Athletic posture while coiling

jryan15 said:

Keep in mind this thread is most generally about quad dominant athletes. Natural athletes who's glutes function well, don't typically have these problems. For them, hip hinge is generally a no teach.



Hip flexion, even if subconscious, is definitely something you do, not a result of other stuff.... The fuss is because people like me and my DD have been missing hip hinge for all of our athletic careers... For quad dominant people, hip hinge will not happen on its own. Its victims will unawaredly continue to use quads (via knee action) until they wash out of sports. Being able to identifying and correct this destructive pattern as early as possible is a very big deal.


HIP HINGE
This video explains hip hinge (link). For the most part hip hinge is part of the setup in the box and is not part of a swing sequence. Some hitters stand tall and flow into hinge like Jr., but that is style and not an absolute. The next video gives an example of what most quad dominant kids do when they try to get in an athletic stance (link). Notice how he bends his knees and creates an acute shin angle and has to rake the bar up his shins to lift and over his knees to lower. This is the typical way that quad dominant people change levels using their knees and back instead of hip hinge. It is VERY wrong, but unless you have a sharp eye, the end result will look fairly close to the kids who do it right.

HIP COIL
Tewks has a great video for explaining coil (link). At the end he very briefly mentions tilt and releasing the rear leg. Wish he took that a little further as that particular element is the place many people get stuck. Most are thinking uncoil from the coil and don't understand that with all that tension, all you have to do is tilt the pelvis a little and the rear leg will be freed up and will turn the body through without uncoiling.

PUTTING THEM TOGETHER
The rear leg action that brings the body around in the swing is heavily dependent on the geometry of the femur and pelvis. They need to be hinged in order to leverage the power of the glutes in the swing. So if a kid is quad dom. and doesn't hinge and get his/her butt out correctly, they will be required to use their arms to bring the barrel around. These kids will tend to be very upright in the box and never flow into hinge. When kids like this try and coil, they have lots of counter rotation problems. It will look like there back shoulder peels off of the plate.

For kids who do hinge correctly, they are ready to add coil. If they can get a deep rear hip coil, all that they need to do is generate a little tilt which will release the rear leg and it will very quickly carry the body around and thus bring the bat into the zone. Because of this, the hand/arm motion is just a swivel doing most of the vertical bat movement while the hip does most of the horizontal work. As TM describes when you go all in to turn the barrel, that tilt will happen automatically and therefore the hip action so many HC's try to teach becomes automatic. As Tewks says at the end, all most all of the traditional instruction becomes obsolete.

With the exception of the glute stuff I've keyed in on, this stuff is all HI 101 and I'm grateful to Rich for unlocking the mystery.

P.S. Some kids with good hip hinge can also fall victim to counter rotation when they coil. Tewks does a good job in video of showing how this can be counteracted by IR'ing the rear leg.

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FiveFrameSwing said:

Bold above ... that is what is happening in the swing you posted earlier.

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jryan15 said:

As much as I want to tell you to go troll another thread to run up your post count, I will use this as a teaching moment... Yes, that slight lag right there is a hint of the arms around movement that I have discussed. What you fail to understand is that this is a result of poor glute response and not a core engagement issue.

In regard to her swing, it is excellent. It is 6 frames from decision to contact, and if her glutes were more responsive, maybe 6 drops to 5 which is the gold standard. If you would like to debate it further, start a new thread with a clip of one of your students (or yourself) doing better.

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