Posted by: Phil () on Mon Aug 26 15:06:52 2002

Jack and others:
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> > > > I film my son a lot & put his swings on my my computer, frame by frame.
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> > > > The problem is that when he lands, toe & then heel, rather than immediately starting his swing his body will shift forward about 3 frames before he starts his swing. This results in his knee being even more bent by the time he actually starts his swing.
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> > > > I know you say this forward body shift is bad and I agree with you. The question is HOW to restrain this forward body shift.
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> > > He needs to work on his hip rotation to specifically get the front leg and hip involved. What tends to happen is the fron leg and hip are used as a pivot point and the back leg and hip do all the work to push the hips around. Have him think that the front leg and hip also need to pull the hips around. A good example would be if you were to put your hands on his hips and rotated them you would have to push forward to make his back hip come around and at the same time pull backward to make his front hip come around (by the way this is another example of using torque in the swing). For your son to duplicate these movements he is not going to be able to bend the knee because he is going to have to use the front leg to push his front hip back and around.
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> > Alan, I'll try again, now that the lunatic posts have been deleted. First, I'll apologize for having made such a rude response to your answer. I know you were just trying to help.
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> > Having said that, though, I will reiterate that the answer to each and every problem a hitter has is does not always have to be within the context of rotational vs. linear. The fact of the matter is, after reviewing Bart's response (too bad Jack decided to delete a serious post along with the nutty ones), Bart's solution turned out to be the one that pertains to MY son's problem. Since I know my son, I guess I have a better feel for what works for HIM. All I am saying is that one should excercise caution in prescribing canned or generic solutions simply to try and make things fit in the perfect model.
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> > Thank you
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> Since you do a frame by frame analysis on your computer I figured you looked at this website's swing mechanics. Look at middle mechanics frames 3,4&5 where this hitter locks his front knee and how that causes his hips to stop moving forward and only allows them to rotate and keep his weight back. By removing the bend in the knee it eliminates the possibility of forward body shift.

In my son's case the relevant frame (at Jack's site) is frame c, the launch position. As Jack says, this is the point where forward movement stops, and of course as the swing progresses the knee will eventually straighten out.

In my son's case, at launch postition forward movement was continuing (and knee bending some more), and as I said in my original post, this was happening PRIOR to the beginning of the swing. As it turned out, it was a timing problem. His stride/landing was too early, so at launch position (when, in theory the swing should be starting), he had to delay the start of the swing until the ball was closer in. Therefore, when he was at launch position but not yet quite ready to swing, the body had to do something, thus the forward motion.

Once he started striding a little later, the problem was corrected. At launch, there was very little lag time (dead time)before iniation of the swing and now he's in great shape.