Most players and coaches agree that you should use your hips when hitting and throwing in sports that require force and power. This includes executing the groundstrokes in tennis, baseball batting, pitching, throwing a football, throwing from the outfield etc.. But how many players do this?
In analyzing hundreds of players in a multitude of sports, I have found very few who truly use the hips to produce force in their hits. This is understandable because use of the hips is not stressed in the early stages of learning the basic skills of throwing and hitting or when learning basic shots such as forehands and backhands in tennis.
For example, if you recall your first days of learning how to hit a baseball or execute a tennis groundstroke, you were shown or taught the grip and arm movement. The next task was to make contact with the ball. You were tossed a ball which you then attempted to hit.
If throwing was the task you were probably given a ball, shown how to grip it and then how you turned the body to throw the ball. In essence, you learned how to move the arms to make contact with the ball in hitting or to release a ball. As you learned to hit or throw the ball harder, you increased the range of motion over which you executed the hitting or throwing pattern. This usually involved getting more of the total body participating in the actions.
This is how most players hit or throw the ball today. They turn the shoulders and the arms to throw or to make contact with the ball, but the hips remain in place or turn together with the shoulders. The net effect is basically the same.
However, isolating or initiating the action with the hips moving forward and then rotating to start the chain of joint actions prior to release or making contact can greatly increase the amount of power that you exhibit. The more the player uses the hips, the less he will have to rely on the arms.
In the long run this helps prevent shoulder and elbow problems — in addition to giving you more power that will seem effortless. But, to learn how to get the hips involved will not always be very easy if you already have a well ingrained motor pathway for the throw or hit.
But it can be done at a time when you do not compete or play for a few weeks. During this correction phase you will have to do specialized strength and flexibility exercises to learn and enhance the actions involved. It requires maximum concentration and hundreds if not thousands of repetitions.
For maximum effectiveness, it is necessary to separate the hip turn from the shoulder turn. Since all hitting and throwing actions start from the bottom up, the hips should be the first to be put into motion via rotation after forward weight shift. As the hips begin to rotate forward, the shoulders should remain in the side-facing position. Some players rotate the shoulders to the rear as the hips are being rotated forward. This produces more efficiency and power. In essence, the greater the separation between the hip and shoulder turns, the greater the power that can be generated.
After the hips are completing their forward turn, the shoulders should begin rotating forward. The key point is to get the hips started before the shoulders, even if it is a small range of motion. This will still give you considerably more power. Then, after the shoulders rotate forward, you begin the arm actions to contact or release the ball.
To get up the feel of rotating the hips forward, you should do specialized strength exercises with the Total Athlete System™. Because these exercises duplicate the same neuromuscular pathway as seen in execution of the skill they develop the feel of this movement as well as the strength of the hip muscles that are involved in the action.
These specialized strength exercises can also be used to develop the feel for the preliminary hip rotation before the shoulder rotation without any resistance. We use this exercise in the early stages so that the athlete can learn what is like to get the hips moving prior to the shoulder rotation. It can also be used to develop more speed of movement together with integration of the shoulder turn.
Once you have developed the feel for this movement, then you can do it against resistance for greater strengthening of the muscles. In this case, the Total Athlete System™ is attached in a different location on the nonslip hip belt. Mastering one or both exercises enables you to then transfer this movement into your throwing or hitting action.
For more information on getting your hips into the throw or hit and for descriptions and illustrations of the specialized strength exercises that can be done, see Build a Better Athlete and Explosive Tennis: The Forehand and Explosive Tennis: The Backhand.