A NEW APPROACH TO BASEBALL BAT SWING WARM-UP

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to compare a new form of warm-up with the traditional warm-up routine in baseball bat swing. Three different warm-up conditions (i.e., the standard bat warm-up (CO), the overweighted arm warm-up (OA), and the overweighted bat warm-up (OB)) were tested. Twenty subjects who had competitive baseball experience in high school or college participated in this study. Results indicated that during warm-up swings the bat speed of the CO (31.95 ± 1.50 m/s) was significantly faster than that of the OA (31.35 ± 1.82 m/s) and the OB (25.55 ± 1.43 m/s). However, the OA warm-up increased bat speed (0.659 ± 2.79%) more than the CO (0.049 ± 2.54%) and OB (−0.203 ± 3.83%) warm-ups. However, these differences were not statistically significant due to large variation across subjects. This study also found a significant drop of the bat speed at the first trial (−0.499 ± 3.21% and −1.07 ± 3.21% for the OA and OB warm-ups, respectively) immediately following loaded warm-ups. It was concluded that the overweighted arm warm-up might be better than the traditional warmup routine (i.e., the overweighted bat) but a short break (e.g., 3-min) is recommended to maximize the performance.