Baseball hitting and grip strength have long been linked together.
There are many different areas of your body and your game that can be trained and honed in order to improve your baseball hitting performance. One of the most overlooked and the least understood is your grip strength and your forearm training. Master this crucial element and you’ll be amazed at the difference in results that you see on the field.
The thought is that you need to increase you grip strength in order to have home run hitting power.
Forearm training to gain grip strength is one great way to gain bat speed and strength through your swing. You can train your forearms and work on grip strength by doing a number of things
Other’s think that grip strength will overcome many shortfalls in your swing.
A powerful grip can allow you to overcome many shortfalls in most of your athletic endeavors.
Either way, it will help to increase your grip strength.
There are some exercies that you do in the weight room.
Grip strength is an under-appreciated attribute. Most baseball athletes spend too little time building up their forearms. It’s unfortunate, because being up to par here has a big carryover to increasing bat speed and control at the plate.
Other’s can be done in your own home with a simple tennis ball.
Have some tennis balls around the house and especially in your child’s room. While your youth baseball player is watching television or waiting on his turn to play a video game he can be squeezing the tennis ball building the muscles on the hand , wrist , and forearms.
But… wait!
Some think that forearm strength is not as important.
Like everything in athletics, swinging a bat for optimal performance relies on efficient use of the kinetic chain. This means proper force application/generation technique from the ground up, from proximal to distal, largest to smallest body segments. In layman’s terms, this means using the legs to power the hips, which turn the shoulders, which launch the arms, wrists, hands, and finally the baseball bat to contact.
So, forearm strength is important, but not as important as leg and lower back strength.
If you want to see some of the strength drills you can do in the gym, here is a youtube video.
[do action=”add-youtube-video” id=”ZVOB8KZk3fM” name=”Forearm and Grip Strength” duration=”T1M40S” description=”Some workout exercises to increase forearm and grip strength.” height=”337.5″ width=”600″/]
Leave a Reply