- Dec 11, 2010
- 4,728
- 113
Bucket dad not hitting instructor perspective here: I am a TCB user and like them generally. This is a great discussion and I think FFS's perspective should be considered.
I keep coming back to the following as an emerging "truth" for hitting practice and drills, that too much of any one "good thing" can rapidly cause unintended consequences. (Same with dog training btw, and the older I get the more I think training dogs and kids are parallel but that's another story.)
29dad posted:
My observation? Something funny started happening with their swings. Can't quite put my finger on it, other than the swings universally became more "choppy," and several of the girls seemed to just quit after contact with hardly any follow through. That seemed counter intuitive to me. I mean TCBs would help you drive thru the ball even better, or so I would have thought. But that definitely did not match my observations. A lot of us were left wondering - what has happened to these girls' swings? And why were the swings so choppy?
29d, I saw this with my untrained eye when we started using the tcb's several seasons ago. The coach I was assisting wanted to use only the heavy ones by themselves. Bat would stop dead after we used them exclusively for too many weeks in a row. The solution was to mix them with the holey balls. The unintended result of that was the girls focused hard on seeing the ball because they wanted to know what the ball was going to feel like before they hit it and they started following through with swing again. The other benefit was that they had improved timing because the heavy and holey balls fly differently.
Does this mean they adjusted their swings for these balls? Yeah, looking back they probably did. Is that a bad thing? IDK, but I do know we use them in a limited role just like all the other hitting stuff I like to do. Less is more, mix it up, etc. etc.
I keep coming back to the following as an emerging "truth" for hitting practice and drills, that too much of any one "good thing" can rapidly cause unintended consequences. (Same with dog training btw, and the older I get the more I think training dogs and kids are parallel but that's another story.)
29dad posted:
My observation? Something funny started happening with their swings. Can't quite put my finger on it, other than the swings universally became more "choppy," and several of the girls seemed to just quit after contact with hardly any follow through. That seemed counter intuitive to me. I mean TCBs would help you drive thru the ball even better, or so I would have thought. But that definitely did not match my observations. A lot of us were left wondering - what has happened to these girls' swings? And why were the swings so choppy?
29d, I saw this with my untrained eye when we started using the tcb's several seasons ago. The coach I was assisting wanted to use only the heavy ones by themselves. Bat would stop dead after we used them exclusively for too many weeks in a row. The solution was to mix them with the holey balls. The unintended result of that was the girls focused hard on seeing the ball because they wanted to know what the ball was going to feel like before they hit it and they started following through with swing again. The other benefit was that they had improved timing because the heavy and holey balls fly differently.
Does this mean they adjusted their swings for these balls? Yeah, looking back they probably did. Is that a bad thing? IDK, but I do know we use them in a limited role just like all the other hitting stuff I like to do. Less is more, mix it up, etc. etc.