Ditch the Donut

A great find from reader Jamie regarding donuts, swinging two bats, and other stuff in that vein:

Tune into tonight’s baseball All-Star game and you’ll see a familiar ritual: Batters standing in the on-deck circle will swing a weighted bat (or even a heavy, pipelike club) while they wait to hit. The exercise is intended to improve players’ bat speed, with the idea being that the regular bat feels lighter after taking cuts with the heavier one. But a new study suggests batters who add ounces to their practice swings may be making an error.

Practicing with a heavier bat significantly slows down the velocity of the bat head—depriving the batter of slugging power, exercise researchers at California State University, Fullerton, say. Swinging light or normal weight lumber just before stepping up to the plate helps players become accustomed to swinging fast, repetition that is key to athletic training, the researchers say.

Click through for the science.


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Splint Chesthair
14 years ago

Someone else made the point at the Scientific American site that most ball players used the heavy bat for stretching very slow motion warm-ups and don’t take many practice swings with it, certainly not at the speeds indicated in the study where practice swing was 75% of top speed swing on a normal bat.  Most ballplayers take their practice swwings after ditching the donuts. 

That’s what I was thinking.

MJ
14 years ago

They did this on the show “Sports Science” as well.  I can’t find a link unfortunately since fox website only has promo’s for the next season.

Motherscratcher
14 years ago

I visit your blog periodically throughout the day.  Since this post went up, every time I’ve scrolled through the posts I’d read this headline and immediately think “take the cannoli”.

Craig Calcaterra
14 years ago

Paulie? Oh, you won’t see him no more . . .