Primal 1 Baseball Player Development

Keeping Space in the Swing 🎯

One of our guys was losing space in his swing — coming out of his hinge instead of letting forward bend turn into side bend as he rotated. So we built a constraint to make the correct movement the only way to succeed.

Step 1 — Ramps. The ramps take away his ability to hinge and hide. If he loses his hips, he loses his balance and falls off. The only way to stay on: keep the hips up and hold space.

Step 2 — Water bag. Added instability in the rack position to force a “chest out” feel as he rotates — the thoracic spine rotates better extended, not rounded. He has to find stability through the chaos and rotate over a stable front leg.

Step 3 — Time + target. Bag comes off. Now he’s under time pressure, hitting to the C1 zone. Ramps are still talking: keep the hips hinged, keep the space, or fall off.

Step 4 — Remove the constraint. Ramps come out. What’s left is his — the embodied pattern, not a cue he’s thinking about.

Result: he held his space and transferred it, on his own, without a coach’s voice in his head.

This is the ecological approach in action — we don’t keep telling the athlete what to do, we build an environment where the only way to solve the problem is work your way through the constraint. The body finds it. It sticks.

**LOAD BACK. FIRE FORWARD. 🔥**

Bat speed doesn’t start in your hands — it starts with what your legs do to the ground.

⚾ Skilled hitters load over 90% of their weight into the trail leg, then explosively shift it forward — activating their front leg and hamstrings earlier than unskilled hitters do (Moon et al., 2013; Nakata et al., 2013).

⚾ In live at-bats, successful swings produced meaningfully more lead-leg force (150%+ of body weight) than mistimed ones (Fortenbaugh et al., 2011).

⚾ The lead leg generates roughly double the rotational ground force of the trail leg — it’s the primary driver of trunk rotation into the ball (Ae et al., 2017).

⚾ Here’s the twist: researchers expected front-to-back force to drive that rotation. It didn’t. It was the **side-to-side** push into the ground that turned the body (Ae et al., 2017).🧐

⚾ Even outside baseball, the pattern holds — golfers who shift pressure to their lead side earlier and faster produce higher clubhead speeds (Smith et al., 2017).

The takeaway across every study: **load into the trail leg, then drive early and hard into the lead leg.** That’s where bat speed actually comes from.

📊 Train the ground. Train the swing. Swipe through ➡️

🧠How you speak to yourself matters more than you think🧠

Most people think a water bag is just “unstable weight.” It’s actually a diagnostic tool — and the condition you choose changes what it teaches. 🎥

Shoutout to Paul Venner (Paul | groeilokaal.nl), for the education Instability and inventor of the Aquabag, who breaks the tool down into 3 distinct conditions:

1️⃣ In Balance — control the water’s movement to build steady mechanics and control
2️⃣ In Sync — let the water move, but minimize the perturbation so it just flows
3️⃣ Impact — create turbulence and tidal forces the athlete has to overcome perturbation to build stabilization

For this drill, we used In Balance.

Why? We wanted to improve our hitter’s forward move — getting him moving away from his hands, not dragging them with him. A good forward move loads the lead leg, and a well-loaded lead leg produces more natural, unforced bat speed.

Here’s the tell: if he’s doing it correctly, the water stays quiet. Still water means his upper half is removing slack — staying back and loaded — while the lead leg is doing the work, taking on force and getting ready to fire. Hear or feel the water sloshing? That’s slack he hasn’t removed yet.

We’re not making this up — you can see the same pattern at the MLB level. Swipe to our breakdown of Hunter Goodman: 🟢 the green circle/line marks where the hands work in relation to the back foot. 🟡 the yellow line marks the starting distance between his hands and head. 🔴 the red line marks that same distance at full foot plant. His hands stay back over the trail foot as his body moves forward — and the hand-to-head distance is bigger at foot plant than it was at the start. Same forward move, same “quiet water” pattern, just without the bag.

Simple tool. Specific condition. Specific outcome.

If you’ve got a water bag lying around, give In Balance a try.

— Primal 1 Baseball

🌊 Concept via Paul Venner (Paul | groeilokaal.nl)

Most people think a water bag is just “unstable weight.” It’s actually a diagnostic tool — and the condition you choose changes what it teaches. 🎥

Shoutout to Paul Venner (Paul | groeilokaal.nl), for the education and inventor of the Aquabag, who breaks the tool down into 3 distinct conditions:

1️⃣ In Balance — control the water’s movement to build steady mechanics and control
2️⃣ In Sync — let the water move, but minimize the perturbation so it just flows
3️⃣ Impact — create turbulence and tidal forces the athlete has to overcome perturbation to build stabilization

For this drill, we used In Balance.

Why? We wanted to improve our hitter’s forward move — getting him moving away from his hands, not dragging them with him. A good forward move loads the lead leg, and a well-loaded lead leg produces more natural, unforced bat speed.

Here’s the tell: if he’s doing it correctly, the water stays quiet. Still water means his upper half is removing slack — staying back and loaded — while the lead leg is doing the work, taking on force and getting ready to fire. Hear or feel the water sloshing? That’s slack he hasn’t removed yet.

Once the movement is discover we take it from global drill to a contextual drill

You can see the same pattern at the MLB level. Swipe to our breakdown of Hunter Goodman: 🟢 the green circle/line marks where the hands work in relation to the back foot. 🟡 the yellow line marks the starting distance between his hands and head. 🔴 the red line marks that same distance at full foot plant. His hands stay back over the trail foot as his body moves forward — and the hand-to-head distance is bigger at foot plant than it was at the start. Same forward move, same “quiet water” pattern, just without the bag.

Simple tool. Specific condition. Specific outcome.

If you’ve got a water bag lying around, give In Balance a try.

— Primal 1 Baseball

🌊 Concept via Paul Venner (Paul | groeilokaal.nl)

🔥MLB Monday🔥

Yesterday we talked about removing slack from the system with the Mid Body Bat Tip drill. Here’s what a system with NO slack looks like. 👇

Chris Hacopian — Gaithersburg, MD native, Nationals’ 2026 first-round pick (No. 11 overall), Texas A&M infielder. A hometown kid taken by his hometown team.

His load and first move show a body self-organizing to find its movement attractor — and you can see it in the fascia.

🔹 SPIRAL LINE
Wraps diagonally from torso to opposite hip/leg. Up top, it anchors the torso from early rotation and stores energy through the stretch before slinging it into the bat. At the lead side, that same line initiates sequencing and builds pressure for stability and thrust — the stretch that decelerates the pelvis while accelerating the torso.

🔹 ARM LINES
Run from the shoulder blade/spine, through the arm, into the hand. As he loads, slack comes out here too — so the arms release ON TIME instead of dragging behind. This is the exact “dead hands” fix behind the Mid Body Bat Tip drill.

Remove the slack before you need the power. The release takes care of itself.

The numbers back the eye test: .319/.405/.578, 11 HR, 127 wRC+, 2.4 WAR at Texas A&M. MLB Pipeline’s 14th overall prospect, 8th college hitter. .320 xBA, .440 xwOBA, 114.4 max EV.

Self-organization isn’t theory. It’s on full display in a hometown kid about to go pro. From what I can see there is a good argument that he will be an impactful bat in the bigs especially as he develops better hard hits at slightly higher LA.

— Primal 1 Baseball

📹 | 🦴 Anatomy Trains | ⚾️

A few coaching cues. One big chain reaction. 🎥

This is a staggered drop hang clean to hip lock — a drill we use to teach athletes how to absorb force AND explode with it, using a load that’s never quite the same twice.

Here’s what we’re coaching and why 👇

🔹 CUE 1: LIFT THE TOES
Before the drop even starts, we have the athlete preset his toes up — touching the top of his shoe — and hold them there until the hips fire.

Small detail, big purpose. That preset toe extension promotes an ankle rocker into dorsiflexion, setting up a better toe grab once triple extension kicks in. Toes grab, ankle rockers through, and now he’s using the ENTIRE triple extension chain (ankle, knee, hip) instead of leaking power at the bottom.

🔹 CUE 2: RECEIVE WITH THE HIPS
When the water bag drops, we want him catching that load with his hips — not his lower back, not his knees. That’s where the real eccentric force absorption happens, storing and stabilizing those high-speed forces instead of losing them.

Why does that matter? Because the better he absorbs eccentrically, the more energy is available to unload concentrically — ankle rocker re-engages into rapid plantarflexion, hip lock fires, and the toe grab initiates right on time. Absorb better, explode better. Same principle every time.

🔹 WHY THE WATER BAG
The water shifts. It’s unpredictable. That’s the point — the athlete has to learn to absorb and redirect force on the fly, not just in a controlled, predictable pattern. That’s a lot closer to what actually happens on the field.

A few cues. One drill. A whole chain working together.

Swipe through the sequence — setup → catch → concentric drive → hip lock → full triple extension with the cross-extensor pattern on the back leg. 📸

— Primal 1

This dudes got real pop. But now we are developing it to show up on low pitches?

We pulled his Blast Motion data and immediately found — his Connection and Rotation scores were strong, but his Plane Score was lagging behind. Specifically, his On-Plane Efficiency (how well he holds his vertical bat angle from launch to impact) was the leak.

On the field, that shows up as getting steep or standing up on low pitches — which was cutting him off from the power he naturally has to the left-center and pull-side gap. Additionally, it can impact attack angles on lower pitches. He was already rotating well, the issue was he’d sometimes stand up too early and pull off before the barrel could finish its job.

So instead of telling him to “stay down” or “keep your bat angle” or “stick the finish”— cues he’s probably heard a hundred times — we built an environment that forced his body to find the answer itself.

All it is, is a vertical pool noodle. It is place in front of his lead side, slightly behind him.

That’s it. That’s basically the whole intervention.

🎥 Clip 1: Before the constraint

🎥 Clip 2: Exploring it for the first time — you can see him searching, adjusting, discovering the feeling

🎥 Clip 3: Same swing, constraint removed — the feeling stuck

The placement wasn’t random. Far enough behind him that he had to forward bend or hinge, letting that forward bend turn into side bend. Too close and we’d have limited too many degrees of freedom — he needs room to move and problem-solve, not a cage. Positioned slightly forward to encourage him to stay through the back side and hold his angle instead of standing up early.

If executed incorrectly he would hit the pool noodle— the swing goes horizontal too soon, he leaves the zone early, and it turns into a roll-over.

This is ecological dynamics and a constraint-led approach in action. We’re not manually cueing a position. We’re designing a constraint that makes self-organizing of efficient movement the easiest one to find — and then letting the data confirm it worked.

Swipe for the data. 📊
This is what training looks like when the environment does the teaching.

You worked all offseason…

Are you about to lose it once the season starts? 👀

Most players don’t just lose strength in-season…
They lose timing, sharpness, and skill feel too — because practice + games alone doesn’t automatically equal development.

That’s why I’m hosting a:

🔥 FREE In-Season Virtual Training Meeting 🔥
✅ Free of Cost
✅ All are welcome

📅 Sunday, February 22, 2026
⏰ 7:00 PM (EST)
💻 Zoom (Online Learning + Live Q&A)
🔗 Zoom link Click Below https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82423962685?pwd=exc1rYrIEvQQTaTB0s7e2aCqQkrDr5.1

This is a practical, research-backed session on in-season performance + skill development — so you can keep building while you’re competing.

What You’ll Get:
• Training philosophy to guide your decisions
• Recovery strategies that work during the season
• Understanding the lasting effects of training efforts
• Injury mitigation approaches
• Skill acquisition & performance development
• Live Q&A to answer your in-season training questions

⚡ SPECIAL BONUS:
Everyone who attends will get access to a special in-season training offer (only for attendees).

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