This article may or may not light the online hitting community up like a forest fire. If it does, RIP to all the good people that have been apart of it. If not, and this article is still here when you reach it, congrats, you got here before the fall and you might as well continue reading.
What is “One Legged Hitting”?
An example of literal one legged hitting:
The biggest difference between people that have to hit off one leg, because they literally only have one leg, and those that have two legs, is the fact that they aren’t able to transfer energy from their rear to their front leg during the swing. They have only one leg in contact with the ground which, by definition, means that leg must handle all of the force that has been generated.
The argument for one legged hitting is that those focused too much on weight transfer will lose their ability to have a quick launch and, as a result, react to a multitude of different pitch speeds and locations. Is this a valid argument?
Ground Reaction Force
Ground reaction force (GRF) is the amount of force that is being put into the ground at any given time. It can be measured and accounted for via force plates. The impact of GRF on the golf swing has been well documented and can be summed up with the following quote:
“Weight transfer, from the trail foot to lead foot, has been identified as a key element in hitting the ball a long distance” (Okuda, Gribble, Armstrong, 2010).
So we know for MAXIMUM distance to be achieved, the weight shift is a huge piece. However there’s a big difference between golf and baseball: the golf swing happens in a closed environment and the baseball swings happens in an open environment. We have to rely on external stimuli to tell us when and where we should swing (or if we should take). So we can assume that weight shift is also important in baseball as it pertains to hitting the ball as hard as possible, but how does that relate to being able to time and react to different pitch speeds and locations?
A study from Katsumata looked at the differences in timing of front foot contact to weight transfer in the successful hitting of off speed pitches off a pitching machine. He found that:
“once weight was shifted onto the front foot, the bat-swing was initiated at a consistent time” (Katsumata, 2007).
In other words, once the weight has shifted from your back to your front side, there’s no going back. In addition, he found that:
“For timing Weighting with respect to the flights of slow and fast pitches, the stepping movement was modulated such that, after the front foot made contact with the ground, Weighting remained for a short moment and stayed back to wait for a slow pitch” (Katsumata, 2007).
The stepping movement (stride) of the batters he looked at remained the same on every pitch. They would stride as if it were a fastball every time. However, when the batters were able to successfully hit the slower pitches, they were able to delay the actual weighting of the front foot for a split second longer. Yes the foot was down, but it was not yet bearing the batters’ weight.
Additionally, in a separate study, Fortenbaugh et al found that:
“The peak front foot forces against fastballs with successful results occurred closest to bat–ball contact, with peaks for swings against changeups with successful results occurring a bit earlier and peaks for swings against changeups with unsuccessful results occurring earlier still (Fortenbaugh, Fleisig, Onar-Thomas, Asfour, 2011).
The article went on to say:
“Batters appeared to be ‘fooled’ slightly even when successfully hitting a changeup, as the peak horizontal braking force occurred (based on confidence intervals) between 7 and 17 ms earlier than for fastballs, and the peak front foot vertical force occurred between 10 and 21 ms earlier” (Fortenbaugh et al, 2011).
Essentially, what these articles are saying is that controlling the weight shift is of great importance to your success in being able to hit a multitude of pitch speeds and locations. The better you are able to time your “weight transfer”, or the moment when your weight transitions from the back to the front leg, the better your chances of being successful. One legged hitting or not, I think ALL hitting coaches/people can agree on that.
The One Legged Weight Transfer
What I think often gets lost in the shuffle of the one legged hitting argument is that there is, and has to be a weight transfer, even if that means the weight transfers from the leg into the ground, resulting in a slight upward push and elevation, and then back into the leg upon recovery. Look closely:
Even in the purest form of “one legged hitting”, there is still a weight transfer.
How does this relate to your swing?
So does one legged hitting have value? Think about it like this: if you had to hit a pitcher throwing a multitude of pitches with different speeds and locations, and you were only on one leg, what would happen if you got off balance? You’d fall over right? Guess a pitch incorrectly and you’re out of luck.
Now, earlier in the article, we looked at the successful hitting of changeups and it was found that the weight shift was not perfect, but was better than the weight shift on changeups that were not successfully hit. Which brings us to…
The Front Leg as a Buffer
The fact that a one legged golfer can hit a ball off a tee relatively well has very little to do with hitting once we have to adjust to an external stimulus. I.e. a moving baseball. The front leg is our timing mechanism. You can only stay on one leg for so long before losing your balance forward, assuming you’re getting some forward movement (which you should be). Your goal should be to time the weight shift as well as possible but, if you happen to get a particularly slow pitch in which you need to create more time for, the front leg can be a way to delay and still put a good swing on it.
As Fortenbaugh et al found in their study, and as we discussed earlier, the weight shift timing on successfully hit changeups was not as good as it was on successfully hit fastballs. It is NOT possible to be 100% on time for all pitches, no matter what type of timing or loading mechanism you use. You NEED to have the ability to take good, but not perfect, swings when your timing is slightly off. Without that ability, you should probably just stick to golf or hitting off a tee.
Application
So where do we go from here? First of all, there is definitely value in learning how to best control your weight during your stride. I think that is one thing the “one legged hitting” community gets across fairly well. We saw that the better we can time our weight shift in relation to our swing, the more success we will likely have. So learning how to control your forward move is definitely going to be of advantage to you. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t also use the front leg as a buffer when things get out of whack and our timing gets a little bit off. In fact, I would argue you should put yourself in situations during practice that challenge your ability to use the front leg as a buffer. Check out this clip of Mookie:
(Credit Brain Bannister for the video).
And then where he ends up on his front leg here:
Now, we don’t have force plate data here on Mookie, unfortunately. However, given the position we see above, I think it’s fair to assume he has some weight on his front leg here. If one of the best hitters in the world right now is willing to put what appears to be premature weight on the lead leg, me and you probably can too. Should we do it all the time? No. But should we have that option available to us in our “movement library”? Absolutely.
So to wrap up: controlling your weight on one leg is important. But making sure you eventually get a weight shift is important as well. We need to find a happy medium. The more often you can successfully control your weight, shifting at the correct time, the better. However the current data shows that you won’t always be able to do that. As a result, it’s probably a good idea to work on both controlling your weight shift AND figuring out how to execute a good swing even if you happen to lose your weight forward early.
We simply can’t be perfect all the time, and failing to train your hitters how to compete when they aren’t perfect, is doing them a huge disservice.
Questions or comments on the article? Interested in remote training? Shoot me an email at brady@dacbaseball.com.
References:
Fortenbaugh, D., Fleisig, G., Onar-Thomas, A., & Asfour, S. (2011, November). The effect of pitch type on ground reaction forces in the baseball swing. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22303780
Katsumata, H. (2007, February). A functional modulation for timing a movement: A coordinative structure in baseball hitting. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167945706000856
Okuda, I., Gribble, P., & Armstrong, C. (2010, March). Trunk Rotation and Weight Transfer Patterns Between Skilled and Low Skilled Golfers. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737954/