The Science of Speed: What Does it Take to Unlock Bat Power?

Athletic Intelligence Episode 10 Transcript

The Science of Speed: What Does it Take to Unlock Bat Power? 

‍

Timestamps listed are for reference. You can manually skip to them in your podcast player.

Meet Dr. Sasho Mackenzie, the Savant of Swing Speed

[00:00] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: You can't just swing faster. You have to train for it. 

[00:03] Narration: Every player is looking for an edge, the thing that can take their game to the next level. 

[00:09] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: If you look at all the time they put into improving their baseball skills, this is a direct, tangible way to improve your batting performance. 

[00:19] Narration: Dr. Sasho MacKenzie is known as the savant of speed.

He spent his career decoding the science behind the world's best and fastest swings. The Stack System is his solution to help players unlock their full potential. In this episode, Sasho joins Aman Loomba, GameChanger’s SVP of Product, and Alex Trezza, Senior Manager of Baseball. They explore questions about the science of speed.

How does overload and overspeed training work? Why does bat speed and exit velocity matter at every level? And what could this technology mean for the future of baseball?

This is Athletic Intelligence from GameChanger, a show where we go deep inside the world of baseball and softball, uncovering the tech that's shaping the game.

Sasho is a biomechanist who built his career helping golfers on the PGA Tour unlock more power in their swings. But lately his work has crossed over into new territory — the world of baseball and softball, even collaborating with the Los Angeles Dodgers. So how did a golf scientist find himself shaping the future of bat speed?

How a Track & Field Mindset Transformed Bat Speed Training

[01:34] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: I've got an extensive background in track and field. I was a coach for 10 years at university. I competed at university myself. Track is an amazing sport to, uh, look at in terms of applied science. There's not much strategy. It's basically run fast, okay? So through trial and error and lots of good scientific research, we have a pretty solid understanding on things you need to do to run faster.

Things you need to do to jump higher and throw further. Science is is pretty solid and it, it's improving at a pretty good rate as well. Some other sports like golf, a little more traditional other than just swinging faster, there's lots of other ways you can do to improve performance. So maybe there's historically less of a awesome science that's been done.

So if I was looking at how important club head speed was in golf and the fact that most tour players when they got on tour, even if they were in their early twenties, never really improved their club head speed. That's strange for something that is this important, you would never see a sprinter bust onto the scene when they're 18 and stay the same speed as, you know, throughout their, their twenties.

The whole point is to get faster 'cause that that's exactly what the activity is demanding. But golf. Swinging faster is important. So I started taking some of the principles from track and field and applying them to golf in terms of overload and overspeed training, you know, and had great success. But, um, you know, I'm a a sports biomechanist.

I want to optimize all sports. You know, I'm not just locked in on golf. A few MLB teams reached out to me like, okay, if you can make a golfer swing faster, same biomechanical principles for swinging a stick, maybe you have some insights into baseball players. And so started doing consulting with MLB players and some of those MLB coaches that had reached out to me were using the golf system.

Right? And they had gotten a lot faster, you know, in their golf game. Like, what, why don't we have this for baseball? You know? And it's really only in the last three or four years there's, you know, we're kind of in the elbow, the hockey stick part of the curve where people are starting to realize how important exit velocity is to baseball.

And if you want more exit velocity, you need to swing the bat faster. Right. Lots of people have known this for, for decades, but it really's taken a little while to really catch on, and so basically applying those same principles that have worked really well in golf into baseball. 

How Long Does it Take to See Results?

[03:45] Alex Trezza: Yeah. That's awesome. Uh, 'cause growing up a player playing a long time then, you know, coaching and now being at GameChanger, where obviously we're involved in, in diamond sports, um, kids and myself growing up, we always talked about, you know, swing the bat faster, having better swing speed, but I don't, I'm not sure we knew how to do those things.

So how are athletes responding to that now? Like, do they understand that swinging it heavier or swinging it lighter? Is the thing that works for me to have that swing speed go up and are they seeing like, immediate results or something that takes a little bit of time? 

[04:20] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: Baseball in some respects with training is where golf was at 15 years ago.

The statistics in baseball that say, Hey, let me find a player that has this stat, that means that they're a more valuable player. They're very solid now, but what's less solid, and especially as you trickle down from the MLB, is, okay, what does a player need to do to get those stats. Right? We know we want a player with those stats.

How do they train to get those stats? And so it, it's a slower trickle down process, you know, but the top MLB teams and the more inquisitive players that are, and coaches around the side of innovation are like, yeah, this is, this is obviously the easiest way to go about gaining bat speed. You don't have a lot of time.

Um, you have other skills that you have to practice in baseball. So, you know, if, if you can dedicate. 45 minutes, you know, a week, two 20-minute sessions, something like that. That's enough to see some gains. You know what I say is give it at least six weeks. Our, our programs are 18 sessions long. The first one that you do, 18 to 24 sessions, you do a session two to three times a week, two’s plenty, and you will see quicker gains.

If you see changes in positive changes in your swing mechanics, so we've got a sensor in the bat, Bluetooth to speak to your phone or some kind of iOS device. And what a lot of players will realize is getting that immediate feedback loop. You swing, you see the speed 65. Okay, maybe I'm gonna try to do something a little different with my lead up.

Maybe you have some swing tips from your your batting coach. Great. You try a different feeling. Whoa, look at that. The speed just went up. So you can have some kind of organic changes to your mechanics that happen naturally. Those speed changes can happen very quickly, just through a feedback loop of seeing the swing speed and doing different things. Changing of the physiology, how fast your muscles are contracting, how fast signals are going from your brain, those things are gonna take a little bit more time.

Those adaptations. So there's different ways that doing this training can increase your speed. Those ways take different varying amounts of time. 

What Is Biomechanics—and Why Does It Matter?

[06:22] Aman Loomba: Your approach to this comes from a background in biomechanics? 

[06:26] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: Yeah, it certainly starts from a biomechanics perspective. I think that, you know, even if you're gonna look at changing physiology, you know, like strength exercises or plyometrics or whatever, you have to understand the biomechanics of the movement.

The, the stimulus that's gonna lead to an adaptation is determined by the biomechanics of the movement. 

[06:46] Aman Loomba: Tell us more about what biomechanics is and what it means. How, how does thinking about things using, uh, you know, a biomechanical framework differ, or how, how does it evolve from sort of the traditional ways people think about their swing?

[07:00] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: Biomechanics is, is really physics, Newton's Law is F equals ma, but applying it specifically to, uh, the body. So if I want to have someone swing a bat faster, then I need to understand what are the muscles doing to swing a bat. So you're swinging the bat right now at 80 miles per hour. What are the constraints on the system?

What does the system need to do? Okay, well, the muscles need to contract at this speed. The muscles need to apply or generate force in such a way that the hands apply forces and torques to the bat. Um, if I know those stimuli, then I can set up, uh, training that allows someone to be just experience a little bit more of that.

Inside The Stack System: Custom Weights for Personalized Bat Speed Training

[07:44] Narration: Sasho's team has developed The Stack System. First created for golf, and now adapted for baseball. The tool uses a set of interchangeable weights that can be added or removed to create those different training loads. The Stack System alternates between overload and overspeed training. In simple terms, sometimes the bat is heavier building strength.

Other times it's lighter teaching your body to move faster. Together, those two forces — power and speed — raise the ceiling on how fast a player can swing and how hard they can hit the ball. 

[08:20] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: We've got 30 different, uh, options for loads, five weights that can be interchanged to get 30 different combinations.

And that allows us to adjust both the load stimulus, what are the forces and torques you're experiencing, as well as the speed stimulus. And then even to go a little bit deeper, if we look at both overload and overspeed training separately, they act on different mechanisms in the body. If we take a look at someone, say force velocity profile when they're swinging a baseball bat.

We know how fast they're swinging their current gamer bat. We know how fast they swing things a little bit heavier, and how fast they're swing things a little bit lighter. That gives us kind of a slope, their speed sensitivity. Some folks need a little bit more focus on overload training. Some folks need a little more focus on overspeed training, and so that puts you into a slightly different philosophy of training program that we can still customize within once you're in that program.

[09:12] Aman Loomba: That's interesting. So I, I heard you say folks have a different sensitivity in response to these things, and that's because of our different inherent sort of physiologies and depending on, on their level of sensitivity, where they fall on that curve. The recommendations for them to actually improve that speed will be different.

[09:27] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: Exactly. It could be your physiology, it could be, you know, the speed with which you can track muscle. It could also be your, your swing mechanics, 

[09:33] Aman Loomba: Right. 

What’s Your Force-Velocity Profile? Here’s Why It Matters

[09:34] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: So the, the particular, uh, coordination pattern you're using to swing a baseball bat might be different than somebody else's. So that enables you to swing a really heavy bat, still pretty fast, you know, and the three things determine, um, how fast we swing something.

The three properties of an object: it's mass, it's moment of inertia, and where the center of mass of that object is relative to your hands. If you increase any of those three properties and keep the other two equal, then you're gonna swing it slower, right? That's true for everybody, but how much slower we swing it for that increase is specific to the individual.

So, some individuals might need more. Based on that, what I call a force velocity or load velocity profile. Some individuals will need to experience more overload training. Some individuals will need to experience more overspeed training to push the speed that they're swinging their gamer bat that particular set of inertial conditions faster.

[10:35] Narration: Each player has their own sweet spot. Make a bat heavier, and everyone slows down, but how much they slow down is unique. The Stack System reads that response and fine tunes each workout to push players in the right direction. 

[10:50] Alex Trezza: We know baseball players are superstitious and a lot of old school players that maybe don't want to use tech.

What's been the response like overall? Uh, are you running into some roadblocks with that? Are people like. Hey, I wanna try this because this, this is a simple but effective method. It's not like this crazy thing I gotta wear or anything like that. 

Ideal Training Strategies Balancing Bat Weight, Speed, and Time

[11:10] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: The tech is all behind the scenes. You can do the whole workout and all you're seeing or interacting with is a speed popping up and a timer.

So you're just swinging and you know, it'll say, Hey, rest for 10 seconds. Take another swing. An image will pop up telling you when to change the weight. But it feels very low tech. You're not trying to interpret data. You're not bogged down trying to figure out what to do next. The apps like, Hey, load these three weights on, swing.

Timer pops up, swing, timer pops up. Then you get a set rest, three minutes long where you change the weights. 15 minutes later you're done. If you set new records, it cheers for you. So there's, that's, I mean, there's no downside to that in the tech we keep, we keep track of your records with every weight as you're swinging.

It's pretty motivational. So, I mean, if you're. It's as techy as, um, going into the gym and lifting weights and you know, having a watch to know, hey, how, how long should I rest between my reps and sets? You're lifting weights in the gym. You have to change weights. You're taking weights on and off the squat rack.

You may as well be putting them on and on. Uh, off and on the, TheStack Bat, so it's quite low tech and we make all the decisions for you. We're like, Hey, tell you when to work out. Come on back in two days. We'll tell you what program to do. We tell you what weights to put on. It's cool that the tech isn't in your face. It's behind the scenes. 

[12:29] Aman Loomba: So there, there is a lot of complexity there in deciding, you know, what are those suggestions to make. But you're saying it's all behind the scenes. The the player doesn't have to think about it too much. Your algorithms help them know exactly what next move to make. 

Feedback Loops and Auto-Adjusting Training Plans

[12:40] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: Right. It's completely boxed in.

There's no decisions that need to be made on the part of the, the user. We, it's like you just need to show up. And it's like having a trainer be like, all right, and we even, we have a warmup built into the app. You know, so it's like the trainer being like, all right, come on in in, we're gonna have you do a warmup.

Do these exercises. Great. Alright. You know, you can certify your, uh, your warmup by taking a few swings with the bat, so we know if you're warmed up or not. The app will tell you, Hey, you're warmed up. Great way you go. We have you swing a, a gamer bat equivalent load on TheStack Bat every session. So, if we know your current gamer weight, then you swing that every session, all the other weights will change.

But based on how fast you're swinging that one particular weight, let's say it's 260 grams for your gamer bat, you'll, you'll swing 260 gram condition every session. We’ll base how fast you're swinging the other weights relative to that one, and how fast you're swinging that one. That will change. The makeup of your next workout.

The app is constantly looking at what you're doing and adjusting the programming dynamically for you. So we're always in that sweet spot to get just the right stimulus. 

Can Bat Speed Data Help You Choose the Right Bat?

[13:53] Aman Loomba: You mentioned that the training program has the player take swings with the equivalent weight of their gamer bat. Would the system also potentially recommend changes to what kind of bats you use to change, you know, its center of mass or its overall weight?

[14:06] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we've got some thoughts around, um, bat fitting. My thought is you want to, in general, the bat that's best for you over the course of a number of at bats, you will maximize your exit velocity, right? And kind of in there is packed in there, even though it seems like a certain thing.

Well maximize your exit velocity. What about, you know, launch angle? What about spin? What about con number of, I wanna make contact more often. I just don't want the odd home run. Well, if you've maximized your average exit velocity, that means you've made contact a lot, right? Because your exit velocity, if you, you know, whiff three times is zero.

Those numbers are gonna bring down your average exit velocity. And also if a bat that's recommended, is too heavy, your swing time is so long, that's gonna probably lead to more mishits mis-contacts, you know, strikeouts. So, if the overall objective is to maximize exit velocity, and then we can work backwards from there, well that means that we want to maximize bat speed.

At the spot where you wanna hit the ball, the sweet spot in the bat, right? And we wanna minimize swing time, so it's not just about great. Give me this 34-and-a-half-inch bat. Weighs a ton, and I take a half a second to swing it, but look at how fast the speed is. No good. So with the sensor in our bat, we know not just how fast you're swinging, but how long the swing took.

So, when you're swinging all these weights during your session, like over the course of a program, you probably will swing outta the 30 different weights you'll probably swing 15 of them. So we have this really nice force velocity profile, so that allows us to optimize for, okay, what is the bat that you're gonna be able to swing with the best combination of swing speed and swing time to maximize exit velocity?

Because you know, when it gets complicated, we can do the, those computations in the background, a longer bat, like a 34-inch bat, you wanna hit it further down the barrel than a 30-inch bat, right? So in the algorithms, we can account for that, right? If we're going to a 34-inch bat, the sweet spot's gonna be further down.

That means we're gonna have more speed of the bat for a given angular velocity. Also, the heavier bat is gonna have more moment of inertia, it's gonna have a higher collision efficiency. So, these are, you know, all things that need to be kinda worked in. So, we can certainly try to maximize for exit velocity based on that data to, um, you know, get a pretty good idea of the, the best bat for you.

[16:36] Narration: While The Stack System itself doesn't choose a bat for you, the data it provides makes a strong case for better bat fitting. Small changes in weight, length, or balance can have a big impact on swing time and exit velocity. And understanding those trade-offs can help players get more out of every hit.

Does Training for Bat Speed Sacrifice Contact Ability?

[16:57] Aman Loomba: Can you say more about how players manage possible trade-offs or just the other complexities of the swing beyond bat speed? You know, you mentioned that some folks are looking to just make contact more versus hit the ball harder, farther. Do you have to balance or, or trade away certain things as you improve your swing speed?

[17:18] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: I don't think so. I think you can work on them simultaneously. So you know, if you, across a whole lot of contacts, you wanna have an upward, you know, motion of the bat when you make contact with the ball. Right? That's about the only thing that you can really control. So if overall your average swing pattern is such that the bat is moving on an upward angle, then for a range of contacts around the bat, which we have very little control over, right?

You, you can't, making contacts great. Sometimes the ball's gonna come with top spin, sometimes back spin. Very different than golf, right? Where we know it's always gonna come up with back spin, but why not? While you're doing your speed training, work on those positive swing mechanics. So it's real easy to say, right?

Maybe you've got some ideas yourself. Maybe you film yourself and you're like, okay, I wanna make sure that I have the bat moving on a certain swing plane when I'm doing my speed training. I'm gonna make sure I'm doing that. So you can reinforce positive things. You can also make sure that you're not taking forever to swing the bat.

So I think it's really important to imagine before you make your swing, all right, I'm watching visualizing the pitcher, watching the pitch come in, and then you're getting that swing off as quickly as you possibly can. With a certain swing playing, but also at the same time trying to maximize for, for bat speed.

Speed Training for Young Players

[18:29] Narration: Of course, not every player is chasing a major league fastball. The Stack System also provides a youth model built from the same principles, but scaled for younger players. 

[18:40] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: The youth bat designed completely different from the pro because it needs to also accommodate everybody from someone who's swinging in T-ball all the way up to that player that's, you know, on an elite travel team.

So the, the design is, um, very specific to baseball and very specific between the, the, the pro and the youth model of our bat as well. We wanna really make sure we're hitting that stimulus versus, Hey, um, here's a heavier bat. Just go swing this one. Right? We have really 60, if you take both the youth and the, the pro model and the, and all the weight combinations, we have 60 different ways we can adjust the stimulus for baseball players. 

[19:19] Alex Trezza: If you notice when you're using the product right, that I'm okay, that was a, a faster swing, does that automatically equal better mechanics? And if it does, does those mechanics a hundred percent make you a better hitter? And I'm, I'm not talking about all the intangibles, but like the correlation between swing speed and like really good hitters, is it there, and is, is swinging faster, make better mechanics, which make will ultimately make you a better hitter?

[19:46] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: . Well, yeah, a hundred, a hundred percent. All else equal, I wanna swing the bat faster. Okay, so here's the best way to think of it. The objective of the The Stack System is to make you have a higher potential to swing faster.

Let me give you an example. Trezz, you've got your current comfortable in-game swing that you make, and let's say that's generating a bat speed of 80 miles per hour. It takes you a certain amount of time to make that swing of, you know, maybe you're swinging at 95% effort level. Let's go do some Stack training.

What's the objective? Well, let's say your in-game is at 80, but your max is at 85. Well, I wanna take that 85 and make it 95. You can still swing exactly the same way you're swinging now in the game. You can swing at 80, but think about how much easier it's gonna be. You're gonna be able to swing at 80 in a much shorter period of time.

You're gonna be able to adjust the pitches much more easily. If your capacity to swing the bat goes from 85 to 95, you can do exactly what you're doing. It's just gonna be a lot easier. We're training to improve our max capacity, so even what we currently do is easier and we can do it with more precision and control.

Speed Priming in an On-Deck Circle

[20:56] Alex Trezza: Yeah, that that's great. Are guys using this on deck at all before they actually hit in a game at all? Like, maybe they like it heavier, maybe they like to feel it lighter. Like, you know, we've, yeah, we've done it all. Like fill bats with sand, do whatever it may be, but. Um, are people using it? 

[21:12] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: Not to my knowledge, but they probably should be, and we've got a protocol in there called speed priming that's exactly designed to boost your over the next, you know, half hour, two hour boost your bat speed, right? It's like amps up your nervous system. There's a, a concept called post activation potentiation comes from some simpler studies that are like, Hey, if you're trying to max your vertical jump.

Right now I wanna jump as high as I can. Let's go do some heavy squats, and then I'll come over and then I'll be able to jump higher. So we kind of prime the neuromuscular system to swing faster. The other thing that's great, why it would work really good in an on-deck circle, whatever, is because you can precisely load the bat to get exactly what you want, right?

If you're going in to hit a ball, it’s about, actually, is it swinging faster? But you also want the confidence. You wanna feel when you pick up your gamer bat and your hands are like, yeah, I feel like I own this. I'm in complete control.

[22:10] Narration: You won't see players using TheStack Bat in the on-deck circle. At least not yet, but teams have started testing it in practice. Some are even connecting the dots between training swings and in-game results using increased exit velocity as proof that the gains are real. 

[22:26] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: What some of these MLB clubs have done has tied it to in-game exit velocity.

Which is awesome. So we actually, yeah, we can see that the training's helping. I can see that in the app. You're swinging our product faster, and those teams have doubled down and ordered more. 

The Impact of Team Usage: Exit Velocity at Scale

[22:40] Narration: When you think about it at scale, those gains add up fast. If one player's added bat speed can boost their exit velocity, what happens when an entire lineup makes that jump? 

[22:53] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: Let's say your bat speed goes from an average of 73 and it goes up to 75. You can literally go through knowing impact dynamics and go, Hey, I would've got on base 30 more times. I would've had six more homers. I would've, you know, you can literally go, everything stays the same.

The bat moves faster. This is what happens. That's impactful for one player. You go through the lineup and all of a sudden you go, we would've won nine more games. If everybody just got one mile per hour faster bat speed, nine more games, that puts us in the playoffs. You know, it's pretty easy just to do.

And applying that same logic that I said to you Trezz where it's like, look, you just feel like you're swinging the exact same way. You honestly don't know you're doing anything different. Your swing time has gone down, your bat speed has gone up, but you feel like you're doing the exact same thing. 

[23:47] Alex Trezza: Yeah. And when you were saying like when you can look at those numbers and say over the course of the season, your batting average would've went up. You have more homers, I think back to like Bull Durham and Crash Davis saying if one more, one more flare, you know, a week for the whole season and I'm hitting 300. So it's a better, more technological way to come up with this is what I would've done if, if I was a better player. And that's

[24:11] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: Right. Right. Exactly. Yep.

Training for Bat Speed in Travel Ball

[24:14] Alex Trezza: This is great stuff. How, how do you see this trickling down to like youth leagues? And kind of usage, you know, you talked about like whole organizations using it, but is this something you see that can really take hold at the youth level and maybe, uh, travel ball teams high school, using it across maybe their, their whole organization or something like that?

[24:32] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: Uh, I mean, any serious travel ball kid should be training for bat speed. I mean, if you look at all the time they put into improving their baseball skills, this is a direct, tangible way to improve your batting performance. And it's boxed in. You don't need to think, it doesn't take much time. So to me, it's just, I look at all of the junior golfers that have adopted this, all the best golfers, you know, it's gonna happen.

Um, it's just a matter of the rate of adoption, but the, the best players are gonna start doing it. It's, especially in youth baseball, you look at your best hitters, it's even more clear, right? That is just higher exit velocity is what you need. You need more bat speed, and there's a lot of. You can train around ways to get faster with bat speed.

You know, I'm not saying that they're bad, but Oh, let's go do some squats. Let's go in the weight room. All that stuff's good. But if you only have 45 minutes a week to dedicate to improving your bat speed, this is it. You know. And even MLB guys are clearly seeing this.

[25:41] Narration: As we heard Sasho say, the same principles that help pros at a few miles per hour can also help young players build the foundation for speed and power early on. But with youth athletes, as Aman points out, there's another layer to consider.

Long-Term Athlete Development and Why Timing Matters

[26:00] Aman Loomba: At the youth level, you're still growing and your, your body's changing. The biomechanics are gonna change 'cause your physiology is changing. Does the program have some way to account for that or how does that factor into the way you think about training for something like swing speed? 

[26:15] Dr. Sasho Mackenzie: Yeah, it accounts for it because it adapts with you.

So as you are able to swing heavier weights faster, the program changes. So it just, it accelerates that curve. Probably the best theory on youth development for improving sports performance is called, um, long-term athlete development. You're familiar with LATD kinda started in Australia. It's championing a lot in Canada, but it's looking at, okay, we want a kid to be as fast as they can be as strong as they can be.

Most endurance, flexibility, be the best athlete they can be when they're done growing. So by the time they're 18 or 19 or 20. What should we do? Are there certain times in their development where we should focus on speed, where we should focus on strength, flexibility, and endurance? And so you look at, you know, heaps of data.

This is a well rounded, well-researched theory. There are critical phases in a kid's development where if you don't do things as fast as you can, you miss out on that window of opportunity and now your ceiling is lowered as an adult. So if you miss those, and the first one is actually around seven to eight.

So if you're like a kid's running the first base and you're like, well just run at 90% and they never go full out, or they never swing something or try to throw something as far as they can, they've missed that developmental timing in their youth and then their ceilings can be lowered and then they hit another one.

And it's not just age, it's more to do with maturation age. So not all, you know, nine-year-olds are, you know, maturationally the same age. Right? So, safest thing to do is just make sure you're, you're hitting those windows. Do some speed training. So there's two windows that you want to hit. It's not a worry if you're doing it, it's a worry if you're not doing it.

'cause you're gonna miss that window. Some people talk about injury risk, as you know, doing The Stack System, is that gonna lead to more injury, especially among, among youth? And I don't need to get into the specific details of the biomechanics of injury risk. We won't go down that rabbit hole, but it's less about the peak stimulus and more about overload.

Like, kids can get injured if they just do too much, but the volume with Stack is very low. So you, you sw taking 25 swings extra twice a week. That's not gonna really make a large difference. In fact, if you think it is, they maybe pull back some of the other training. But in terms of, well, you shouldn't swing something that fast.

Could you imagine telling, you know, some 4-year-old kid with a plastic baseball bat, you ever see some of where they swing it a hundred miles an hour? No one says, whoa, Billy, don't swing that the plastic bat so fast, you're gonna tear your, uh, labrum, right? Kids swings plastic clubs and throw plastic balls.

Breakneck speed, right? So the peak stimulus really isn't the issue. Kids jump off monkey bars, land. Right. If an adult did that, they tear their ACL, right? So those peak forces swinging something aren't really a concern for kids. It's the overload and our, and our volume's really low.

The Future of Bat Speed Training in Baseball and Softball

[29:17] Narration: This is just the beginning of how bat speed can reshape the game and how new layers like bat fitting and smarter data will push it even further. The science of speed is still unfolding, and it's only getting faster from here. This has been Athletic Intelligence from GameChanger. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow, rate, and share it.

I hope you'll join us next time as we uncover the tech that's shaping the game.

‍