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What is Cutting Off Your Swing?
Young hitters have a tendency to want to hit home runs. While there is nothing wrong with that, this mentality can affect their swing.
The more the hitter thinks about pulling the ball to the pole, the more they will cheat that way. This results in grooving the swing with the front shoulder rotating out. This is cutting off your swing or also called pulling off the ball.
When a hitter’s front shoulder opens up too early, it creates the following problems for hitters:
- Limits plate coverage
- Makes timing more difficult
- Results in ground balls to the pull side
- Makes you an easy target for pitchers
The Solution
The good news is that cutting off your swing is a problem that is fixable. In this week’s article, Doug Bernier shows us how we can work on keeping your front shoulder closed with the following tee drill.
For this drill, we hold the bat with only our backhand, while we keep our front arm extended over the plate.
Make sure you choke up on the bat so the bat is more comfortable to hit one-handed.
Now take a swing and try to keep your front arm extended over home plate as you hit the ball off the tee and drive it up the middle.
This exercise will force you to move and turn with your hips, almost in a whip-like fashion. It will also discourage hitters from initiating the swing with their front shoulder.
In addition, this drill encourages proper sequencing of the swing and promotes an optimal bat path to the ball.
Quality Over Quantity
When working on tee drills, it is important to make every repetition count. You aren’t doing yourself any favors if the first few repetitions are good and then we fall back into our usual bad habits.
Poor quality leads to poor results. Focus on the quality of every swing.
One Thing at a Time
If you are working on not cutting off your swing, focus solely on that.
Forget about drills that focus on your stance or hip placement, etc. Overly complicating your drills and thinking about too much at a time can muddle up your efforts.
Thanks Doug!
Tanner Tees wants to thank Doug Bernier again for these great tips.
We hope you have fun practicing this drill so you can stop cutting off your swing and be more consistent at the plate.