Hello and welcome to the D one pitching mechanics website. This is coach Missoni. And believe it or not, it is the dead of winter while we're filming this outside big snowstorm. So this is not me imagining that I'm at a beach. This is me going to great lengths to try to talk to you about what your stride should be like and how to use your stride on your maximum velocity. What I'm doing here is I'm putting my feet at the front of the pitching rubber, which is what I'd like you to do, lie down and then right at where your shoulder goes, you could put a piece of tape or make some sort of a mark that is 80% of your height.

Your stride should be at least to that mark on the ground in terms of where your shoulder is. Okay, for guys like Chapman, Billy Wagner back in the day. Tim Lincecum we've all know that they stride actually over their hundred percent of their body which is very rare. So those guys would stride this far out for about this height, at least 110. The longest I've heard is Lincecum at 127% of his height, tremendous got to be a great athlete and flexible to be able to do that. In terms of throwing hard, this is our third video on how to use your mechanics to maximize velocity.

And now we're going to talk about the rest of the stride down to footplant. There's a lot of things that can go wrong in this phase from guys that don't stride far enough from guys that don't stride that stride too far. As you saw in the opening segment, I was down in the ground to show you sort of where your stride length should be. You can always look at that but we know that guys are occasionally across their body geyser or open we have balance issues left to right throughout the stride. Here's the really good news guys. The good news is that, as I talked about before, release point is everything but if we back up what happens prior to it.

That's what leads to our release point position. So if you can get that early momentum And then drop into the backside with the hip lead, the stride generally takes care of itself. So if you have stride issues, they may correct themselves just working on those first two parts. So I would certainly get those first two parts down, I'd film, you know yourself after that, and then determine where your stride is. Okay. Now let's talk a little bit about that in detail.

There is a right stride length for everyone, and probably the best way to explain it is in a punch. Okay, if I put my feet together and then tried to punch, I have very little power because I'm not using my lower half. But if I got crazy wide, really, really wide and then tried to punch, I actually still don't get a lot of power on it because my legs are so wide, I really can't get my hips through. So this in terms of a punch, there's an ideal stride that we really don't even have to teach ourselves to get a maximum punch. Now we're not walking around punching people. So I'll give it back to Do you want a Hitting Point of View, if I swung with my feet together, I certainly don't get a lot of power.

But if I swung with my feet incredibly wide, the same deal, I can't get my hips or we all have a natural position we should be in to get maximum amount from our lower half. And without getting too deep on you. The power from pitching comes from the earth. Okay. And I know this because if we didn't have cleats or tarps on and we were barefoot and oil on our feet, and we went to an ice skating rink and tried to pitch it throw about eight miles an hour, okay, so we're actually building power as I talked about the speedometer, the speedometer builds, when our foot lands again, whatever miles per hour you're at, we're going to try to hold so if you landed at eight, we want at eight to come out the arm. So the idea with the stride is to continue to build until that foot plant and we'll talk about a few pieces with it now.

I want to definitely be as close to it as I can to in line but if you want analyze a lot of guys as I will on the video Following this, you'll see those guys closed. There's guys like Kurt Schilling that are open in their stride. There's a lot of different ways it's fair amount of different ways to pitch within this framework that I'm talking about, but your stride, we're looking for the following at footplant, we want your lower half your belt buckle to start to open, okay, while at the same time your upper half is closed, your elbow could pull off a little bit, but this separation from lower half being open, and the upper half being closed is the torque that actually creates our velocity. It's the same and hitting we don't stride and swing. identical. We our hips, bring our bat through and the punch our hips, bring our hand through in pitching our hips, bring our arm through.

So if you can imagine if I had my hand right here, and I did my delivery, and my arm is here, and I threw even though my body's doing everything, I would get no velocity because I've taken away the torque in terms of my delivery. Okay, some drills that you can do for the stride back to our med ball. Okay, we've talked about this med ball from leg lift, we talked about this med ball from the foot coming down. There's a variety of things that you can work on with drills with this med ball from our two point stance, right here in this position, where we do work on the right stride length, and hip turn. So we would fire this ball and follow through. We could start at the leg lift position, get momentum, land, fire through and measure your distance or your velocity to see what you're getting out of your lower half in terms of your stride and your hip turn.

But back to back to the stride itself. Same within the stretch. If I get good momentum here and I drop into my backside, my stride is going to take care of itself in terms of its length, and what I would check then on video do is to see that my lower half is firing open while my upper half remains closed. Okay, so I'm going to talk a little bit more about this as we get to the next segment. And while stride length is incredibly important, those first two segments lead to a proper length of stride. And they lead to they lead to what what you need in terms of power.

Now, I want to cover this before we end this segment is the talent drill. You talk to any pitching coach, half love it, half hate it for a variety of reasons. I'm right in the middle. Here's what I don't like about it. So as a warning, if you use a towel in the way that does not relate to your pitching, it's all a waste, you're actually grooving in something or practicing something that's not going to translate when you have a ball. So here's what a lot of guys do is they stride really far, whether trying to hit someone's glove or a chair or anything, and they actually bring their arm through and they get Get extension out here.

So it looks something like this. Well, my real release is up in here. It's not out here. So that makes no sense to get a longer stride to hit an object out front. And then I go back to a baseball off a mountain and it doesn't translate. Some things that you can do is you could put a person's glove, maybe up at your release point.

And the idea is if you currently release with with a short stride, and you get to here and you want to get a little further, you can have a glove or a target out here where you work on getting to a longer release and then finish. So your stride would increase by where your release point needs to be. And you can also even put, hang from a light switch at your house, put a towel or something at release. So imagine this hanging which I can't set up right now guys, but imagine this hanging. And now I have this spot that I'm trying to get to and I need increased stride length to get it there. So you can rig something up at home or at your baseball facility are in your gym, where you're hanging down an object that you're working harder to get to.

And again, I talked about that before, a lot of guys with balance, they come through with their weight forward, they stride short, they pitch very upright. If I get momentum, and I drop into my backside, that automatically is going to increase my stride length, it's going to get me further out in front with a good finish, which we'll talk about in a little bit. So I'm a big believer in stride length, it is crucial, but I'm also a believer that if you do the prior things properly, the stride length can take care of itself. And if you want to work on getting a little bit more out of it, set up a couple of drills with a med ball with a towel or even hitting a target. And that will help you increase your stride length. So when you go to those videos that I've created online, you'll take a look at some of the big leaguers in their strides and how their separation between their hips and their upper body.

And hope you like this video and look forward to bringing you videos number four and number five. Thank you