Swing Changes With Softball Player

Hey, what's up fellas, how you doing? Manettinelli here. Okay. So I put this video up on Instagram and I got a lot of questions from it. So we do a little video here talking about some of the changes that we made. This is senior softball player going to play in college. And this is, um, from last week and then this is the following session. So she's worked twice with me and this is probably towards the beginning of the second session. So basically these are about an hour, uh, about an hour of work with me. So let's look at her first swing over here. The biggest thing with her when she came in is that a couple of things. One, she liked to kind of push the barrel forward. So her body wasn't, she wasn't in very good sequence. And so she was more upper body. She was a little bit more forward. And because of that, her barrel didn't turn up into the ball as much as it, as it should. And so with that, you're going to have more inconsistent contact. You're going to have more ground balls, typically the full side, you're going to have more balls that you kind of clip and slice to the opposite field. You're going to have a much less line drives that have carry. And like I said, the bat speed isn't going to be there because you're not using your body as well as you kind of see how steep she is on the ball right here. All right. She has her lead on working down. Knob is really working down. Doesn't really get turned up. And you can see the ball kind of going right there down into the ground. Okay. So with all that being said, what we wanted to work on is trying to get the barrel turn deeper, trying to get her body to work better together so that her, her rear leg will go and her upper body and barrel will work back. So she creates more of that stretch, more bat speed. And by turning the barrel behind the ball more, she's going to be inside the ball, which is going to produce more line drives gap to gap. Not as many holds around balls, not as many flare balls to the opposite field. So how do we do that? We did a bunch of drills. This right here, I've been getting a lot of questions on. This is just a little crate that we use. And so you can use a crate. We use a medicine ball, different things. And essentially all it is, is we kind of progress to this. So we start off with her toes facing forward. We work on coiling around this leg right here. Then we'll progress to toes kind of pointed out the first base. And then we'll get onto the crate. And so what the crate does is it basically unweights our front foot, right? And so it's very light on the crate. You can't push down or the crate feels like it's going to break. And so when we do this, the first thing that we're able to do is we preset this leg to be loaded. And so we take the back pocket this way, which closes her hips, which loads her back leg back that way. And so you can kind of see here, there's no coiling. There's no, you know, her hips aren't coiled. Her back leg isn't loaded back as much. And so you can kind of just see her back pockets pointed right there instead of more in that direction. And this is really important because if you want to set your body up to be able to turn behind your leg, behind this leg, you've got to set up so that when you start to move out, you don't just shift or fall forward. And so if you look over here, right, she's very even, kind of right in the middle, 50-50 weight. And as she starts to move, she's going to still be kind of right in the middle. So she doesn't do a good job of getting behind this leg. Now, I'm going to preface it with saying this. Some people might say, oh, she's really far back here. In order to get to where we wanted to get to, we've got to exaggerate. And she's very new to this. She's never, all the stuff that I talked about with her, she really hasn't heard before. And so we really had to exaggerate to try to give her a feel. And that's one thing that the drills do. That's one thing that the crate does. It helps you really, really exaggerate the moves. And so let's talk about the moves again. So the first thing, again, is coiling. So getting around this leg. As we move out off the crate, I want her to feel like she's not going to shift forward, not going to fall forward. Keep the foot off the ground a little longer than normal so she can learn how to keep this leg loaded as she's moving out. And so if we just watch that move first, you can see how as she picks up, she continues the coil, right? So look at the lower half again. This is that way. This is that way, right? So she's continued to coil. She's strong around her back leg. She feels like she's down into the ground and not just kind of pushing or falling forward, right? So that's the first thing. Her posture is different, right? So right here, she's very vertical, right? Her spine is very vertical. You can see how her shoulders are very even. So we worked on here is getting her more over the plate. And we also worked on getting the lead shoulder to be a little bit more down, just pre-setting herself or setting herself up to then be able to work the upper body back. We worked on getting a better pullback. So rear elbow behind rear hand. Here you can see her elbows down here. Her hands are up there, right? And so getting into that position where she feels like she's using her back. It's important to be able to use your back because if you don't, then you're going to push the barrel forward. If you use your back, then when your leg starts to turn and you work back like this, you'll be able to turn the barrel back a lot easier. All right. And so then when we make our turn, what we try to do is, the move is to try to get the upper body, like this entire upper body to get back behind your leg. You want your leg to turn this way and your upper body to work back, right? And so look at the difference in moves. Now this might be a little bit exaggerated. Again, we're on a crate and we're really, I told her like, I want you to try to get your upper body back as much as you can go all in on it. And so you can see her doing that right now. And when you do that, when you get in good posture and you make your upper body work back, your rear shoulder is going to work under, right? And so you're going to be in this position right here. You can see how much flatter she is there, especially on this low ball. The lower the ball, the more your shoulder should be like that. Your upper body should be like that. And so the fact that this ball is really low, yet she's still kind of fighting over the top with their upper body means she's always going to swing steep to the ball. All right. And so the difference here is, one, her upper body is working way more back behind the ball, right? Two, her lead arm is working up versus is working down, right? And so upper body back, but then we also talk about taking both arms in your chest and we want to turn that up. We don't want to just go down as you can see right here, right? So this is going down and this is turning up. And when all that happens, now your barrel comes in completely different, right? So lead elbow or lead arm is up. And now as she works through the ball, you can see how much more she is on path with the ball and behind the ball, right? She's behind the ball much better here. Here she's above the ball all the way down to the ball. Here she's behind it. And when you get behind it and you get your right palm up a little bit earlier and your knob starts to turn this way, now you're inside the ball. And notice when you square the ball up, this ball right here is a line drive with carry to center field, right? And she's behind the ball more. And so those are all really, I mean, when we're working together, that's the stuff that we're working on, right? And I don't know if you can see how much better her extension is, how she's much more again, palm up with this hand right here. She's palm up, palm down. We also straightened out her stride a little bit. See how much she dove in before. Now she's able to straighten out her stride. So all really, really good stuff. Again, she's very new to it and you could see the difference so quickly. The ball jumped off her bat much better, right? Now she's got to learn now. She's got to kind of recalibrate herself because she's swinging much differently in only a day, right? And so one thing to think about when you're doing this, two things really. One, don't worry about results. Go all in on what you're trying to change. It's really hard if you just focus on the ball and what the results are, you won't make the necessary changes that you need, right? And so some players don't buy into it. She's been great at like buying into it, understanding what she needs to do, why she needs to do it and then doing it. And if she misses the ball sometimes, you know, fouls the ball off, who cares? I say that all the time, who cares? Eventually we'll get to the point where we care. Right now we don't care. Just trying to change your body, change the way your body moves, your movement pattern essentially. So hopefully that helps. If you'd like to, if you're in our area and you'd like to do work, just let me know. You can shoot me an email, matt.antonellibaseball.com. If you're not from our area, I can still work with you. So shoot me an email and I'll explain how to do that. That's all we got. Thanks for watching. Subscribe to the channel, hit the notification bell, give a thumbs up, all that good stuff. We'll talk to you later. If you've enjoyed this video and want to learn more about building the elite swing, check out our new course. We have over two hours of content, almost 30 hitting drills. We break down the exact mechanics that you're going to want to implement into your swing. I've put the link in the description if you want to go check it out.