Posted by: rql () on Mon Sep 10 20:09:27 2001

jack, tom, rql, ray, et al......last week "parent" posed an interesting question.....he asked: "Is it the knee/back foot that pushes the hips or is it the hips that pull the pivot foot?".......i kind of thought that the knee/foot sort of followed the hips....what do you think?
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> > gustavo-
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> > My views on this may be somewhat idiosyncratic,but here goes.Much of this is more in terms of teching "cues" rather than reality.
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I think my cue I use is the front leg driving back at heel down but I make sure that I hold the position at the end of a swing and check to see if the rear knee did drive properly to create the proper rotation.The ques. to parent had a problem with the rear leg specifically ,this is why I focused on it,but to answer your ques. I believe the legs drive the hips and they should both drive properly to create the best rotation but I cue on thr front.
> > The primary center of "feel"/proprioception/control of the lower body motion is in the hips.Good " balance" and supporting positions of the feet must be learned,but focussing primarily on the feet or legs is like the tail trying to wag the dog and will not result in adequate hip rotation.I like the feel of "striding to balance",then "dropping the front heel" as a "trigger" for a strong "hip turn".I think these cues encourage good separation and powerful hip turn.Pushing from the back cues do not work as well as they often discourage separation of upper and lower half or swaying motion rather than balanced rotation of the body(rotation around a stationary axis as Jack describes it).Sometimes I do add the cue of "driving the back knee forward" as a way of teaching the feel of more powerful hip turn.I also teach windmill fastpitch pitching which has very similar lower body action using the same cues of front foot plant "triggering " hip turn sometimes assisted by "back knee drive" if hip turn is weak.The pitchers do not have the added task of having to react to the pitch by varying front leg action/timing.
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> > More theoretically speaking,what I see on video of "optimum" home run swings is usually incredibly fast "hip snap".Look at the recent ESPN clip of the first 60 of Bond's homers to get a feel of how he rotates the body.When this happens in many power hitters(Bonds is an exception because the way he sets up his body's axis of rotation,he usually stays on the back toe)they come up on the back toe,then hip turn decelerates whipping momentum into the torso.The back toe then drags behind the front foot with reactive torque as momentum goes into the torso,then into turning the bat as long as the circular handpath is maintained.This toe drag is quite pronounced in some-Mantle and Aaron,for example.The toe drag stops and the back hip falls back(accentuating the prior "up" thrust of the hips before this)when the hands cast away from the axis of rotation with a second wave of reactive torque going down the back leg and turning the back ankle back.This second kind of reactive torque is the only kind seen in "upper body swings" in those hitters who do not separate the upper and lower half then sequentially transfer momentum from the ground up like the prferred "lower body" hitters do.
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> > Back toe drag is usually a sign of good momentum transfer in a "lower body" swing.The absence of toe drag is not necessarily significant.Dragging the toe is not a useful cue in my experience,but can be important in video analysis.
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> > tom....thanks for the response...now i have even more questions but i'll hold off until jack & others respond....respectfully, grc....