Posted by: mike28nc (mikelamb68@hotmail.com) on Thu Jul 6 22:19:18 2006

Interesting information.

What we do is swing wood bat in the off season. Now I am not dealing with college players. My son is only 11. We always swing wood bats in the off season the help build strenth. When he goes to the normal 31" 23oz bat has increased. I would like to see what there bat speed would be like if they rested there bodies for a couple weeks. To let them recover from the over weight work outs.

Mike
> It has been studied and pretty much proven now that hand and forearm strength have nothing to do with bat speed. There are also several studies that show swinging a heavy bat for practice decreases bat speed in game. You are looking to increase the neuromuscular connection and strength of type IIb muscle fibers which generate the explosive bat speed. Not the type-I slow twitch fibers that generate slow strength.
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> As far as the muscle part on bat speed, you want to train the Type-IIb fibers and that is done by swinging repeatitively with your game weight bat and lighter then game weight bat.
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> http://www.asep.org/jeponline/issue/Doc/Apr2004/Stuempfle.pdf