Stop Striding to Where the Ball is Pitched!
January 18, 2010 by Dave Hudgens
Filed under Baseball Instruction, Featured
Many coaches mistakenly tell their players to stride to where the ball is pitched. This is not good advice. In order to be consistent with your approach, you need to stride to the same spot every time. If your timing is going to be correct, your stride food will be down by the time the ball is halfway to home plate.
This must happen in order to execute the proper swing. If you follow poor advice and stride to where the ball is, you will be limiting yourself to that one area and you won’t be able to make adjustments.
Keep your stride short
The Stride should be no longer than 8 inches. If your stride is too long:
- Your weight is going to go too far forward.
- Your hands will come forward prematurely
- Your head will have too much movement
- All of these will make it difficult for you to see the ball clearly, and your bat speed and power will be greatly diminished.
Dan Buck on Sat, 23rd Jan 2010 7:54 pm
Strides are another reason many players have horrible timing… especially with pitchers who change speed often. WHAT IS THE ADVANTAGE OF THE STRIDE? Albert Pujols is a prime example that a stride is NOT necessary… if you like to hit from a wide-based, spread-out platform (like Pujols) start there… why stride there. One more thing that can go wrong, one more timing element that has NOTHING to do with barrel to the ball. It looks good, it gives a false sense of “timing” and rhythm… but it does not generate bat speed nor help create additional power. In fact, as this article points out, most strides often get a player to “drift” forward with the stride momentum and they leave their core and hit with “forward balance” and get very little power from their backside…
Watch Pujols smack a HR and see how long his stride is… “zero inches”. He lifts his heel and braces himself against the front foot. His hands are back, loaded, barrel tilted toward the umpires head, and he merely drops the bat head with incredible quickness! Foot strides, push back loads, long swings from behind the head (going back first) do nothing but complicate a swing, make you commit earlier, and often throws off timing and balance.
Quiet and Quick! That’s the key to consistent hitting!