In today’s video blog post, we are sharing 3 creative softball hitting drills that you can include in your next softball practice. All you need is a tire, a string and a block of wood!
The Tire Drill for Softball Hitting
The Tire Drill is a softball hitting drill for strength, but it also develops point of contact understanding and teaches players to hit through the ball.
In this offensive softball hitting drill, players gain an understanding of the proper contact point, and how to hit through the ball, because they are going to use the end of their bat barrel — right by the sweet spot — to make contact right on the edge of the tire, and actually extend through the tire and follow through.
This is an fantastic softball hitting drill the provides excellent feedback, because if you are too early or too late, you will really feel it when you hit the tire.
The proper position on contact is the edge of the barrel towards the edge of the tire. It is critical to understand this because if you hit the tire too far down the barrel, that hit is going to reverberate throughout your entire body.
The Stride Box Hitting Drill
We know from watching a softball swing in slow motion that the toe opens up and the hips start to snap through in the swing. The Stride Box drill is an excellent sofyball hitting drill to help address the issue of opening the toe too soon. The key in this hitting drill is to make sure the stride foot lands with the toe closed or facing home plate.
The Stride box, which is just 2 pieces of a 2 x 4 — 1 foot long and 6 inches long — made into an “L” shape. Nail this box into the ground to help the batter be aware of the stride foot, allowing them to make sure the stride foot lands closed to the pitcher.
The hitter sets up their ready position just shy of that lead part of the stride box. That gives her room to stride. Keeping the stride foot closed, and as the stride foot lands, you get ready to launch your barrel.
The String Drill for Softball Hitting
This is a great softball hitting drill — and en excellent trick! — for working on the stride. It works well for younger players who you see a lot of stepping out and overstriding from.
Get your hitter into a good stance, and into their post stride position. Measure off the length of the stride by tying a string from her front leg to her back leg. The string should be tight and this shows how wide the stride is.
The player should then get into their normal stance, which will result in the string relaxing a bit as the legs are closer together.
The player will take a good hard swing through, and when she steps she can feel that tension in the stride and she knows she shouldn’t go any further than that and won’t overstride.