How To Stop Lunging In Baseball Swing

Hey, what's up fellas? How you doing? Manettinelli here. Okay. Today we're going to talk about the rear leg and being able to control the rear leg. It's really important. As I move out in my stride, do I have control of this rear leg so I can control the weight of my body? If I don't have control of my rear leg, well then I don't have control of my weight. Typically my weight's going to get forward. It's going to get forward early. And if I don't control or have control of the weight of my body, then I can't control the ability for me to then weight on the ball. So control of the rear leg allows control of the weight of my body, which allows me to weight on the ball. They all go together. So let's talk really quickly about what does it mean to control my rear leg? There's a couple of things that we talk about and this is one of the core principles. We talk a lot about four core principles. If you have our course on hitting, then you know that this is really, really important. It's the first thing that we talk about with all of our hitters and we have a lot of drills teaching hitters. How do I control my weight? How do I control my rear leg as I move out? So a couple of things. What does it mean to control my weight? I need to feel like I'm connected into the ground and that I'm not pushing away from the ground as I move out in my stride. I connected to the ground. Again, if I'm not connected, I can't control myself. I can't control my weight as I move out. So think about these few things. Think about as I'm preparing to hit, right? As I'm getting ready and I'm getting loaded, I want to think like I am coiling my lower body and feeling like I'm getting around my leg instead of getting into my legs by squatting. When I get around my legs, so when I make this coil move right here, I make this coil move where my hips slightly closed and my leg starts to work back under me in the opposite direction of what it's going to do when it finally starts to turn. It's going in the opposite direction. That allows me to not have the feeling that I'm going to jump away from my leg and away from the ground. So coiling allows me to control it. Getting into my legs by squatting puts me in a position where when I move out, I want to push. If you're going to do a jump, if I'm going to have you jump, you would squat to jump, right? If I was going to have you do a jump this way, you would squat to jump. And so a lot of hitters when they think get ready to hit or get loaded, what they do is they skip back, they get their weight back and they start to squat and now as they move forward, they do the opposite. So I'm loading by squatting and I'm going to move by coming out of that squat. If I coil instead of just squatting, if I coil this way, well now as I pick up to move, I'm not going to want to push off out of that squatted position. So that's one really important thing. What you can think about is one, keeping your entire foot in the ground, feeling like your heel is going to stay connected to the ground as long as possible. Because remember, we're trying to feel the ground under us, especially under this rear foot. So if you get into that coil position, you'll feel yourself getting connected down into the ground. And so I want to keep my whole foot as long as I can into the ground. Keep your heel down. Eventually your heel is going to get peeled up off the ground. But if you're one of those hitters that pushes forward, jumps forward, can't control their weight, you'll notice that your heel, when you make that push move, right? Your heel is going to come off the ground early, right when you start to push forward. If you do a good job, if you do a good job of coiling and then controlling as I move out, coil, control, notice how the heel stays in the ground longer. So that's really big. Look at your heel. See if it's coming up early. The other thing you can look at is this back knee. When hitters push, their back knee wants to race forward really, really fast. When hitters do a good job of controlling their weight. So they coil control as they move out. Notice how this leg isn't pushing, right? My leg isn't extending. My knee isn't moving this way really quickly. So my knee feels like it stays towards my foot a little bit longer. Now, can you do this too much? Yes. I don't ever teach and I don't want our hitters rare knee to be right above their rear foot. I don't want this for me. This is not controlling your weight. This is just getting stuck back here, right? So this is not controlling. This is going to lead to me working too far back here. My front side is going to open really, really early. But I'm going to get stuck. So what I teach is knee is always going to be inside the foot slightly. Hip is always going to be slightly inside the knee, right? So I'm here. As I move out, I'm somewhere here. Now, everyone's a little bit different, but I don't think I've seen a major league hitter, a really high level hitter, get ready to hit and be in this position where their knee is completely over their foot and their hip is completely over their knee. That's not controlling my weight. You'll see this with some young players. You'll see a lot of young players because they're told, Hey, get your weight back, get it back there. And so they'll either squat and jump or they'll just sway back here and then just get stuck back there. Right? And so those are really two things that you can think about to help you control that weight, to be able to have control of the rear leg. Now you've seen a bunch of drills that we do. I'm not going to go over them all, but easy stuff is to put your feet close together and force the hitter to move out from this position without jumping. They have to move an exaggerated amount because their feet are together. They have to get out to their normal heading position. And so it just works on being able to control your weight as you move out. So we either go feet together. Sometimes we'll cross the front foot over the rear foot and same thing. Try to get the player to move out without pushing or jumping. You've also probably seen on our channel, we use medicine balls. We use crates to same idea. We put the lead foot up on a ball or on the crate and we're going to work on coiling, controlling our leg. And then we're going to move out and feel control as we move out. When you put your foot up on an elevated ball, two things for me, one, it really allows you to feel the rear leg and what it's doing when it gets loaded. And two, because you're up high, you'll feel even more of a drastic move. If you push, you'll come down really hard on that front foot. And so we'll talk a lot about getting into position and then controlling the foot off the ball, control it off the ball. Don't just fall, right? And then we'll put a crate here and we do a bunch of other drills with the med ball as far as being able to control it as we, as we move out. So hopefully that helps you all out. If you want to get more in depth with this, we talk about this a lot. Like I said, it's one of our four core principles. We go through some other drills on our hitting course. You can check it out in the comment section below or in the description below. I should say, although it might be in the comment section also, not really sure. But hopefully that helps you out. Let me know if you have any questions, comment in the section below. Subscribe to the channel, hit the little bell icon. Don't forget to do that. And that's all we got. 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.