Advanced Baseball Hitting Techniques: Perfecting Your Swing with Lead Arm and Back Arm Drills

Hitting a baseball effectively is a skill that requires both precision and power. To develop a powerful and consistent swing, it's crucial to focus on advanced training techniques that isolate and strengthen specific parts of your swing. In this guide, we will dive deep into lead arm and back arm drills, providing you with the knowledge and tools to enhance your performance. Whether you're an aspiring college athlete or a coach looking to improve your players' skills, these tips from Lupos Baseball will elevate your game.

Why Focus on Lead Arm and Back Arm Drills?

Lead arm and back arm drills are essential for honing the mechanics of your swing. By isolating each arm, you can build muscle memory, improve your swing path, and generate more power. These drills are particularly beneficial for players who need to fine-tune their technique or overcome specific weaknesses in their hitting...

Mastering Hitting Contact Points in Baseball By Building Room for Error

In baseball, hitting is not just about making contact with the ball; it’s about making consistent and powerful contact. One of the keys to achieving this is understanding and mastering hitting contact points. This blog will delve into the nuances of hitting contact points, providing insights and techniques to help you build room for error in your swing and improve your overall hitting performance.

Understanding Hitting Contact Points

The Basics of Contact Points

When it comes to hitting, the contact point is where the bat meets the ball. Depending on the pitch's location, the contact point can vary:

• Outside Pitch: Ideally, you want to make contact with an outside pitch deep in the zone, allowing the ball to travel before swinging.
• Middle Pitch: For pitches down the middle, contact should be made slightly further out in front.
• Inside Pitch: Inside pitches should be hit even further out in front to pull the...

How to Hit a Curveball: Mastering the Art of Recognizing and Hitting Breaking Pitches

The curveball is a pitch that many hitters dread. Pitchers love their curveballs and often use them to keep hitters off balance. There are countless videos, books, and tutorials on how to hit a curveball, but in this blog, we will focus on our approach to recognizing and hitting this tricky pitch. We'll discuss why it's essential to work on hitting curveballs, how to recognize them, and provide actionable tips to improve your performance against breaking pitches.

Why Work on Hitting Curveballs?

Pitchers frequently rely on their curveballs to disrupt hitters' timing. A steady diet of curveballs can make it difficult to stay consistent at the plate. Learning to recognize and hit curveballs effectively can significantly improve your overall hitting performance.

The Opportunity to Capitalize

Curveballs are thrown at lower speeds compared to fastballs, offering an excellent opportunity to make solid...

Mastering the Trigger in Your Baseball Swing: A Key to Power and Control

In baseball, mastering the mechanics of your swing is crucial for success at the plate. One essential component often overlooked is the trigger. The trigger is the pre-swing movement that serves as a staging platform to generate energy and momentum, allowing you to attack the baseball with purpose and control. This blog explores what a trigger is, why it’s important, and how to implement it effectively in your swing.

What is a Trigger?

The trigger in a baseball swing is a pre-swing movement designed to generate energy and momentum in a controlled manner. It sets the stage for your swing, ensuring you’re ready to attack the ball with purpose and intent.

Purposeful and Controlled Movement

A good trigger involves aggressive yet controlled movements. Think of it as being 99% committed to swinging at the pitch with 1% control to adjust if necessary. This balance allows you to maintain enough commitment...

Learn Your Swing by Finding Patterns: Simplifying the Path to Hitting Success

Hitting a baseball is one of the most challenging feats in sports. The combination of a round bat, a round ball, varying pitches, and different velocities creates a unique challenge for hitters. Despite these difficulties, success in baseball is often measured by achieving a 30% success rate, a stark contrast to most other fields where such a percentage would be considered a failure. This blog explores how simplifying your approach and finding patterns in your swing can lead to greater success at the plate.

The Complexity of Hitting

As a former hitter and current hitting coach, I understand how difficult it is to achieve consistent success at the plate. The mechanics of hitting require precise timing, balance, and coordination. However, by simplifying our approach and focusing on key elements, we can improve our chances of success.

Simplifying the Process

To simplify hitting, it's essential to break down...

Baseball Hitting Cheats: Strategies to Anticipate and Exploit Pitches

In baseball, the difference between a good hitter and a great hitter often lies in their ability to anticipate pitches and position themselves to exploit them. This blog will explore some of the cheats our hitters use—not to break the rules, but to gain an edge by anticipating pitches and making slight adjustments in the batter's box. These strategic moves can turn the tide of an at-bat and lead to more consistent success at the plate.

https://youtube.com/shorts/zVV_W-v13iY

CHEAT #1: Anticipating the Fastball in a 3-0 Count

One of the most predictable situations in baseball is a 3-0 count. When a pitcher falls behind with three balls and no strikes, everyone in the stadium knows the next pitch is likely to be a fastball. This is because pitchers trust their fastball more than any other pitch to get a critical strike. This predictability gives our hitters an opportunity to capitalize.

The Strategy

In a 3-0...

Mastering Barrel Accuracy in Baseball: The Key to Elite Hitting

Barrel accuracy is the cornerstone of elite hitting in baseball. It means hitting the ball's center mass with the sweet spot of the bat, a skill that separates great hitters from the rest. Launch angle and exit velocity are important metrics, but consistently hitting the middle of the ball on the sweet spot is what all elite hitters do and do often.

Understanding Barrel Accuracy

Barrel accuracy can be measured by a hitter’s batting average, which is the number of hits divided by the number of at-bats. While there will always be some lucky hits, baseball is a game of duration. Over time, a hitter’s success reflects how often they can hit the ball on the barrel. As Ted Williams, one of baseball’s greatest hitters, famously said, “Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer.”

The Sweet Spot and Center Mass

Few sounds...

Dreaming About Being The Best? Here's How You Set Goals To Get There.

Dreaming about being the best is easy–but setting goals to get there? That’s hard. Taking the necessary steps to accomplish those goals is even harder. But it doesn’t have to be.

We’re all guilty of it—especially baseball players—finding ourselves dreaming of the day we drive in the winning run, get the ring, and get awarded the MVP trophy. I bet you have even imagined (or maybe actually practiced) your post-game on-field media interview.  We get this far-off gaze in our eyes and dream of accomplishing these Big Hairy Audacious Goals (or BHAGS) that leadership guru Jim Collins taught, almost as if they are already a reality. 

That far-out gaze you get and that sense of hope for the future aren’t goals. They’re dreams. I know that truth probably stings a little. But if you are confusing dreams with goals, you lie to yourself, and you will no doubt...

Why Motivation Might Be Actually Fooling You

Are you feeling motivated? Ready to take on that goal? Not so fast. That urge or desire to do something might actually be the wrong path toward the goal you set. Motivation can’t be fully trusted. Yet you rely on it. Almost as if it was the sustenance you need for performance survival. Don’t believe me? Google it. 

“How to Motivate Yourself”

"8 Psychology-Based Tricks for Staying Motivated"

"15 Tips on How to Be More Motivated in The Morning"

"30 Tips for How to Get and Stay Motivated"

I could keep going, but for the sake of getting to the point, I won’t. But trust me; there are millions of articles espousing every idea imaginable for how you can stay motivated. The problem is that while motivation sounds nice, we mistakenly believe it will help us achieve our goals. 

It won’t

What’s your favorite sports movie? Take a moment and think about it. Think...