You're swinging too hard

It's an easy trap to fall into. You want to hit a ball farther, more sharply, so you swing harder. That must be the answer, right? In fact, swinging too hard reduces performance significantly. Over exertion tightens muscles in your neck, shoulders and arms reducing your bat speed, slows reaction time and reduces accuracy. What good is 4 more miles per hour of bat speed if you hit a pop up?

So what's the answer?

Relax. Have loose​ muscles. Legendary UCLA softball coach Sue Enquist uses the term "noodle arms" to make her players eliminate upper body tension at the plate.

Next it's important to remember softball and baseball hitters use a large percentage of their body in a carefully coordinated series of movements in order to hit a ball effectively. We can generalize by grouping body parts by function. For this article will just talk about upper body (hands and arms) and lower body.

Kids often try to do too much with their arms when swinging the bat. I try to deemphasize the focus on arm strength and speed with this statement. It's a slight over generalization but it serves our purpose.

While hitting the main job of your hands and arms are accuracy, getting the bat to the right place at the right time. Your power comes from the larger muscles in your torso and thighs.

They need to trust that relaxing their upper body and slowing down a bit will actually produce better results. The performance improvement is easy to prove with a device like a Zepp batting sensor. Capture 5 or 10 of their "hard swings". The sensor will note there bat speed, angle another stats. You could also keep track of your judgement RE whether a ball was a line drive, pop up or grounder.

After some instruction RE letting go of tension and a smooth transfer of power from stride through swing, capture 5 or 10 new swings. Their line drive percentage and bat speed stats will increase significantly. A bat speed increase of 5% to 10% MPH is common after a single lesson.

As with any physical activity, they will revert back to their old habits unless the player has completed enough high-quality repetitions to make the new action instinctive. So good quality repetitions are crucial.

The point of hitting a baseball or softball is to make solid contact, to drive the ball, to hit it hard. But swinging hard isn't really the answer.

Swinging swinging harder does not make the ball go farther. More specifically,

That sounds counterintuitive doesn't it? But it's true. Swinging

The hardest hit balls are produced by swings that smoothly coordinate the actions of your hands, hips and legs.