If overcoming inertia is how a hitter moves sideways, creating leverage is where a hitter works from when both feet come back to the ground. Snapshots in time aren’t a great ways to evaluate the totality of a movement. But the point in time when both feet return to the ground (well, hopefully both feet) can help paint a picture of the swing in both directions: We can infer some things about how the hitter got there, and we can also make some predictions about what they’ll do from there.

It’s less about the position of where they get to at landing. It’s more about the process of how they try to find leverage into landing. Some things to consider include: 

• How wide of a base do they create? What kind of angles do they create? Do they land open, neutral, or closed? 
• How much posture do they land with? How does the amount of flexion they create at the chest compare to what they create at the hips? Knees?
• Where is the chest in relationship to the hips? How much hip shoulder do they create? How much counter rotation exists at the hips and/or chest? 
• Where is the majority of their weight distribution? Do they favor the back leg? Front leg? Keep things more centered? 
• What kind of angles do they create with their upper half? Do the arms have space to operate? Does the barrel lay flatter, or more vertical in relationship to the chest? 

Before we start to hone in on the essential elements, let’s start with what we know: Everyone wants to create force. Hitters organize to hit the ball hard. How each hitter organizes to hit the ball hard is a different story. But everyone is ultimately looking for some sort of tension they can leverage to deliver a strike. How you create these forces is a style – vertical vs. horizontal, more torque vs. less. But when it’s time to turn, everyone needs a point of leverage – or multiple points – to get the bat moving really fast. 

Your ability to do this comes down to a balance between two delicate elements: Space and tension. You need tension to motivate the body to move, but you also need space for the body to move efficiently. Tension without space gets you stuck. Space without tension doesn’t give you anything to leverage against. 

This is where I’d start when evaluating substance in this bucket.

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From a spacing standpoint, below are some questions I would ask:

• Where are they in relationship to the plate? 
• Where is their chest in relationship to their hips?
• Where are their arms in relationship to their chest? 

Where guys stand in relationship to the plate gives you feel for space horizontally. This spacing plays a big role in the ability to get the barrel flush. Whether you’re closer to it or further away it is a style. But if you can’t get the barrel delivered because of where you stand in relationship to home plate, you need to move somewhere where you can. It’s not to say you have to cover all seventeen inches with ease. But if you’re fighting against your body to get the barrel square over the heart of the plate, you probably need to create some space somewhere – whether it’s where you start, land, or how you move to and through those positions. 

The hips and chest have to function in a similar regard to give the hands a window to work inside the ball. To evaluate whether they are or not, I’d look at two specific moves:

1. Does the back hip maintain flexion as the back hip starts to internally rotate 
2. Do the hips rotate independently of the chest and clear space for trunk rotation 

The spacing you create and maintain at the back hip isn’t just important for lower half purposes. It’s the foundation for the early part of your bat path. If the trail hip loses flexion and slips into early extension, the hands no longer have a window to work inside the ball. The back hip gets in the way. The hands, as a result, end up pushing and casting away from the body. This out-to-in entry impacts the bat’s ability to create length through contact, hurting adjustability. 

The root of this leak varies. Some guys don’t hinge and add hip flexion when they overcome inertia. Other guys lose this flexion during hip rotation. In either regard, this window for work is a foundational move during the early part of the swing due to the downstream effects it has on both the lower half and upper half. The hands will follow the hips, but only if they have the ability to. 

On the second part: How much hip to shoulder separation one creates is a style. Some guys need much less than others to have success. But the ability to rotate the hips independently of the chest is a foundational move for rotational sequencing. The chest doesn’t just need a good relay race partner to pick up speed. It also needs some space to operate. Hip rotation prior to trunk rotation helps us do both.

Hips and shoulders don’t get married together by accident. It’s usually an indicator something upstream didn’t do its job. In some cases, it could be an indicator of excessive counter movements at the middle (what closes together opens together). In other cases, it could be due to an under active back leg loading pattern (sway/crash). During the swing, it’s not uncommon to see these kinds of guys slip into extension based compensation patterns (e.g. vaulting, premature hip extension). If your chest doesn’t have space to turn, your body is going to find space using other strategies – irregardless of whether they’re efficient or not. 

The transition period between these two movements creates a really important moment in the swing. Your ability to maintain hip flexion during the early part of the swing is only as useful as your ability to leverage that hip flexion into hip rotation. But your ability to rotate the hips is highly dependent on how much hip flexion you’re able to create and maintain. The interaction between these movements is much more important than how they exist in isolation. Which means they need to be evaluated as a relationship – not two boxes to check. 

There’s a lot of ways you can create hip flexion. There’s not as many ways to create hip flexion that positively influences hip rotation. There’s a lot of ways you can clear the hips prior to trunk rotation. There’s not a lot of ways you can create hip rotation prior to trunk rotation while still holding on to your back leg. If your options for movement are endless, you’re operating much closer to style. But if those options start to find limits, you’re moving a lot closer to substance.

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It’s one thing to find positions. It’s another to be able to harness those positions to create force. Your ability to harness those positions comes down to how you create tension: Where you create it and when, how you create it, and how much of it you create. If you want to move your body in a meaningful way, you have to find a way to create tension. It’s how we prepare the body to produce force.

If something that needs to be stable isn’t getting the muscle recruitment it needs to find stability, your body won’t send a lot of force up the chain. It’s going to hold you back until it trusts that you can. Spacing might open up our windows to move. But your ability to capitalize on those windows comes down to where, when, and how you find tension in your body as you move. 

Tension is a little tougher to evaluate because you can’t “see” it quite the way you can see angles, positions, or postures. Hitters also perceive tension very differently (some get better feedback proximally, others get better feedback distally), so asking where someone “felt” something won’t always give you accurate feedback on what you need to know. But we can make some inferences on where guys should carry tension when they move to execute specific tasks. 

For example, think about how your body is going to organize in a deadlift pattern. Before you pull, you have to find a way to protect your lower back. This starts with how someone probably educated you at one point to lift a heavy box off the ground: Lift with your legs, not your back. Starting in a hip hinge pattern sets the foundation for this. But you need tension in a very specific area before you can start lifting the barbell off the ground: The middle. Bracing your core becomes the bridge between the work you do with the lower half and the pulling you’re doing with the upper half. It’s not just designed to protect your spine. It’s what gives your body something to leverage against when you try to pick the barbell off the ground.

Going from the sagittal plane to the transverse plane, think about how you’d rotate a cable machine with one hundred pounds attached to it. Different movement, different goal, but ultimately the same pattern of tension. Until you stabilize the middle, your body isn’t going to trust its capacity to rotate with a substantial amount of speed or force. The arms don’t have big muscles for work. They need help. When surrounding musculature around the hips and spine has been activated, the extremities are free to do what is required for the task at hand. But until then, they are at the mercy of the middle – whether you’re deadlifting, rotating on a cable machine, or swinging a bat. 

Now creating tension is one thing. How you create tension is a completely different thing, but equally as important.

Going back to our hip shoulder example from above, you can create tension in your core in very different ways. You can create it through muscular contractions by using external obliques or transverse abdominis, for example. You can also create it through counter movements. Adding counter rotation at your chest is going to increase the length of your external obliques. This increase in length will accompany an increase in tension to protect the muscle from becoming over stretched. Both strategies increase the tension you feel in your obliques, but both require very different movement strategies.

If it’s not a movement strategy that’s going to set you up for success, you’re better off finding a better strategy that will. Tension isn’t an objective to continuously achieve more. You just need enough to be good. Chasing a bigger scap load might help you feel more tension in your upper half, but it’s not worth killing the spacing in your upper half. Don’t rob Peter to pay Paul if you don’t have to.

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Find the tension you need, give yourself some space to work. Create the best possible point – or points – of leverage that your body needs to work. If you set yourself up to succeed upstream, the last part – and most important part – should be the most fun: How you rotate.

You can make some errors in the first and second act. The final act is the part you have to nail.