9. Hips First

I once formed a theory that all of athletics could be defined as an effort to move the hips and to let the rest of the body follow. The trouble with my pursuing the theory too far is that I was never very athletic, and my athletic experiences were somewhat esoteric at best. Here are a few examples I came up with:

Rowing: the crux of the power generation is a lever using the gluteal muscles, supported by the abdomen and lower back. That creates the acceleration that continues the push from the legs into the upper back and arms.
Rock climbing: every bit of climbing wisdom ultimately reduces to moving the hips to maximize pressure on the legs and minimize reliance on the arms.
Whitewater kayaking: stability, direction, and speed all are dependent on adjustments with the hips.
Alpine skiing: it looks like a leg sport, but the legs just bring into effect a control process generated in the hips.

I'll leave it to others to talk about baseball, golf, football -- but I'm pretty sure this works there, too. Maybe Nascar is out, but I did intend this to be a post about athletics, after all.

How about running? I always thought of it as the calves and little else. But I now believe otherwise. First, sure, the calves push you down the road, but what are they pushing? It would be a funny sight to have a gal or a guy with infinitely strong calves and infinitely weak hips -- sort of like the cartoons of the road runner, where his feet take off before the rest of him. Second, the calves are at their best a pretty small set of muscles, so unless you see running as a reverse moon-walk, you need to engage through the legs -- and what lifts the legs, after all? Third, we use our arms and shoulders, whether to maintain rhythm or to assist in the stride -- I think it's the latter -- and the coordination of the upper and lower bodies runs through the hips.

Having reached the limits of my bio-mechanical intuition, here's an anecdote. I run much better with flexibility through the hip-flexors and quads, the kind of thing you emphasize in yoga poses like the cobra and the backward bow. That flexibility lets me push forward from the gluteal muscles, shifting to a stride with a long follow-through. An adjunct to that flexibility in the muscles that need to be extended is, of course, strength in the muscles that need to be contracted, hence a return to the overused notion of "core strength." Planks, yoga poses, and the dreaded stomach crunch improve my running, I'm sorry to say.

So my ninth lesson about running is that it fits the general theory. Hips first!