Anybody had any luck keeping kids from swinging with the upper body, i.e. having their shoulders spin out? What drills or approach did you use to fix it?

Its funny you mention this; just last Wednesday I worked with my hitting coach on this problem. I was over-rotating my shoulders, so he had me swing a 20oz bat with 1 hand at a time, not moving anything but my arm to hit the ball. It over-stresses the opposite, so when you go back to swinging you will be in the middle. It worked for me, so give it a go. Take like 10-15 correct (drill-wise) swings with each arm. Don't move the lower body or upperbody, just the hands. Hope this works for you.

NJ Pitch

CADAD

I am interested too . My son is strong upper body and slo-mo shows that his hips slide at times and he is mostly arms from the right side. Goofing around LH his hips turn through ahead of the shoulders good.

The answer to many shoulder problems is two fold IMO
Getting the hands loaded to come out in a circular path and having the hips turn to completion leading the hands.
I think flying shoulders are upper body hitters that are not connected and torque driven. Hard to correct once ingrained.

I plan to try some things this week. One is to put the hands in a pattern in front of the head going into toe touch to slow them down like: seen in Kirby Puckets swing and many others. Mankin calls this THT??

http://flippen.videos.home.comcast.net/Puckett1991MIN_HomeRunLF01.mp4

[I'll let you know if it helps or is a disaster

CADad,

How big is their stride? Are they lunging? I've been working w/ some 10-12YOs the past few weeks and I see these issues in 3/4 of the hitters. Their strides are 18+", their hands drop during the strides, and they never firm up the front leg to stop all that momentum. Even my son often takes too big a stride.

What I tried this week w/ my son is some pure no-stride practice. (I'm not looking to start a war over this, as even I don't think he needs to hit like this, but as a practice tool...). Removing his stride and focusing on keeping his hands up (or rather, moving them up a bit during heel lift) gave him the knowledge/confidence that he can still hit the ball hard w/ a "quiet" swing.

Then, when he went back to striding last night vs. pitching and machine, our cue was "short stride, hands up" and he absolutely crushed line drives at will. One sequence he told me about over breakfast today was he "hit a high linedrive left, then a low one left. Then a high one right, then a low one right. Then he hit the L-screen, then the back of the cage. All IN ORDER." Now, I'm not saying he was aiming in these areas before the pitch, but NTL, just being able to rip off that many line drives in a row w/o popping up or pulling outside pitches into the ground, etc., is great progress.

My point is... what I often see w/ upper body hitters (kids anyway) is also very big strides and too much lunging. Sometimes if you can convince them that they don't need to do so (that their power can come from elsewhere and w/ less effort even), you might make some gains.

Good luck,
Sandman

Interesting clip Swingbuster... Who ever it was that put that clip (and the others) together is probably one heck of a good guy.

Jason

Swingbuster,

You mention the hip slide....I think that is a major source of the problem.

This is mostly for my son, although as with most rec teams I've got several kids who swing this way. My son has a short stride, good hip action and although he lunges on occasion he doesn't usually lunge. If you look at the clip of Gwynn posted by swingbuster, at the point where Gwynn has the knob to the ball and the bat parallel to the path of the ball my son would have his shoulders fully open and his hands out in front of his body, with the bat in the same orientation as Gwynn. From that point he has to leave the bat head back on low or outside pitches and just keeps the shoulders turning to get the bat around on inside pitches. I believe he got this habit back when he was 9 or 10 to make sure nothing ever got by him when I was throwing BP too hard. Whatever we do it will take quite a while to fix because he's had a lot of reps doing it wrong.

I did work with several of the kids on the one hand drill with the lead hand to show them how much they are opening up their shoulders.

CADad,

Where's the Gwynn clip? Swingbuster posted a link to a clip of Kirby Puckett. Is that not the one you're referring to?

Jason

Have you tried (as Epstein suggests) having him rest the bat against the outside of his rear shoulder while swinging?

FlippJ,
Oops!
CADad

Sandman,
In the past. The only thing I've had much success with is having him hit off a tee with the ball set well back in his stance and outside so that pulling his shoulders won't let him hit the ball effectively. Unfortunately, when he partially corrects the problem we tend to go away from the drill and he slips right back into the bad habit.

What about the ol' Dusty Baker-style "bat behind the waist, turn the hips while keeping the shoulders back" drill? Something to ingrain the feeling of the shoulders staying back until pulled by the hips.

A friend just showed me a drill his team used back in college that I'm going to try. They would soft toss with a tennis ball and then have the hitter use a 1 ft. long dowel just going straight to the ball. This drill is done with one hand only.

I tried a few drills with him in the garage last night. His swing was fine. He tends to rock back and then drive up and forward off his back leg as he strides during games. Even though it is a short stride he unloads and the effect is the same as lunging as he strides and he ends up having to use his shoulders. We spent a fair amount of time simply working on a soft stride. Unfortunately, it is going to take a long time to make that his game stride.

CaDad,

Rear leg extention is usually followed by rear elbow extention. Start with his rear knee "knocked" inward. The first thing that happens to the rear knee is it goes parallel to the ground. If it does that properly then you cannot push the body forward. Even if you stride the rear leg escorts the weight forward as a bent spring; it should not push hard forward.

Today I talked to the hitting instructor my son has been going to for a couple years before commiting to the next ten lesson package. I told the instructor that my son's shoulders have been flying out badly for a year and that we needed to focus on fixing it. His answer: "And whose fault is that? I have only one way I teach. I don't change it for each kid. If that's what you want maybe you better find another instructor."

We left immediately to find another hitting instructor.

CADad

I think here are proper sequences of muscle groups firing that must occur. On stride landing , if the front leg is braking the forward motion and firming up to uncoil the hips, then the swing is working correctly. During this phase the upper body is still and back or loading back which ever you prefer. If the upper body seizes the moment and tries to hit before torque is generated then there is the visual impression that the shoulder is pulling or flying out. IMO the leg/ hip action must launch the bat. We battle similar issues so we went to no-stride,heel drop, weight shift( hard to see but its there), rotate. We still have power and make fewer mistakes and have longer to see the ball

CADad,

Does his eye level change as he drives up and off his back leg? I envision his head bouncing a slight amount.

Redbird5,
A little, not much. The biggest problem is when the shoulders go so early he doesn't keep his head in at all, no matter how hard he tries to and doesn't track the ball to the front of the hitting area.