Throwing Athletes: Take care of your arm by building strong hips

by Grant Norland

While many players give their throwing shoulder a lot of attention (as they should), a major key to improving your throwing accuracy and velocity, that often goes overlooked, is stability in the front side hip.  For a right handed thrower, your front side hip is your left hip.  

Front side hip stability contributes to providing a solid base for the rest of your body to operate on.  If you’re throwing efficiently, all your weight (actually more than your body weight) will be on your front side close to when you release the ball.  This also contributes to force transfer out to the ball.  The more stable your front side hip is, the faster you can slow down (decelerate) rotation of your pelvis when throwing, making the energy you generated transfer up the chain, and eventually to the ball.  

An abrupt slowing down of the more central and lower body segments is what helps to transfer the energy or force onto the next segment in the chain - this continues through the body until it reaches your hand and ultimately the ball.  Stay tuned for future posts with details on how exactly this all works.  

So, you want your front side hip to be strong and stable to provide a great platform for your upper body to be positioned on and to provide for an efficient transfer of force through to the rest of your body.  How do we do that?  There are a series of progressive exercises that combine strengthening and balance to help build stability in the right muscles around the front side hip.  

We’ve detailed a few of them in these videos:

If you’d like to know more about how to build stability in your hip, take care of your arm, and throw with more power, check out our FREE guide for throwing athletes.