hey guys Dan Blewett here make sure when you're watching my videos here on YouTube that you click
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want to teach you high level advanced pitching concepts and I want to explain them simply in
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you're gonna get notified right away when I put out new videos each week so today we're gonna
cover what your hip does in your pitching delivery and it's gonna look different depending if you're
on the windup or the stretch but today we'll cover the wind up so as I start my delivery and
I take my rocker step and I turn here and I lift up this is a really critical part where a lot of
young young players little leaguers amateurs they get this part wrong the first thing that ends up
leading them down the mound is sort of their head and their upper body so if you look at this really
junky mound it's got a good slope but it's not in great shape it's got a pretty good downhill
slope to it right so if I practice the way I do on flat and I don't use my hip the way about to
discuss if I follow the mountain down I'm gonna have downhill shoulders like this because the
mountain slopes that way so what we have to do and we have to counteract the downhill slope of
the mound by leading with our hip and taking a slightly uphill trajectory to level out my hips
were even be slightly uphill still either ones fine but again we have to counteract that downhill
the mound so then when it's go-time we can shift all of our weight on top of the ball just like if
we're gonna punch or hit hey there like that when you're hitting if you're on your phone foot you
lose all your power right you can flick at the wall and if you're hitting a punching bag and
you're on your front foot you can't hit nearly as hard so you have to keep your way back and the way
we do that as a pitcher is by leading with our hip so what that looks like if I'm going to do this in
slow motion it's gonna look something like this and everyone's a little bit different basically
our leg comes up it starts to go down our knees tend to pinch in a little bit and then my hip
from this point on he's leading away so you see this triangle from my head to my hip to my ankle
and here is where I keep my weight back as this leads the way everything's supposed to go uphill
my leg extends for because I'm pushing back into the rubber and then I land with my flat
or up little shoulders so again everyone looks a little bit different but most people they lift
up they start to come down then the hip starts to go out as they finish their stride and then
it all goes at once but again the big thing is this triangle here hip and your ankle alright so
we're not going to cover the back leg what the back leg does you know we're not gonna have our
knee in like this as we go our back leg is gonna drive us down the mound but again for today just
make sure because one of the most common things I see with new young pitchers that I work with
in lessons is they have downhill shoulders when they land and when you have downhill shoulders
you don't have a frontside to then pull down with and rotate and shift way with when you have any
amount of downhill shoulders now my front side has to clear early and I tend to get on the side
of the ball so if you're a young player and you tend to throw a little bit sidearm that's probably
one of the reasons it's almost always the biggest reason because when you get down here I can't get
on top of the ball because I'm already down I'm already up on top of it so now like this doesn't
make any sense by mechanically my body is just gonna go boom it's gonna spin at the hips and my
arms gonna go with it it's the most efficient way to do it that way when you're doing a not
very efficient movement so when I can land with shoulders level now my glove arms gonna fold in
I'm gonna get to use my front side my trunk my hips and drive the ball down and get good
downhill angle on it and as much velocity as I can so again it all starts from here so the hip leads
us the ears up the back ears back so if you kind of think about you know if your water in your ear
like swing at the pool that's a good way to kind of conceptualize what happens at first and then
we have that the hip strength and the mobility to lead with our hip all right so that's what
I want to cover today just a quick tutorial up with the front hip does in the pitching motion