The Hidden Cause of Many Swing Problems: It’s Not the Mechanics

Spotting swing flaws is easy. Fixing them? That’s much harder — especially because many times, the problem isn’t the swing itself. More often than you’d think, the real issue is that the visual system isn’t tracking the ball well enough for the swing to be executed effectively.

We’ve been incorporating vision and vestibular training for about two years now, and it has completely transformed our ability to help athletes make swing adaptations that actually work in games.

In the past, our process looked like this:

• Identify the swing flaw

• Work on the corrective movement without the ball

• Progress to doing the movement off a tee

In both of those scenarios, the movement would look great. But as soon as you introduced a moving ball, everything fell apart.

Sometimes, the athlete could execute just fine off front toss — but the moment we moved to overhand BP or the pitching machine, the breakdowns come back.

I first noticed this problem in myself. Every so often, I would train to hit higher velocity just so I could better understand what our athletes face. Once I reached a speed range I was uncomfortable with — say 90–95 mph — my swing would be terrible for a day or two: pushy, hands-first, all the things a coach doesn’t want to see.

But after my eyes acclimated to the velocity, my swing would naturally fall back into place. That’s when I realized: for some players, swing adjustments aren’t just about mechanics — they’re about giving the visual system time (and training) to catch up.

Some athletes have a naturally strong baseline for tracking the ball, and swing adjustments on moving pitches aren’t a problem. But for others, who don’t track as well, those adjustments are almost impossible until the visual and vestibular systems reach a competent level. Without that, the mechanical changes that could transform their results simply won’t stick.

We saw this firsthand with an athlete we’ll call Ben. As a sophomore, Ben had missed his freshman tryouts due to injury and was nervous about making the team. Thankfully, he made JV — but his swing wasn’t consistent.

The turning point came when we noticed that once Ben started his swing, he often lost the ability to keep watching the ball. That’s a telltale sign of a vestibular system deficiency.

We gave him targeted inner ear exercises, and he committed to them. Within two weeks, his confidence at the plate skyrocketed and his exit velocity jumped by more than 10 mph. By summer, he was hitting over .400 with plenty of extra-base hits.

Before identifying the vestibular issue, we had been working on getting him more hip-shoulder separation. He could do it perfectly off a tee or in a drill, but the second we gave him a moving baseball, everything collapsed — a textbook example of how vision and vestibular function can make or break mechanical improvements.

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Conclusion:

Too often, coaches and athletes focus solely on the physical movements of the swing, missing the underlying sensory systems that make those movements possible under game conditions. Mechanics matter, but they only work when the eyes and inner ear are trained to track and process the ball at game speed.

If your swing looks great in practice but unravels against live pitching, it may not be a mechanical problem at all — it might be time to train your vision and vestibular system. Fix that foundation, and the mechanical improvements you’ve been chasing might finally stick.