Swing With Your Front Arm

Swing with just your front arm.  It’s really that simple.  People want to often make it more confusing than it needs to but it’s not their fault.  Conventional baseball swing instruction has sold them on the idea that they need to be given a one hour lecture to understand the swing, and even then they walk away unsure if they’re doing it right.

The bottom line is, the conventional approach to the swing has gotten way too confusing.  The gurus say science backs up their claims or that some major league player who uses their methods backs up their claims.  But is that major leaguer mostly using muscle to get his results?  In swing instruction, shouldn’t we be looking at players who hit for high levels of power despite their size not because of it? 

Swing instruction is making a mockery of what a great swing is.  If you lean on their methods hard enough eventually you will end up with a swing that is obviously not the ideal way to move at the plate.  I mean the way the swing is taught right now has turned into a comedy skit.

We all know a great swing when we see it.  We’ve just let our own intuition atrophy because we’ve outsourced our opinions to these gurus.

What’s going on in a great swing is front arm dominance.  This is why the swing that everyone says is the prettiest swing of all time - the swing of Ken Griffey Jr. - exudes the extreme of front arm dominance.  What gives him the effortlessness is front arm dominance.  The effortlessness is what you want to strive for when it comes to swing mechanics. 

And what is front arm dominance? You see, everyone has a dominance percentage going on in their swing.  People say, "but I don’t feel one arm dominating.”  As you go through the day are you consciously aware of your dominant arm doing a majority of the work?  Of course not.  In the same way, you aren’t aware that your dominant arm is doing most of the work in the baseball swing. 

You reside somewhere on the arm dominance spectrum when it comes to the baseball swing.  The key is to move away from the back arm dominant side of the spectrum and closer to the front arm dominant side.  And you do that by swinging with just your front arm.