Today you are back in the quick tips video series and we're going to be going over a quick drill that helps you work on our properly using your lower half and how to work on having correct body posture. So with this drill it’s going to help us with two different things, like I said.
Squash the Bug & Proper Hip Movement
Number one an issue we've talked about before, just turning on that back foot and squashing the bug. It's going to help us get rid of that issue. And number two, it's going to help us properly use our hips. Get a nice hip rotation so we get the most power out of our lower half. Second thing that this is going to be good for is with body posture.
And what I mean by that is when you’re at contact, you see that my shoulders are not level, which a lot of kids try to do. I know there are coaches that still preset, they try to have level shoulders and contact but the reality of it is, if you look at any major league hitter, a contact no matter where the ball is, they always have an angle to their upper body and most of the time their shoulders are going to match the line of the bat. So this drill is going to help us work on that as well.
So what we're going to do for the drill is we’re going to need a PVC pipe. And I'm sure a lot of you guys have seen coaches take their players and put a PVC pipe on their chest, and do this movement right here. It's going to be similar to that, but we’re going to put a little twist on it.
Positioning the Pipe
So first thing that we're going to do with this is it is not going to be our chest. We're actually going to put at the bottom of our sternum, down here. Second thing that we're going to do is you're going to need a swing path trainer for this. And the reason why is when you're using this, you actually have a visual for what you want your angle to be at. So when I have the PVC pipe at the bottom of my sternum and I'm going through my movement, I’m trying to match the board.
Watch Your Bat Path
So what we're doing here and I’ll give you guys a couple of different angles of this, but we're going to use the mini training ball tee topper and the mini-training balls. And we're going to set up like normal. You want our front foot lined up with the front leg and so we're going to take the PVC pipe, we're going to go on the bottom of our sternum here. And all we're going to do, we saw on this first run we're just going to simply go to our normal swing getting that bat path correct.
Watch Your Hip Rotation
Taking our hips and rotating them all the way through and then hitting the ball. And so, what we're looking for there is our hips coming all the way through. And making sure we're finishing on a stiff, front leg, and not bending it forward. But also, we want to avoid pushing out with our arm. Okay, so I’ll show you again.
We’ll put the ball there, get into the normal setup again, trying to keep your hands as close to you as possible.
Load and bring your hips through getting bat path correct, and then going through and hitting the ball. Again, trying to finish on that stiff front leg. And I'll give you some views from the side as well, so you can see what that looks like.
All right, so this is just a little side view of the drill that we're doing. You can see how I'm set up, and I'm still taking a couple passes at the ball and then once I feel comfortable with it, really fire those hips.
Repetition Is Key
And then, as you get better with this, you can stop making those couple of passes at the board, and you can just step up and try and hit like normal. If you have a lot of these training balls, it definitely makes it easier.
Make sure you take your time, really focus on those hips and having the correct angle. Another thing you can do is if you really want to challenge yourself. If you do a rep at one height, set it up just like normal, you could do one or two and then change it up a little bit higher, set your angle.
And same thing, just to give you some variation, challenge yourself a little bit. Make it more like it's in game. That's gonna be it for today's video. If you have any questions about the drill we did, why we did certain things with it, or give me suggestions for future videos, leave them in the comments below. Make sure to like and subscribe and we'll see you in the next video.
