How to Explain Internal Rotation to Your Daughter

If you follow even one pitching coach on social media besides me you’ll see the main topic discussed is something called “internal rotation.” This a fancy phrase for what we at Practice Pro call “arm whip.” It looks cool and seems important, since everyone is talking about it. What is it, exactly, and can I do it? Here’s how I explain this mechanic.

The main indicator of arm speed is hand speed. The hand is the only part of a pitcher's body that touches the ball and it has to be equally as fast as the speed she wishes to deliver it.

In order to move her hand quickly she must use a combination of forward momentum with her push-off leg, torque with her torso, resistance with her front leg, and arm whip.  After she stops her forward momentum with front leg resistance, the energy sequence must continue with the arm, unwinding from the shoulder, then the elbow, then the wrist, and finally the fingers.

As a pitcher develops, her arm and hand begins to internally rotate. The elbow and hand rotate from outward at 9’clock to inward upon release (see this video). This creates a whipping motion, finishing with the peeling off of the ball.

If a pitcher has not developed internal rotation yet, it looks like this. It is normal for players to not develop this until years after they start pitching. Generating a whipping motion with the arm requires resistance from the front leg to resist against. After all, if you take a towel and playfully try to hit your brother or sister with it, you need to hold on to it with your hand. Your hand is representative of your stride leg in the pitching motion. Using leg resistance, relaxing and shoulder joints, and keeping the arm circle online all at once is asking your pitcher to performance extremely athletic movement. To expect a first or second year pitcher to execute this is usually unrealistic.

There are ways to teach the feel of this motion, although it’s important to be cautious in how you do it. If you teach it incorrectly, pitchers tend to shorten their arm circle, intentionally bending it, it will result in a slower misaligned pitch. Simply do the drill in this video, build the neural pathways for the whipping action in isolation. Ask her not to think about it when throwing a full pitch.

To pitch a changeup, on the other hand, a girl reverses the sequence of her arm and removes the whipping motion. Her hand comes through before her elbow and shoulder. This slows her hand speed down without your shoulder slowing down and voila - it becomes a very deceptive pitch! Here is a 1 minute video of how to pitch the 4 different types of chanegups.

What is “forearm fire?” What is “hello elbow?” Is one better than the other? Read my take in this blog.