Softball hitting power isn’t built by more swings. The research on what actually creates home-run distance in female fastpitch hitters — and the training gap in the girls’ game.
By: Emily Neff (Pappas), Ph.D.
Softball hitting power is the one thing every family wants and almost nobody trains. She takes 200 swings a week — cage time, tournaments, private lessons, more cage time — and the ball still dies at the warning track.
When that happens, almost every family reaches for the same solution: more swings. A different lesson. A new bat. But at Relentless we follow the research, and the research points somewhere else entirely — to the part of the swing nobody is training.
Here is the uncomfortable truth about a home run: the fence does not care how hard she swings. It cares about the speed the ball comes off the bat and the angle it leaves at. Everything else is negotiable.
The Physics of Softball Hitting Power: Two Numbers Decide Whether It Leaves the Yard
Batted-ball distance is governed by exit velocity and launch angle — how fast the ball leaves the bat, and how high. Physicist Alan Nathan’s trajectory research, including a controlled ball-launcher experiment at Minute Maid Park, demonstrated exactly how sensitive fly-ball carry is to those launch conditions (along with spin and air drag).
This matters for one practical reason: swinging harder does not reliably improve either number. Effort tends to disrupt the sequence that was already producing her best contact. Softball hitting power is not an intensity problem. It is a force-production and sequencing problem.
Takeaway: Ball speed off the bat is the goal. Swing effort is not the lever.
Softball Hitting Power Starts at the Ground
If the ball is going to leave faster, something has to put more energy into the bat. That something is the ground.
Orishimo and colleagues (2024) placed collegiate hitters on force plates under each foot and measured what actually predicted bat speed at contact. Lead-leg ground reaction force was the standout: peak vertical force averaged 159% of bodyweight and correlated with bat speed (r = 0.62), and resultant lead-leg force averaged 170% of bodyweight with an even stronger relationship (r = 0.66). No combination of other variables improved on those.
Read that again — the front leg is pushing into the ground with roughly one and a half to nearly two times her bodyweight, and how much force she can put down there is one of the best available predictors of how fast the bat is moving. The authors’ own recommendation was explicit: training to improve bat speed should include general lower-extremity strengthening alongside hitting drills. That is the first real input to softball hitting power, and it is built in the weight room, not the cage.
Takeaway: The swing is a pushing action before it is a turning action. A weak lead leg caps the whole thing.
The Hips: Where Softball Hitting Power Gets Transferred
Force from the ground is useless if it leaks on the way up. In fastpitch hitting, Iino (2014) used force plates and inverse dynamics to quantify the pelvic rotation torque acting through the hip joints in advanced female hitters, and found hip joint position was directly relevant to how much rotational torque the pelvis could produce — across high, middle, and low pitch heights.
In other words: her hips are the transmission. Their strength, their position, and their available range determine how much of the ground force ever reaches the bat.
Washington (2018), working in Gretchen Oliver’s lab, examined the lumbopelvic-hip complex in female softball hitters and found that the timing variables — when peak pelvis velocity occurred relative to contact — related to hand speed at ball contact, concluding that the temporal components of the swing may hold the most practical value for improving hitting. So softball hitting power is a sequencing quality as much as a strength quality.
Takeaway: Legs create it, hips pass it, the trunk keeps it from leaking, and the hands only deliver what was already made. The bat is last in line.
The Softball Hitting Power Gap That Is Specific to Girls
Here is where the girls’ game diverges from the boys’. Ask a travel softball family what their off-season looks like and you will hear lessons, showcases, and cage work. Ask what her strength and power program looks like and the answer is usually that she doesn’t have one.
That is the untapped lever, and the intervention research on softball hitting power in female athletes is encouraging. Shari and colleagues (2024) added a periodized medicine-ball rotational training program to the normal swing practice of female collegiate softball players. The group that trained rotational power improved both torso rotation strength and batting velocity with large effect sizes (d = 1.15 and d = 1.17). The control group, doing swing practice alone, improved torso strength somewhat but barely moved batting velocity at all (d = 0.22).
Same swings. The difference was training the engine underneath them.
And the broader adolescent literature supports the approach. Harries, Lubans, and Callister (2012) found in their meta-analysis that resistance training produced meaningful improvements in power output in adolescent athletes, and Lesinski, Prieske, and Granacher (2016) established dose-response guidance for how to program it safely and effectively in youth athletes. Properly supervised strength training is not a risk to young female athletes — it is the missing input to softball hitting power.
Takeaway: More reps rehearse the ceiling she already has. Strength and power work raises the ceiling
How We Train Softball Hitting Power at Relentless
When a hitter comes to us wanting more distance, we do not start with her swing. We start with what is supplying it:
- Glutes and hamstrings — the lead-leg force she is currently missing, trained in both legs and through the block she has to brace against.
- Rotational power and rate of force development — strong is not enough; she has to be strong quickly, which is why loaded strength work is paired with med-ball and jump work.
- Trunk stiffness and anti-rotation strength — so energy transfers up the chain instead of dissipating through the middle.
- Hip and thoracic spine mobility — she cannot use range she does not own. Room to load, and room to finish.
Then we let her hitting coach do their job with a better athlete to work with. Swing instruction and softball hitting power work are not competitors — the research above says they are supposed to run together.
The Bottom Line for Parents
Softball hitting power is not a personality trait and it is not a bat purchase. It is force into the ground, transferred through the hips, held together by the trunk, and delivered by the hands. Every one of those is trainable — and for most girls in fastpitch, none of them have ever actually been trained.
Train the engine, and the distance shows up on its own. And it keeps showing up.
Wondering what is actually capping your daughter’s softball hitting power this fall? Book a Discovery Call at RelentlessAthleticsLLC.com and we will assess it, explain it, and build the plan.
References
- Harries, S. K., Lubans, D. R., & Callister, R. (2012). Resistance training to improve power and sports performance in adolescent athletes: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 15(6), 532–540.
- Iino, Y. (2014). Pelvic rotation torque during fast-pitch softball hitting under three ball height conditions. Journal of Applied Biomechanics, 30(4), 563–573.
- Lesinski, M., Prieske, O., & Granacher, U. (2016). Effects and dose–response relationships of resistance training on physical performance in youth athletes: A systematic review and meta-analysis. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 50(13), 781–795.
- Nathan, A. M. Contributions to variation in fly ball distances (trajectory analysis and Minute Maid Park launcher experiment).
- Orishimo, K. F., Kremenic, I. J., Modica, E., Fukunaga, T., McHugh, M. P., & Bharam, S. (2023). Lower extremity kinematic and kinetic factors associated with bat speed at ball contact during the baseball swing. Sports Biomechanics.
- Shari, M., Wan Pa, W. A. M., Ahmad, M. F., Mohd Aznan, E. A., Md Nadzalan, A., Md Radzi, N. A. A., Abu Kasim, N. A., & Raja Hussain, R. N. J. (2024). The effects of medicine ball training on batting velocity in female collegiate softball players. Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, 32(3).
- Washington, J. (2018). Influence of the lumbopelvic-hip complex on female softball hitting (Master’s thesis, Auburn University).
