Posted by: Coach C () on Mon Nov 3 11:57:50 2003

Group, I would appreciate your opinion on what constitutes barring the lead arm. In the eyes of many, I have had a problem with this in the past, but I look at great hitters like Griffey and Brett Boone and it appears they are doing the same. What, in your minds, constitutes barring the lead arm and how detrimental is it to the swing??? Thanks for the opinions!

My thoughts are this. I believe the lead arm can bar on the pitch middle to away, but will bend on pitches in. The thought I have is the lead arm and shoulder should always be soft, even though it's straight. For many moons I tried to establish extension with the lead arm and it instantly put strain on the lead shoulder, creating front side pull or early top hand roll-over as well as incomplete shoulder turn. What I thought was top hand dominance in my swing was really amounting to be the opposite (bottom hand/arm dominance). I still haven't got the problem licked, but in regards to my Son. We recently started to implement a drill where we release the bottom hand at contact. the results for him were quite amazing. He literally finds the barrel with regularity. Now certainly there are other issues involved with how the top hand should work, but here is food for thought.......We always want to hit the ball deeper into our bodies, well if the lead hand/arm are fixated on that idea of extension, then it extends much further out in front the plate, where as not forcing that extension, keeps the extending back arm back more. In other words, the lead arm tends to pull the back arm to extension to far in front of the plate. I don't know if this a relevant issue as it relates to the lead arm, but I will say, "my perception of many great hitters is that the lead shoulder and lead arm look like a wet noodle to me. Certainly not all, but many. What degree on a scale of 1 to 10 would you say your tension level is at contact with your lead shoulder. Mine is probably close to 9 or 10. I think I might do better if it were around 2 or 3. Have you ever experimented with this idea and does it make any sense. I think everyone agrees the swing should be tension free, the question is where should we feel it?

Coach C