Posted by: Dave (NYTino20@aol.com) on Tue Mar 13 07:16:33 2007

Ok, I am drifting off the actual mechanics of the swing and thought I would bring up a topic about the muscle groups and their role in developing faster bat speed.

I was wondering if someone with tight chest muscles could be potentially losing bat speed. If you think about it when your chest muscles are tight (the average person's chest muscles ARE tight) they round the shoulders. This would seem like you could possibly lose batspeed. I am not sure on this but it just seems like the farther your shoulders are apart (most flexible your chest is) the great bat speed you can produce. Round your shoulders and take a swing and then try to stretch them out as far apart from eachother as possible and then go ahead and take a swing. It seems like you can just produce more bat speed with "wider" shoulders or a more flexible chest. If this is the case then it would be the same for all muscle groups. I think stretching should be extremely important in sports training not just for injury prevention but also for flexibility and possibly increasing performance.