½ Swing Pitching Drill (with weighted ball)
In today’s video blog post, we are breaking down an excellent pitching drill called the ” ½ Swing Pitching Drill”. Using a weighted ball, this a great pitching drill to work on pitch speed right off the bat in your practice.
In this pitching drill, the pitcher is walking into a half swing drill, so they are working on timing of their lower body and their upper body.
So as they walk in:
- leg up
- arms are even
- plant the foot and the arm comes through
- working on a nice, short snap and a drag
- wrist snap, forearm strength and lose arms are the focus here, as your pitchers work on their mechanics, and the weighted ball works on strengthening.
Using the weighted balls in warmup drills will help improve your pitchers speed by strengthening their fingers and wrist snaps and their forearms. It can also help the arm to stay loose a the weight of the ball pulls the arm around.
You should also focus on pivoting the back toe, which helps get the hips open. Not getting the hips open is one way to lose speed in the pitcher. So you really want to work on pivoting on that back toe, getting the legs up and out, and pushing towards your catcher with a good drag.