Posted by: Jack Mankin (MrBatspeed@aol.com) on Mon Oct 27 22:21:12 2008

>>> Cocking just means that nothing above the waist rotates while the legs do the cocking process of stretching the abs and back. While the shoulders and arms stay put, you take a stride and you thrust your back knee inward between your legs. Not only do you thrust that knee inward, but at the same time you thrust your self with that back leg against your from leg. The rotation and thrust forward at the same time will pop open your waist to the pitcher. The waist pops open to the pitcher not just because you rotated your back leg to point your knee inward, but because you're forcing everything with your back leg into your front leg, so the waist has no where else to go but pop open squarely to the pitcher. In the mean time your upper body stays put. If you do this slowly with or w/o a bat, you'll experience the abs and back be stretched. That is cocked, and it works for other sports like martial arts, golf, tennis, hockey, and even kicking, but the upper body starts first, and the legs follow after the abs/back are cocked.

The idea of the cocking deal is complete when your legs are looking forward but your upper body is looking down the foul line still. Then the upper body business comes through to hit with a lot more power from those rocking ab and back muscles.

For me personally when I throw/pitch and hit, I'm sprinting forward off of my back leg like I'm one legged. The thing is that my front leg stops me from taking more than one step, and it doesn't do much but stop and stabilize me. I'm sprinting forward on my back leg, and I'm aiming myself in my sprint toward the target off of my back foot as it is completely aimed and stepping thrustfully forward at the target.

To me this cocking business is like juggling. I have to have separate minds for each part of my body working independently. It took a while for me to make these. <<<

Hi Torrent

Welcome to the site. – I could be wrong, but from what I read above, it appears you believe in linear batting principles. Since I teach rotational principle, my concept of good lower-body mechanics is quite different than what you described. It would follow that we teach different upper-body principles as well.

As an example, a linear principle would have the batter fire the hip while “keeping the shoulder in-their.” Whereas I teach my students that the shoulders start rotating during initiation and transfers most of the power for the swing. Therefore, the primary purpose of hip and torso rotation is their contribution to shoulder rotation. – Your thoughts.

Jack Mankin