I’ve had the question asked to me twice this week about the effect of forearm or grip strength on bat speed.  Since a large part of my facebook posts this week were on the subject of hitting fallacies, I decided to address this traditional training idea.
There has been a great deal of research on this subject in the last 10 years, all of which found no correlation between grip strength and bat speed.  I too, feel bad about all the time I wasted with my hand in a rice bucket in college.  But this is just one in a series of traditional baseball “teaches” that has little validity from a biomechanics or kinesiology standpoint.
The reason being, is the bat is ballistic at contact, which means you could actually release the bat milliseconds before contact and it would have no effect on the outcome of the hit.  The after effect in the reaction of the ball hitting the bat does not reach the hands until after the ball has left the bat.
Now, grip strength is important to the overall effect on sequential transfer of energy from one group of muscles to the next (also referred to as the kinetic chain).  For instance, a player with a pulled forearm muscle would not be able to fully utilize the energy transferred from the legs, core, and torso if one segment was distinctly more deficient than the previous segment.
To increase bat speed from a condition standpoint, you would want to spend time working all the major muscle groups. The swing will only be as fast as the weakest link allows it to be.  From a mechanics standpoint, optimal swing speed is achieved when the swing is in perfect synchronization.  This means the body starts transferring energy from the ground, up using the biggest muscles to drive the smaller muscles sequentially to increase the speed of new segment.

Tags: Bat Speed, Justin Stone, Strength, Swing, Training