Does swinging a Weighted Baseball Bat increase Bat Speed?

While I was flipping through the channels last night, what looked like a baseball commercial caught my eye. I quickly went back one channel and noticed it was actually a full show. It was called Sport Science or Sports Science, not quite sure which one.

It was the first time I had seen it and was more interested in the study they were performing than in the title of the show. The question they were trying to answer was “does swinging a weighted baseball bat actually increase bat speed?”.

Although it may feel like you can swing the baseball bat faster after you swing a weighted bat, is that really true? On the show they had some college player who was taking some swings while they were measuring his bat speed. I’m not exactly sure how many swings he took before he swung the weighted baseball bat but it was quite a few.

They took the average of his bat speed in his first round (before swinging the weighted baseball bat) and then again in the second round (after swinging the weighted baseball bat). The results were surprising!

The college hitter actually swung the bat 1 mph slower (on average) after he swung the weighted baseball bat! The scientists explained that they thought by swinging the weighted baseball bat, you are actually training yourself to swing slower.

They elaborated: when swinging slower you are using your red, slow twitch muscle fibers which are used for more endurance type activities. When you swing your regular bat, you are using your white, fast twitch muscle fibers.

Therefore, their conclusion was, that by swinging a weighted baseball bat before you go to hit, you are actually priming the wrong muscle fibers, which in turn makes you swing the bat slower. They also concluded that the use of a weighted baseball bat before swinging in live conditions will mess with your timing and cause you to miss-hit the baseball. Here’s where I disagree!

Weighted doughnuts for your bat are usually 16oz (which is 1 pound). How could a 1 lb difference change the type of muscle fibers you are utilizing? I can understand if you are swinging 5 extra pounds or something like that, but one pound doesn’t seem like that big of a difference to me when talking about using different muscle fibers. I don’t know, I’m not a scientist so I will have to believe what they say about the fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers.

What I am not going to believe is that swinging a weighted baseball bat prior to swinging a regular one will make you miss-hit the baseball. There are just too many variables in the equation for me to believe that this is the sole reason that you will miss-hit the baseball. In the show, the slow motion video they showed after the college player swung the weighted bat was just a horrible swing. He was way out in front and hit the ball off the end of the bat. If in fact he was swinging the bat slower (like they said he was), then shouldn’t he be late hitting the baseball and make contact deeper in the zone?

I think it was probably just a nasty change up with good arm speed (or the kid just wasn’t that good of a hitter). Either way, there are just too many variables to agree with the conclusion the show came to about miss-hitting pitches. What I think doughnuts are good for is to just to get your arms, shoulders, and core loose. Not that you should swing a bat with doughnuts on it 20 times before you have an at bat. But I think 3-5 swings side to side, nice and easy, just to loosen up in between innings is perfectly fine and won’t affect you in any way during your next at bat. Here are some links for doughnuts:

1)Easton Bat Weight 28 OZ

2)Easton Bat Weight 16 OZ

Another interesting point the show had was that when using a weighted club before swinging in golf, the club speed stayed the same, as did the ball speed, but the distance the golf ball traveled was 30 yards shorter on average. The show was great and I hope to catch another episode with some baseball info. I wonder if they will do the counterpart to this experiment and see what swinging something lighter like the Swiftstik Training Aid will do to a hitters bat speed. I FOUND THE EPISODE ON YOUTUBE...CHECK IT OUT!!