Core or torso usage

FiveFrameSwing said:

I see the torso being heavily used in getting the barrel to the ball.

Click to expand...

I see great torso use in JDs swing but it is not like the use shown in video you posted. Thats looks like an injury waiting to happen. Also JD doesnt swing around / pivot hip rear hip socket. More around his spine. His swing is 5 much different than Barry Bonds.

Rolling Hard said:

I see great torso use in JDs swing but it is not like the use shown in video you posted. Thats looks like an injury waiting to happen. Also JD doesnt swing around / pivot hip rear hip socket. More around his spine. His swing is 5 much different than Barry Bonds.

Click to expand...

Is this the video you are disagreeing with?

Thats the one. In catapult hitting he talks of a hunched back. I dont like that term but what he describes is an unarched lower back to avoid injury. Has the abs pushing lower back flat. Make sense to me. I dont see or understand that arching the back as a great sorce of power. Maybe if you are swinging around your back hip it would be.

Rolling Hard said:

Thats the one. In catapult hitting he talks of a hunched back. I dont like that term but what he describes is an unarched lower back to avoid injury. Has the abs pushing lower back flat. Make sense to me. I dont see or understand that arching the back as a great sorce of power. Maybe if you are swinging around your back hip it would be.

Click to expand...

I don't think the hunch posture actually means no arching of the lower back. You are flexing the upper spine/upperbody (think of Stan Musial, Ernie Banks) in the hunch posture. The hunch isn't in the lower back, it's an upperbody thing. I will see if I can find a pic of young hitter rounding the lower back.

Here is a very good picture of hunching the lower back (not tilting the pelvis) and pelvis tilt the correct way (arching the lower back).

Rolling Hard said:

Thats the one. In catapult hitting he talks of a hunched back. I dont like that term but what he describes is an unarched lower back to avoid injury. Has the abs pushing lower back flat. Make sense to me. I dont see or understand that arching the back as a great sorce of power. Maybe if you are swinging around your back hip it would be.

Click to expand...

TM's student performs a demonstration. He doesn't like it and comments as follows.

Too horizontal.
You got to get under it (.... as he flashes an 'upright-vee' orientation with his rear arm).
You got to get that stretch right here (... as he points to his rear lower back).


Do you have an issue with TM's instruction here? What would that be?

Do you feel the follow-up demonstration by the student was inferior? If so, how so?

Here's a good hunch posture



The upperbody/shoulders is what does most of the hunching.

Shawn said:

Here's a good hunch posture

The upperbody/shoulders is what does most of the hunching.

Click to expand...

That swing reminds me of a particular instructor we know, that at the time advocated making the front hip a significant pivot point. Many of us have gone in a different direction.

To me hunch=good athletic posture over the ball. Back fairly flat, butt out. Similar, but not as extreme, as you would want when fielding a ground ball or jumping off of two feet. Some hitters
start their stance this way and some flow into it in their negative moves (Trout, Yelich for example). A lot of young kids either never get into this position or lose it (sometimes due to a lack of
core strength) as they launch their swings.

As Buttermaker pointed out, arching the back is not the key element. The primarily role of arching the back is to tilt the pelvis which will then release the rear hip and allow it to swivel via glutes. If, however, the athlete does not have a good glute response, the rear hip swivel will not be nearly snappy enough to be productive in the swing.

When an athlete with a good coil and a glute response uses their back to tilt the pelvis, their glutes will kick in hard and will drive their body into rotation at their rear hip. The glutes drive rotation of the torso very quickly and how long they continue to pullback controls the body position for inside/outside pitch locations.

An athlete with a poor glute response can also create a rear hip swivel by recruiting their back, but it is a slow, grinding, gear like response as they drive the scap down along the spine. It is too slow to bring the body around fast enough to be effective for hitting. So even if the hitter is coiled and launches the barrel in a way that causes the pelvis to tilt and release the rear hip, they will only get a few degrees of rotation before their brain realizes that they are going to be late into contact and thus automatically supplements with arm motions and spinal rotation to get the barrel to the ball.