Posted by: Teacherman () on Thu Jan 23 19:28:42 2003

Was working out with my son taking swings off the Personal Pitcher tonight and got really frustrated by my mechanics. After taking about 100 swings, doing my best to stay rotational, maintain connection, etc, etc, I realized that the problem wasn't my mechanics. It was my timing that was horrible. I was early, no, way early, on everything and had to disconnect to hit the ball. Seemed no matter what I did I was still early. I was standing about 20' from the machine and it wasn't until I moved to about 14' that I started driving the ball again.

Interesting lesson. We worked on rotational mechanics all winter long in the basement mostly against a Swing A Way and did over/under training. I, being 48 yrs old, didn't see significant batspeed increases (didn't train as much as my son, but I did do some). However, my bat quickness is significantly better due to better mechanics. Better to the point that I could reduce the pitching distance by a third and still hit line drives. In fact, I couldn't hit line drives until I reduced the distance. When we first got the personal pitcher, we needed all 20' or it was too quick for us.

It seems that I'll have to do as much work on my "new" timing problem as I did to increase my quickness. Is there no end to what it takes? Just kidding!! But I thought it was newsworthy to post because others probably will face the same issues.

So the question is......Are there any ideas about how to shorten this timing learning curve?

Have any of you run into this and how did you attack the problem?

When they created delayed gratification they really meant "delayed".