Have you seen this, or tried on of these yet? Seems to be teaching my son to keep his hands back. Great to work off the tee.
Swing Smarter Response:
(The instruction in the video above isn't the best, the guy is teaching a long swing, but it gives you a good idea as to how this device is utilized)
Geoff, thanks for the question...to tell you the truth, just looking at the device left us puzzled :/ But checking out the website (http://insiderbat.com/feature.htm) shed some light on what the heck this "thing" is and does ;)
I do like it, although an odd way to teach keeping the hands inside the ball. The paddle hitting surface isn't hard to mimic (you can use a tennis racquet, cricket bat, etc.), but the surface is small and supposedly the bent shaft helps with keeping the hands out in front of contact.
I don't know if I like the grip training feature of the bat because proper grip isn't hard to teach on a real bat.
However, I think $54 plus shipping is reasonable.
The only thing to be careful of is getting into the habit of sweeping the barrel through the zone (like the coach is doing in the video above), instead of being short to the ball, in a slicing down Samurai motion with the barrel above the hands until contact. At contact our barrel should drop below the hands and in line with the path of the ball.
Geoff, a note on why your son maybe keeping his hands back better is probably due to the funky grip of the Insider Bat, which is putting his hands in a stronger position to launch from. I'm not sure on that, so any other Swing Smarter reader comments would be highly appreciated who've spent some time with this baseball hitting device.
