Posted by: () on Wed Jul 30 23:40:07 2003

>>> Is it ok to "hide your hands"? My coach keeps telling me to hold my hands farther away from my body. <<<
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> > > > > Hi Rob
> > > > >
> > > > > For those that may not be familiar with “hide your hands,” it is a cue I use to get the hands in the correct position to launch the hands into a Circular Hand-Path. When the swing is viewed from behind the pitcher, the hands should disappear behind the batter’s back-shoulder just before the swing is initiated and the shoulder rotation starts. From this position, if the batter keeps the lead-arm across the chest, body rotation will accelerate the first movement of the hands perpendicular to the path of the incoming ball. The hands must first move in this direction to generate the optimum angular hand-path. If the hands are pulled by the arms back toward the pitcher (more parallel to the ball’s path), a straighter, or more linear hand-path will be developed.
> > > > >
> > > > > When I do a video analysis (Swing Review) of a player’s swing, one of the key things I look for is whether I can see the hands when the swing is initiated. The more space I can see between the hands and the back-shoulder, the more linear I know their hand-path will be. But Rob, maybe you can satisfy your coach and still have your hands in a good launch position. As you take your stance in the box have your hands out away from your body (like Sosa). Then “hide your hand” as you take your inward turn and prepare the launch position.
> > > > >
> > > > > Mark Hanson has some great clips of the better hitter on his Web Pages. Go to -- http://mywebpages.comcast.net/swing100/clips/ -- and you will note that they hide their hands at initiation.
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> > > > > Jack Mankin
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> > > >
> > > > Not mine actually. The owner of that web page is a leading contributor over on setpro. But yes, one of the thoughts I picked up from Jack years ago has become a mantra: Always compare ANYTHING ANYONE tells you about hitting or pitching to slow motion clips of the world's greatest hitters. Paul points out that, although this is useful, there is a limit to what we can "see" when we look at these clips in terms of muscles firing, feel, how the body "learns" etc. But clips are still very useful for separating out a large percentage of the horsepuckey that is SO prevalent in hitting instruction.
> > >
> > > clips are good but only if the right clips....many people take the easy way, getting front views of the hitter, which are a dime a dozen, rather than taking the time to get the more difficult to obtain side clips....also, many people do not use a gif animator program to break out the clips in still frame by still frame, and yet they think they are understanding the clip....
> >
> > True, but if you have an mpeg and you use windows media player or quicktime you can slowly step through the frames as well.
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> but you can't control frame by frame, forwards and backwards

Actually, with quicktime or the latest version of windows media player, you can.