Pitching tips – how to pitch fast

Most of the people who start baseball and start pitching ask me. How do you pitch fast? That is the number one thing that everybody always ask. How do you pitch 100 mile fastballs. Well here are some tips I can provide you.

1. You must use weight shifting when pitching.

When you pitch, you should keep your weight centered on your back leg. When I say back leg, I mean the leg that you balance on when you raise your front leg. For example, for a right hand pitcher, the back leg would be your right leg. Anyway, it is important to keep the weight center on your back leg. Then, at your release point, or when you actually throw the ball off of your fingers, you quickly shift your weight to the front leg.

This is important in that you can put all of your weight into your ball as you shift the weight from the back to the front. This is probably the key thing to pitching fast. An example of this is Ryu-Hyun-Jin, a famous left pitcher of Korea.

2. Keep your stride long

Stride is the action in which after you lift your knee, you move your leg forward to land. Keeping your stride long allows you to pitch at a point that is closer to the batter. This not only allows you to pitch faster (because you can throw at a lesser distance to the batter) but it also stabilizes your accuracy. A good example of a fire baller with long stride is Tim Lincecum. He has a long stride that is almost as long as his height or even longer.

3. Use your hips efficiently.

Even if you have a weak arm, you can still throw fastball with just the rotation of your body. If you have a nice, soft pitching form, you can overcome that weakness. Something that you should do to overcome that is using your hips well. The timing when the hip opens up is very important. Many pitchers open it too fast or some pitchers open it too slow. In order to open it at an efficient timing, you can use your front shoulder or the stride knee to lead. Or, you can use your glove to make it an imaginary wall that you push right before releasing the ball. Whatever you do, if you make sure that your hip doesn’t open up too fast or too slow, you can use that rotating energy to whip the ball at the batter. The rotating energy will definitely make your ball faster. An example of a pitcher who uses his hips very well is Roy Halladay.