Weighted bats and clubs

[WUTiger]

Monday's Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on use of weighted bats by pro baseball players during warmup before an at-bat.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903341404576482291550957386.html

A college science prof found that warm-ups with bats that were 10% heavier or lighter than the player's "game bat" would cut bat speed by 3 to 5 mph.

The prof believes that "deviating from normal swing just before hitting activates slow-twitch muscle fibers." (Slow-twitch muscles are the province of  marathron runners, not sprinters).

If this is correct, this means baseball players get the best on-deck warmup from using their game bat. But, most bb players tend to ignore science and go with what "feels good."

Transferred to golf, this suggests that the best warmup may be dynamic stretching, followed by the purposeful motions (in golf, those which mimic your actual swing) of putting and chipping before hitting full shots.

I'm not telling anyone what to do. You might check out the baseball article and see what you think, whether it applies to golf.

[jamo]

Sports Science did a show on this a few years ago (using Paddy Harrington as the test subject, I believe), and found pretty much the same thing. When he warmed up after using a weighted club, his swing speed dropped.

[dhanson]

here's the sports science video

[LankyLefty]

If you know anything about muscle structure it makes a lot of sense.

Fast twitch muscle fibers create short bursts but tire quickly, slow twitch the opposite. So if you take something heavy and try to swing it, you are going to be using some more slow twitch muscle fiber then you would with something lighter that did not take as much energy to swing.