The Blast Motion bat sensor is one of my favorite tools to use with hitters. I found myself constantly recommending it, so I reached out to Blast Motion, and they were kind enough to provide a discount to my players / readers. The coupon code TBB20 will get you the best available deal of any coupon code currently out there. As of this writing the code TBB20 will get you $25 off.
There are tons of good uses for the sensor but here are my 3 top ways to get the most use out of it and improve your hitting
1 – Objective Feedback / Progress Tracking
“If you can’t measure it you can’t improve it.” I’m not sure who originally said this quote but it holds true in baseball. Blast Motion will give you a ton of important metrics and you can use them to track your progress and get better. My favorite metrics are Bat Speed, Attack Angle and Time to Contact. If you improve your numbers in all 3, you will be a better hitter.
Let’s say your a high school junior and you want to play in college. We use the Blast Motion sensor to see that your bat speed is 55 mph with a 32 inch BBCOR bat. We know that is well below average for a college hitter. So if we can improve your bat speed we can improve your chances of playing in college. Now that we have the objective feedback of your bat speed we can use the Blast sensor to track your progress. After training for 3 weeks we retest your bat speed and we see it has gone up 3 mph. Now we know we are moving in the right direction. If it stays the same we can reevaluate our training and find some tweaks to see the number go up next time.
2 – Speed Training
One of the best ways to improve your bat speed is by speed training. Speed training is simply taking swings with 100% effort. For example turn on the Blast sensor and hit 20 balls as hard as you can. After every swing your phone will announce the speed. You can use this feedback to make adjustments and figure out how to move faster. Try to beat your previous number every time. But don’t go overboard. Once you start to get tired and the number start to drop, end the session. Your goal is speed and if you are not at 100% you won’t see results. In fact if you could end up getting worse.
Too many players spend all there time swinging with 90% effort or less. That is fine in games when you are more focused on quality contact but you must spend some time every week swinging at 100% effort in order to get better. A good analogy would be sprinting speed. If you want to improve your 60 yard dash time you must spend time training it. Would you expect to get faster if you only were jogging?
There are not set rules for speed training, but in general I would recommend 20-50 swings 2-3 days a week. Figure out what works best for you and use the Blast sensor to make sure the numbers are going up.
3 – In-Game Use
Blast is great because it is the only way for most amateur players to get in game data. You can get exit velocity and launch angle data from Hittrax but that is only in a batting cage. There is no way to get that data for game hits unless you are in the Big Leagues. What if you are someone who looks great in practice but struggles in games? Blast will allow us to know if there is a difference between games and practice.
If we know you are capable of 55 mph bat speed but you are only swinging 50 mph in games, we have to figure out why there is a difference. But Blast can allow us to know that this is an issue that we have to fix. Without the Blast sensor we would have no idea about your in-game performance.
