Secret to Improving Your Bat Speed in 5 Minutes

Do you want to improve your bat speed in just five minutes a day? Here's how. Okay, so you might think this is clickbait. It's actually not clickbait. We use this with all of our players. We use it every single day at practice. We use it in our hitting clinics and our bat speed sessions. Super simple way to improve your bat speed. Now there's a lot of ways, a lot of different ways to improve your bat speed. You can improve your bat speed through your mechanics, improving your mechanics, which we've been able to unlock tons of bat speed with players in a very short amount of time just by working on their mechanics. We're not going to talk about that today. You can improve your bat speed through getting stronger, more explosive, more powerful. Another way to do it. We're not going to talk about that today. We're going to talk about an even simpler way, a way that literally only takes five minutes a day. And it's overload, under load training. So all it is is swinging a heavier bat than your normal bat and a lighter bat than your normal bat. So what we use is we use 20% overload and 20% under load. And so you're going to take your bat, you're going to figure out how much it weighs, and then you need to find a bat that's 20% heavier than that, and then you need to find a bat that's 20% lighter than that. And what we've done is we've taken a whole bunch of bats. So if you look over here, we've got, I don't know how many bats are over there, lots of bats. We have every size bat that you could possibly use, and we've added 20% weight to all of those bats. Now how do we do that? Well, it's rather simple. I measured out what I needed to add to the bat to be 20% heavier. I grabbed pennies, I have duct tape, and I taped pennies onto the bat. So this bat right here is a 29 inch bat. So this is 20% heavier than a normal 29 inch bat. So any player in our program that swings a 29 inch bat, they're going to use this bat right here. And so we're going to start with the heavy, and you can do this with a tee, you can do this with flips, you can do this with front toss, you can do this with anything. You're going to take six swings, that's what we have our players take. Is six the magic number? There's really no magic number, but how we do it is we take six swings with the overload bat. And the key is that you have to have really good intent and you have to swing it. So if you take your bat and you just kind of go through the motions and you're just doing that at about 50% speed, it's not going to help you. So you have to have a high level of intent. Now that doesn't mean that we're going to rip our front side off and rip our head off and swing as hard as we can that way, but we have to have really good intent. So we're going to try to keep our normal mechanics, but we're going to swing the bat fast. Now that's the key. 20%, again I didn't just make this number up, they've done tons of studies on this and they've shown that if you go 20% heavy and 20% light, that you will gain bat speed. You don't want to go too heavy. The mistake I see sometimes is players go too heavy and they think well if 20% is good then 50% is better, then if 50% is good then 75% is better. If you get too heavy then your mechanics really start to break down and then you actually start moving the bat slower and your body doesn't work as well, so you're not going to make the gain. So make sure you stick to 20%, really important. After we take six swings with the 20% overload bat, we're going to go to a 20% under load bat. Now we do this a bunch of different ways. We have a bunch of different fungos. So for me, if I was doing this drill, this fungo right here is 20% underweight for me, and so I would use this. Again, we have flat bats, we have half bats, we have all different types of bats over there. To make sure that each player has a bat that's 20% lighter than their normal bat. And so you're going to take the 20% lighter bat. Now you're going to do the same thing, you're going to take six swings. And you're going to do it as fast as you can. Now you're going to be able to move this bat faster than your normal bat. So if you think about it in strength training terms, your heavy bat is going to be your heavy lift. If you're trying to get stronger, it's your heavy lift. And then the light bat is going to be something where it's going to be more of a plyometric, more of an explosive movement. So we can move this faster than our normal bat. So then when we combine the two together, that is where we're going to start to get our bat speed. And then we can go back to our normal bat. And so we go, we like to go in rounds of six. So we go six with the heavy, six with the light, six with the regular. And then we just repeat that process. Now when we set up practice, we set up specific stations. So typically in a practice type setting, this is going to be our overload section and that's going to be our under load section. And then you're going to take your regular bat and you're going to go to a different section. So we have these stations that players rotate around. So when they come in here, they're going to use their overload bat. And then we tell them to go over there, they're going to use their under load bat. And then they're going to grab their regular bat and they're going to go off the machine or off of flips or off of coach throwing. And we rotate around and that's the way that we make sure that we get our players using every type of bat that we want them to. But you can just work this into your normal practice routine if you're just doing it by yourself. Use the heavy bat for six, light bat for six, regular bat for six and just continue to rotate. Now we'll typically get through that around three to four times in a session. So if you think about it, that's 18, let's round up to 20 because I'm not great at math. You do it four times, you end up taking right around 80 swings. And you can get that done really, really quickly. The last thing I'll tell you is make sure that you give yourself a little bit of a rest. When we take these swings, we want to feel like we are 100%. And so that's why I keep the number at six and I don't go to 10 or 15 or 20 because at that point your body is starting to get tired and you're starting to slow down. I want these six swings to be as fast as you can possibly take them. So you take your six swings with the heavy bat. Take a rest. Don't go right into the under load bat. Take a rest. When you feel like you're fully rested and you can swing that bat six times again as fast as possible, then you go to the under load. Do that. Then take a rest. Then go to your regular bat. And you can continue that process. Do it three to four times. We do that about three times a week. We have our players in here doing it twice a week, but I would recommend doing it three times a week. And I know that if you do that and you're consistent with it, you keep it up, your bat speed will definitely go up. Now, if you want to really improve your bat speed, you combine that with some of the other things we talked about. So you think about swing mechanics, whether you go to a coach that can help you with swing mechanics, whether you, if you click the description box down below, we have a swing course which talks about the four key principles of the swing. We talk about 50 plus drills that you can do to improve your swing mechanics. So that's another part of it. And then if you really, really want to improve your bat speed, then you can look at your body. Strength training, getting more explosive, getting more powerful, getting in the weight room. That's when you put those three things together and you really see some huge changes. So hopefully that helps you out. Let me know if you have any questions in the comment section below. Again, don't forget to go down and check out our swing course if you want to learn more about how to properly use your body in the swing to help build bat speed and not just bat speed, but bat path and bat quickness. We talk all about that in the course. So that's what we have. Thanks again. Subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so, and we'll talk to you later. If you've got hitters that you're looking to improve before the start of next season, this is essential for you. Matt Antonelli here, former major league player, first round pick, and college coach. With this course, we're going to show you exactly step-by-step how to generate power, develop bat speed, and enhance swing mechanics. 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