Negative Movement vs Dead Stop Hitting

are you trying to hit the ball hard or just make contact?

anyone ever thrown a punch without moving your legs,,,,????
if you did, you lost the fight.....

Steve...good point about the golf mechanic.....

 

I saw on TV a show about "the art of an athlete". In one episode, the scientist were showing how power is generated in punch. Long story short, the result was that power was generated by a combination of muscles in sequence "loading" up the "whip" of the punch. Starting in the legs, then hips, and then to the upper shoulder, BAM! It was cool.

I guess I'm gonna have to come down on the side of negative movement.

Now, check this out, .....you're at the pool and some one throws a towel at at you, no problem, but let someone load up the "whip" on a towel and the energy is created. The pop you hear is not the towel hurtin' your butt, its that the towel end is traveling faster than the speed of sound. True gig, look it up if you think I'm BS ing.

Dr. Fish

 

Actually, it's the opposite of that. A body in motion can move quicker than a body standing still. Quicker movement to the ball is one of the reasons for the negative move. An example would be a ss standing still vs a ss in motion; the ss in motion moves quicker and changes direction faster.

The negative movement is ever so slight; it's not like you are moving backward a foot. And it's in time with the pitcher, so it helps timing also.

Dead stop hitters are generally go or no go. There's not much room for adjusting to offspeed pitches, for example. With negative movement there's time to adjust to offspeed better. The negative movement is not load and stop; if the timing is right the swing flows from negative through contact. Very important!

Negative movement gives a batter much more. Look at higher level elite college hitters. Most all of them use negative movement.

Many of the HS and TB teams I see hit from a dead stop. Kind of reminds me of the early days of fastpitch in the area when girls were being taught shortened swings because "they couldn't swing as fast as boys." Of course, we all know better than that now.

If you don't want to teach your players to load, at least observe players that do load. Overall, there is a big difference.

 

have you ever seen a golf shot start without neg. movement?

 

one of the best books you can read about the science of a swing is called THE PHYSICS OF BASEBALL By Robert Adair. Its all science and was commissioned to be written by the MLB commissioner Bart Giomatti. Adair was at the time a physics professor at Yale.

A negative load or movement allows the bat to be in motion when the swing to the ball begins. It is a basic principle of physics that it is easier to affect the movement of an object in motion than one that is stationary... this makes for greater bat speed. There is also the slight increase in the swing arc which is lengthened.. the longer the arc the greater the bat speed. I honestly doubt you could find a swing without some "load" if you videotaped it.

As with most things in nature there must be balance and keeping the head and eyes as still as possible is very important. The more the body moves the more the head moves.. the more the head moves the harder it is to track the ball.

 

Not necessarily. One must overcome the kenetic energy in the direction of the current movement. To reverse direction takes more energy than it would to begin from a dead stop, unless the kenetic energy can be stored and redirected (as in the compression of a ball when it hits the bat).

I'm not saying this is true of batting, per se, just clarifying the laws of physics.

 

nobody is talking about a total reversal of the direction in which the bat is moving. What you are talking would be for example starting your swing down on a ball on a tee and suddenly right before you hit the ball trying to stop your swing and hit a ball on another tee in the opposite direction. It has no application in fact to the swing and what we are discussing. To use another analogy if a car is traveling down a road at 50 mph you are talking about it suddenly stopping and going in the totally different direction.

In this example the basic law remains true as I mentioned if the car is traveling down the road it is easier to affect its speed and direction of movement than it if it were standing still. Have you ever pushed a car that will not run? Getting the movement started is the hardest part.. increasing its speed or direction is much easier after the car is moving.

 

Um, with all due respect, BSD, this whole thread has been about "Negative movement", i.e. movement away from the direction we eventually want the bat and ball to travel when we're done.

 

surely if you are a senior member of this board you understand what a load is.

 

I understand what loading is. I have no problem with it.

However, if the bat is actually moving in the opposite direction from the direction you want it to go in, then you have to exert more force to change the direction than you would have if it were still. THAT'S what physics has to say about it.

If you time it perfectly, you've wound your body up like a spring, storing potential energy, the bat is already stopped at the farthest point you want it to travel back at the moment you want it to start going forward. This would be the ideal.

I'm was only narrowly objecting to the blanket statement that physics says that it's easier to make something move that's already moving, not to loading-up in general.