The hand path is one of the most critical parts of the baseball swing, and the hardest to perfect. Being able to get your hands “On plane” with the pitch as quickly as possible is so difficult because during the swing it’s not just the hands that play a role, it’s also dependent on body rotation.

Body rotation consists of feet, knees, hips, core, arms, shoulders and head. When one or more of these breaks down (over rotates or stops rotating), it can change the path of the hands, causing inconsistent contact. Add in a poor starting position with your hands, bat angle or stance, and you have compounded the problem.

For this blog, we will just talk about the path. When training, breaking the movement down into parts can help. So if we are working on the hand path only, there are couple of things we can do. First, take the lower half of the body out of the equation and work solely on the hand path. This means doing drill work such as one knee swings, single arm swings, no stride or post stride swings and focus on the initial movement of the hands going straight to the path of the pitch. You can move on from there to more fluid drills where there is a stride and a swing:  net drill, net drill with a tee, two tee drill, etc.

Drills are just that, drills. What you want the players feel. The more they do them, the better they will get at the feeling. Isolating a movement can help a player develop that particular motion.

Baseball Zone’s Practice Planner [1] makes creating practice plans quick and easy. With over a hundred different drills to choose from, creating a well thought out plan is only a few clicks away.