If you play baseball, or used to play baseball, it’s very likely you’ve heard the phrase “don’t step in the bucket” more than one time in your life. Thankfully, players such as Khris Davis (if you don’t know what I mean, watch him swing one time and you’ll figure it out), have broken the negativity of such phrase and proven it can be a useful movement to have in your arsenal if you’re body is built for it. But today I want to talk about something a little bit different: stepping off the bucket.
I wrote a little while ago in an article here about how controlling our weight shift moving forward is important. As hitters, we don’t have the luxury pitchers have of creating and transferring as much momentum as we can to produce maximal velocity. While we do want to produce maximal velocity, we need to do so in a controlled manner that is adjustable to different pitch types and speeds.
Enter: Don’t Step Off the Bucket.
Now, using the term “bucket” here is probably a little bit misleading. I don’t remember ever seeing a bucket that was 3 inches high, but the phrase rings a meaningful bell in the baseball community, so here we are.
Are we literally stepping off a bucket? No. But are our feet flat? Also no. Example:
By elevating our rear foot, we are forcing our body to have “longer to go” before the front leg makes contact during the lowering of the stride.
Think about it like this: if you are walking down a stairs and miss a step, what happens? You very likely end up in a heap at the bottom of the stairs wondering who removed the step from the staircase (hint: no one, you just missed it). However, if you are aware that a step has been removed, you now are able to adjust your gait and more easily lower yourself to the lower-than-normal step. We’re trying to do the same thing with the swing.
If you have a balance board so you can actually SEE the difference in how and when you’re holding your weight as well as when it’s shifting, use that! That’s actually where I got the idea for this drill from:
Theoretically speaking, the width of the graph you saw above will be wider in those that spend more time with their weight on the force plate. The next question, of course, should be: Is that what we want?
For the answer to that I’ll have to point you in the direction of the weight shift article that I wrote (and linked) earlier. But to summarize, based upon the current data we have right now, which isn’t a whole lot (definitely a limitation), we at the very least need to have the ABILITY to create a “wider graph”. Once our weight shifts completely to our front side, we are pretty much toast as hitters. And when I say completely shift I mean like if you had a force plate under you and ALL the weight was on your front side Bryce Harper (but too early) style. We want that to happen at and through contact, which means maximal energy transfer into the baseball, not before, when we decide we have to wait a little bit longer for an off speed pitch.
Circling back around to the drill, then, the purpose is twofold: First, we want to be able to more effectively hit off speed pitches, as we’ve already talked about. Second, by “lowering” yourself into landing, you can theoretically direct the energy you have created more forcefully into the ground.
To understand what I’m saying here, take a look at this video demonstration:
The first move I make is going to create more vertical force, which can’t be transferred into rotation at landing (because it’s already “gone” from when you pushed down into the ground, thereby causing your body to elevate), while the second move has conserved much of the energy you have created and can now be used as rotational energy to be transferred into the baseball.
So by lowering off the bucket instead of stepping off the bucket, we give ourselves the opportunity to better adjust to different pitches as well as the ability to, theoretically, create more force (I say theoretically because there hasn’t really been any research done to prove this. “Lowering” versus “stepping” are pretty abstract terms. Hopefully at some point in the future we have the ability to say this force graph versus that force graph, but we aren’t quite there yet in terms of mainstream hitting. Much more research needs to be done. But just because it isn’t yet validated, doesn’t mean it’s not useful or correct).
To finish up, here’s a video explaining the drill and some different variations you can use with it:
Like the content? Have questions? I’d love to hear from you! Shoot me an email at brady@dacbaseball.com.