Posted by: Game (daggar1@yahoo.com) on Thu Jul 6 09:05:10 2006

It has been studied and pretty much proven now that hand and forearm strength have nothing to do with bat speed. There are also several studies that show swinging a heavy bat for practice decreases bat speed in game. You are looking to increase the neuromuscular connection and strength of type IIb muscle fibers which generate the explosive bat speed. Not the type-I slow twitch fibers that generate slow strength.

As far as the muscle part on bat speed, you want to train the Type-IIb fibers and that is done by swinging repeatitively with your game weight bat and lighter then game weight bat.

http://www.asep.org/jeponline/issue/Doc/Apr2004/Stuempfle.pdf