Posted by: Teacherman () on Wed Mar 12 16:04:14 2008

Tobell,

The Nyman swing plane....with the lead arm up in the swing plane, providing the link to rotating shoulders, from the beginning to the end of the swing, SHOULD be his defintion of bat drag. Of course....that is his definition of the swing. So....he teaches bat drag.....then he notices it....then has tried for 6 years to get rid of it.....and can't. It's inherent in his belief that the swing is around the shoulders.

He is big on the merry-go-round effect of rotation. Turning like hell so as to make the bat fly out into the stike zone from the plane of the shoulders. There are so many problems with that it's difficult to list them all.

The most noticeable are bat drag and pull off. Both of those occur if you swing with a plane like his animation shows. You HAVE to have one or both of those if you swing like that. There are no other options.

The fix is easy. Torque the handle at go. Turn the barrel rearward at "go'....DO NOT PULL THE KNOB. Any swing that pulls the knob drags the bat. I don't care if the rear elbow leads the hands or not. If you pull the knob...with or without shoulder rotation...you will drag the bat.

Make the flattening of the hands the swing. Most flatten, then swing. WRONG. That is a slop filled move that will get the bat sawed off at the handle by a good fastball.....or.....you'll continually "just miss" good pitches. It offers zero adjustability.

The barrel must be sent rearward by a "launch and spend" move of the hands. The swivel of the hands powered by the rotation of the forearms.

This clip shows what good hitters do with their forearms. In one fashion or another....from one angle or another....from a vertical barrel....a tipped barrel....a 45 degree barrel....or any other barrel angle....that IS the swing.

That forearm movement....accompanied by the lateral tilt of the shoulders....(a much more explosive move than shoulder rotation)....against the running start of the lower body....(early hip opening that creates stretch against the upper body)....creates the cusp....the sudden change in direction of the barrel...into the diagonal swing plane.

http://www.teachersbilliards.com/Forearmrotation.gif

To not use your hands in this fashion at "go" means you love bat drag.

Using the hands like this will create a completely different swing plane. Experiment with the handset and barrel angle that you/your son like....and you'll notice that your lead arm/elbow is down....not up in the plane of the shoulders.....and stays there until "go"....when the lateral tilt of the shoulders and the forearm rotation move it upward. That creates a swing plane that is NOT around the shoulders. That is what we call the diagonal plane (pitchers view of the bat coming through the strike zone.....a diagonal from the handset position down through the zone to the pitch location.