In today’s blog post, we are featuring 3 easy and effective baseball hitting drills that can be used to coordinate hitting and breathing, get rid of tension, and gauge your percentage of power on the swing.
Blow the Hands Away Drill
Difficulty Level: Easy
Setup: You’ll need a partner, a couple baseballs, and a bat.
Execution: The goal here is to coordinate your breathing with your swing, inhaling as the ball approaches, then exhaling forcefully as you make contact with the ball – much like the way a weight lifter will exhale on each rep, or a tennis player will with each swing. Execute 10 reps with this exaggerated breathing, then go back to five more with your normal swing.
Coaching Tips: This is a great exercise for getting rid of tension, loosening up your swing. You’ll notice that even after going back to your normal swing, it will be tough for you not to use the same principles as you did on your previous ten reps – even if your breathing may not be so loud and exaggerated.
Maximum Power Start Drill
Difficulty Level: Easy
Setup: You just need a partner, a couple baseballs, and a bat.
Execution: The focus here is on getting a great start to your swing – for both speed, and power. There are five things that you need to focus on: snapping the front knee, pivoting the back foot, pulling your hands down, seeing the ball hit the bat, and blowing your hands away from you. Since this is something you should be trying to do on every swing, just do 15 swings focusing on these five principles.
Coaching Tips: Think of each of the five things as being worth 20% of your power. If you only do three, you’re only swinging with 60% of your power. Also, this is a versatile drill, and like the previous, you can do as a soft toss drill or any other number of way – but until you get the principles down pat, you should just be doing dry swings.
Bat Back & Stop Drills
Difficulty Level: Easy
Setup: You’ll need a partner, a couple baseballs, and a bat.
Execution: This is a two part drill. For your first five swings, you’re swinging all the way through to the back of your swing as fast as you can, focusing less on making good contact on the ball, and more on getting to the end of your swing. For the next five swings, you’re still going to swing as fast as you can, but instead this time try to stop the bat immediately after you make contact with the ball. After you’re done with that, go back to your regular swing, an go through five swings like that.
Coaching Tips: Make sure you don’t start slowing your swing down to make it easier to stop, as that kills the whole point of the drill. Yes, you’re momentum will carry you a fair bit past the point of contact but that’s fine, much like how if you’re not making great contact with your first five swings its fine.
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