Lots of pitchers make one simple mistake at the start of their motion that really limits the amount of speed they can create.
Read on to see if you’re doing it too.
Since your legs are the strongest muscles in your body, you need to involve your legs in your pitching if you want to throw faster. There’s something that many pitchers do, at the very beginning of their motion, that limits the use of their legs.
When you look at a pitcher from the back in Pic 1, you can see a starting position that lots of pitchers use. This is a righthanded pitcher and she’s starting with all of her weight over her right foot. That’s fine, that’s not the problem. The problem is that her feet are wider than her hips, and she never moves her feet underneath her hips.
If you look at Pic 1, 2 and 3 you can see that the Yellow lines are her hips and the Red lines are her feet. In all 3 pictures her feet are wider than her hips. What’s the big deal, you ask? Well, stand up right now, move your feet so they’re wider than your hips (not directly below your hips) and try to run. Hard isn’t it? Now, simply move your feet so they’re directly below your hips – which is where our feet are naturally by the way – and you can run easily.
Well, the way we use our legs in pitching is nothing more than a 1 step run. And we just learned that to run our best, we need our feet directly underneath our hips. So if you’re a pitcher that likes to start with her feet wide like in Pic 1 above, that’s fine. Just make sure you slide your push foot underneath your hip when you shift your weight back over your stride foot (as in Pic 4).
In Pic 4 you can see that both of the pitcher’s feet are now directly under both of her hips, and she achieved this by sliding her push foot (her right foot since she’s right handed) to the left as she shifted her weight over her stride foot.
This is a simple way to help create more speed on your pitches by putting your body in the best position to use the strongest muscles in your body – your legs!
For more help with your pitching check out the following:
