Originally Posted by BrianG

That's right; I am 100% sure Patrick did NOT mean to short the battery leads. That would be "bad". He did mean shorting the motor leads together via the FETs. Try this sometime: spin a motor by hand and note the resistance. Then, somehow ties all three motor wires together and spin it again. You'll see how much more resistance there is. And the faster the motor is spinning, the more resistance it will have when the wires are shorted.