting drills that will eliminate the sweeping or looping swing is our frisbee and throwing bat drills. It will teach the hitter to gt the top hand on top of the ball.

We also use our our pop target in our training drills as we want our hitters to feel the knob of the bat making contact with the target. This will help the hitter get the feel of our drive action, which is the #1 way to hit for more power. We can continue these baseball training drills using the pop and stroke to help the hitters get inside the ball.

I hope you enjoyed our baseball video… use these drills and I will guarantee you’ll see a noticable difference in just a few short days, and your hitters will hit better and with more power.

Best to you,

Coach Brock

http://www.learnbaseballhitting.com

Baseball Training | Hitting Training Tips

Why start with the bat on the shoulder?

After years and years of baseball training research, and looking at major league hitters we discovered that no matter where they held their hands they always brought their hands inside and went into drive action. We’re going to talk a little about that and the bat on the shoulder because that is controversial. There are a lot of people that believe or do not understand that it is the best way to teach baseball training and hitting training.

In fact, we’ve all heard the old cliche for many years to get the bat off the shoulder. And here we are saying that it’s not a bad idea to keep the bat on the shoulder.

The first thing that I would like to explain is that if we had to throw the greatest punch in the world, would I really want my hand up above my shoulder or below shoulder width? In those positions there is nothing behind my hands!

In baseball hitting training, I want my body to support my hands. Essentially, I want my hips to take me to the ball. What we see so many times is hitters going in to a loop or sweep phase with each hand going in a circle and away from the body.

Well, we don’t want our hands going away from our body. There basically the action that we take to hit the baseball would be rotational, which is load… #2 linear which is stride… #3 which is pivotal and then swing. We want the hands to go in a straight line because the shortest distance between two points is a straight line!

In all of the baseball training film study we’ve done, where a player holds his hands, he will usually bring his hands inside by the time he completes his stride and get in the drive position which places his hands above the ball, the bat head above the hands so it’s diagonal down to the ball and from there to rotate the hands in a straight line.

So the position we want to use these hitting training tips to be in to eliminate our hands getting away from the body going in to a loop phase or sweep phase, what we want to do is turn his hips he would be perfect in position to hit the ball.

He can hit high.

He can hit low.

He’s got all those options available.

Otherwise, what 95% of hitters do in their baseball training, they drop their hands off the back side as they go to the ball and they don’t have those options.

For hitting training, we get the bat on the shoulder and we’ll load and stride and make sure that we turn and get inside the ball. We say “shine the light”. By having the bat on the shoulder, this is automatic.

This really helps the hitter keep his hands in position to make a good ball strike and make good contact.

Now, what if baseball coaches disagrees with the bat on the shoulder.  Well, start on the shoulder and raise it up a bit, that’s fine. But what we don’t like to have happen is to have the hands so far away from the body, that you never recover back inside. It’s so easy to get the bat inside the ball with the bat on the shoulder.

So for baseball training, we’ll allow for them to keep the bat on the shoulder, and if he plays with his team and coach disagrees with it… you can pick it up a little bit, as long as you have trained the hitter to go inside the ball and to pivot inside.

If the pitch is down the middle, all we do is step and turn and we’re in perfect position to ball strike. This is the true launching position.

Hitters don’t usually like to do this, when we adjust them early on in our hitting training. But if we asked every hitter that I’ve trained at first they may say that they didn’t like it, but they live it now.

You can check out some more of our baseball training videos here:

http://www.learnbaseballhitting.com/baseball-workouts-offseason.html

1. Stance position, bottom hand (lead hand) starts at shoulder point.
2. Palm open, facing down.
3. Other hand on hip.
4. Front heel lifts, player loads.
   1. Hips rotate square to pitch—hand at shoulder moves straight to front of body, where hands
      would be while bat is in contact.
5. Hand remains palm down.

1. Same stance but with palm open, facing up and forward.
2. Hips rotate square to pitch, hand will move to same location, but with palm up.

1. Put both hands together, but with bat added, starting at the shoulder area.
2. Move bat into contact (hands should be in same position as before.)
3. Open hands while in contact position.
4. Top hand open, palm up, under bat.
5. Bottom hand open, palm down, over bat.

First of all, we need to understand the concept that we teach in our baseball training, that is, in a physical activity, that activity always begins with the large muscle mass.  Having said that, let’s take the stride out of the feet, and put it in the large muscle mass and put it in the hips, the large muscle mass.  In doing this, there is less chance for feet to overact.

There is better chance therefore to control the stride.  Therefore, we recommend that you stride with the front hip, and let the feet follow.

Feet have a tendency to get happy, not only in over striding, but in striding in the wrong direction.  So you want the stride to be in the large muscle mass (hips) with a slight push towards the pitcher.  The stride is only about 6 inches.

Some baseball training drills that you can do are the following:

1. Take the stride away completely for a while, by only lifting the front heel before the hip turn.  Keep a good base. When the front heel goes down, he should pivot toward the ball.  This should be only a temporary technique.

A good stride is better than no stride.  But no stride is better than a bad one.

2. Practice load and stride only using the proper technique, since this can be done any place.  Doing enough of these should overcome the long stride habit.

In a reaction skill, it usually takes 11 to 1 ratio of correct strides to incorrect. He must work on this over and over again because he has many incorrect strides to work out of his technique.

We use our Super 8 Hitting System “Tempo Baseball Drills” which repeats this technique over and over again.  This is a great way to reinforce the good habit.