Want To Become A .300 Hitter? Learn Your Swing Feelings
Want To Become A .300 Hitter? Learn Your Swing Feelings
Anyone can swing a bat. But learning how to swing doesn’t make you a .300 hitter. I can still hear those very first instructions from my tee ball coach. Point your shoulder to the mound, feet apart, and put the bat up by your inside ear. Eye on the ball.
Swing!
Those first few swings were both exhilarating and intimidating. But over time, every young player begins to understand the feeling of swinging the bat. But as you mature, that feeling needs to be replaced with the feeling of hitting. Because swinging the bat and hitting a baseball are not the same thing.
What would you say if I asked you what your swing felt like? What does a smooth, early building trigger feel like? How about your thoughts on the feeling of a long-full-robust extension after contact? Many of you have never stopped for even a fraction of a second to consider how your swing feels.
That’s because most of us, as players, are taught rote mechanics stuck on rinse and repeat. Coaches argue that such a method aims to develop muscle memory and remove one more aspect of thought while trying to perform. In other words, create a swing that is essentially on autopilot. However, this line of thinking is wrong. The swing is not a rote mechanized action. It is fluid, dynamic, ballistic, and, most of all, adjustable. We need our swing to be this way because pitchers throw different pitches at different speeds, angles, and spins, and our job is not to swing at it but hit it. Therefore, we need to be aware of our swing to make changes to it, especially when we feel something goes wrong.
For a hitter to move from swinging toward hitting, they need to be able to identify the feelings his swing creates so that when he feels a swing flaw, he will know what cue to use to fix it.
Are fundamental swing mechanics important? Yes, but successful hitting is more about your ability to adjust those mechanics.
Sure, muscle memory is good, and our methods train for it. But your swing should never be on rinse and repeat. It should never be a mindless rote activity. Instead, we want you to reach your full potential as a hitter by engaging your mind and learning to self-diagnose and self-correct by teaching you to feel your mechanics.
We teach you to feel your swing so you can adjust your swing. Because those who adjust WIN. If you cannot make the necessary adjustment, you are simply an out waiting to be recorded. We help you gain the advantage by engaging in Higher-Order Thinking (I’ll explain this in a minute). Yes, thinking while hitting. By engaging your mind, we can achieve two critical goals.
- The ability to communicate how your swing feels.
- The right cues to make real-time, in-game adjustments.
But first, a crash course on Higher-Order Thinking.
Have you ever memorized something for a school test? Most of us have at one time or another. But as soon as the test was over, you forgot all about it? So much of this problem is the fault of our education system and methods–memorizing and repeating facts. While you might know something of those facts, it doesn’t necessarily mean you learned anything. Learning happens when Higher-Order Thinking is engaged.
Higher-Order Thinking takes you to another level of education beyond mindless memorization and repetition. It includes critical thinking skills like analysis, synthesis, evaluation, correction, problem-solving, and making informed decisions. So, for you, as a baseball hitter, engaging in this level of education makes you a more educated athlete and, therefore, a smarter hitter. Now, you are a very dangerous hitter for pitchers to face. It takes player development to a new level and winning into a new reality.
Learning to communicate how your swing feels.
As I mentioned above, you cannot see yourself swing, only feel yourself swing. Therefore, elevating your understanding of your swing allows you to identify and, most importantly, articulate the feelings your swing creates. From this elevated mindset, it becomes simple to differentiate a poor swing feeling from a good swing feeling.
So rather than a coach barking corrective orders, players need the opportunity and language to discuss what their swing feels like. Let’s return to school again, and my least favorite subject math. While there is value in memorizing math facts, like multiplication tables. As you progress into areas like calculus and differential equations, you need to understand more than the routine problem solving but the why behind the what.
Athletes should desire this same level of understanding–to move beyond how to swing into how a good swing feels versus a bad swing. And most importantly, why it feels the way it does.
As you learn to identify your swing feelings, your knowledge of your swing raises from a sense of ignorance–not knowing what you are doing wrong or how to correct it–to a complete understanding–creating a swing that is so familiar you can easily analyze (self-diagnose) a swing defect and immediately create a solution (self-correct). When you can accomplish this level of mastery, you are taking ownership of your swing, leading you to win your at-bats.
To make the right adjustments, you need the right cues.
Traditional coaching would suggest constantly reminding or yelling at players about their mistakes. It’s that constant word in your ear about what you need to correct. However, the reality is that while you may know what you did wrong, you don’t always know how to fix it.
So, instead of negative corrections, we use actionable cues.
A cue is a short phrase or word that reminds the hitter of something to do, never what not to do.
When working with a hitter, we ask him to describe how his swing feels. Then, we use simple cues that he can use to identify a problem (self-diagnose) and what cue to use to adjust (self-correct).
As you develop and employ your cues, we continue to ask you to describe the feeling your swing creates. You’ll soon begin to diagnose the feeling of an off-balanced, noisy, bitten-off swing and which cues you need to use to feel a strong, balanced, robust swing.
For example, when you feel your lead shoulder flying out, your swing gets too long to hit effectively, so you need to make a swing adjustment. Therefore, you use the cue Lead Shoulder To the Ball. Reminding yourself of this simple cue will keep the lead shoulder under your control and shorten your swing. Or you fall slightly off balance and cannot hold your finish. Using the cue Swing Toward Balance will remind you to swing only as hard as you can control to maintain balance throughout your entire swing.
Over time, a hitter can identify the feeling of a long swing or a noisy swing and immediately cue himself with the correct cue to correct it for the next pitch. Some hitters will even write a cue they often need on their batting gloves to remind them of a swing adjustment they need to make.
It is all about becoming an effective, intelligent hitter.
Let’s simplify this a bit more. Imagine for a moment that your swing is noisy. A great cue for a noisy swing is saying, “Shhhhh.” This simple cue tells you that you have too much pre-swing motion (aka noisy), and now you know you need to create the feeling of quiet in your pre-swing action.
When you attach a cue to a body movement or adjustment, you are teaching your brain what to fix and adjust in the moment without a coach barking orders at you. The same word or phrase (the cue) used repeatedly will train your muscle memory to know exactly what to do the second you utter the cue.
Guiding the hitter this way, instead of barking orders, raises his understanding of his swing and how to correct it by using his cues when he feels a flaw. You have seen this many times while watching a good hitter hit but have probably never noticed it. When he steps out of the box and mumbles to himself between pitches after taking a bad swing, what do you think he is doing? Yup, he is using his cues.
This essentially combines muscle memory with higher-order thinking—creating an intelligent, effective, and powerful hitter. Now, you’re an incredible asset to your team and a dangerous threat to every pitcher you face.
Every good hitter can swing the bat, but not everyone that can swing the bat is a good hitter.
The first step as a young hitter is learning to swing the bat. As you gain strength and ability, you understand better what kind of hit you seek. But more than likely, you’ve been taught to create a systematized, robotic swing. These methods are great for the youngest hitters still learning and not facing a variety of different pitches.
However, to progress, to become better, and to be more versatile, a maturing hitter must learn to feel their swing. You’re not playing in front of a mirror, so the more you understand the feel, the easier it will be to dial in the swing you need to be an effective hitter–not just a dude who can swing the bat.
Learning to express your swing cues requires a process.
Our guys learn to identify and articulate their swing cues through our IHP. The IHP is an Individual Hitting Process.
The IHP I developed includes a chart that helps hitters self-diagnose and self-correct their swing so that one bad day at the plate does not turn into a slump.
The best part about our IHP is that it works with any hitter, using any hitting style, and with any hitting coach.
Learn more about our FREE IHP Course here.
For a deeper dive into content like this check out my book. “BASS The Path to Elite Level Hitting.”
See ya on the field.
Coach Leo
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