Posted by: ray porco (rporco@verizon.net) on Thu Jul 7 18:10:54 2005

Hitter,

You cannot focus on a single joint movement in swinging the bat at a pitched baseball in a competitive atmosphere.

The only hope that you would have that a single joint movement would contribute to your swing (in competition) is to practice/drill in such a way as to make the movement involuntary during competition.

You said, “My ‘approach’ is repeatedly performing these actions individually and consciously, until they become muscle memory.”

I disagree. Repetition of individual action is not the optimal way of learning to bat a ball optimally in competition.

Three reasons:
Repetition prepares you for a pre-planned action. (This only occurs until toe touch).

Schema theory. People don’t learn specific movements. Instead, they construct generalized motor programs.

Contextual Interference. People retain skills better when they train in an environment or task context that prevents their simply repeating a movement pattern. Interference, like random, ever-changing practice, forces them to engage in more meaningful processing or regeneration of motor skills.

Main reason why some are great “cage” hitters, and can’t do it when it counts.


Your quote:

“By your post and the poem you cited, it gave off the impression that you were against learning an exaggerated leg push/pull, and rather do what comes naturally. Or maybe I just misunderstood.”


You are correct. You just misunderstood.
What I said very plainly was:
“single joint movements are involved in multi-joint tasks but the movements are not controlled separately. If several elemental single-joint commands were executed simultaneously, a normal multi-joint movement would not be generated; instead, a very disorganized movement would arise.”