Core and Hip Rotation Exercises for Powerful Performance in Sport

There’s one thing that’s true across a huge variety of sports – from tennis, to golf, to martial arts, and figure skating: Rotation is king. The rotational plane of movement is crucial for generating power and performance in sport (and stability in everyday life) but it’s often overlooked. Read on to learn three core and hip rotation exercises to improve your stability and power.

Why Does Rotation Matter?

When we think about anatomical rotation, we typically picture rotating your trunk along the transverse plane – a line that divides the body into upper and lower halves.

The transverse plane is important, especially for generating power and speed.

But it’s also important to consider rotation along the axes of individual joints. Be it your shoulder, hip, or wrist, axial rotation at these individual joints also contributes to creating power and speed in functional movements, as well as stability.

Let’s consider tennis, for example. For a good forehand, you don’t just stand statically and swipe your arm across the transverse plane.

You instead start by generating rotation in the hips, moving the racket up, down and around with axial rotation in your shoulder, elbow and wrist, and utilize core and trunk rotation to help stabilize and power the movement.

The same is true for a baseball swing or pitch, or for generating powerful moves in hockey and martial arts.

Even if you aren’t an athlete, training rotation is important, because rotational muscles are crucial for stability.

Take your rotator cuff muscles. These muscles definitely help with shoulder rotation (it’s in the name), but perhaps even more importantly, they perform dynamic stabilization of the shoulder joint [1].

And if we don’t train them, we can’t expect these muscles to stabilize or generate power when we need them to – whether that’s to swing a baseball bat or stabilize the shoulder while lifting heavy boxes overhead.

Core and Hip Rotation Exercises

These moves are designed to wake up the often-neglected rotator muscles, activate throughout their ranges of motion, then start to incorporate it all into functional movements.

You can follow along on YouTube here.

Exercise 1: Open Chain Hip Rotation

In open chain movements, the body is stationary while the limb moves freely. These types of movements are great for activating sleepy muscles by isolating a single joint.

The first set will be performed in a neutral stance to focus on isolation and activation. To make the second set more functional, you’ll take an athletic stance with your hips and knees slightly bent.

1. Stand on one leg, hovering your other leg off the floor
2. Externally rotate the lifted femur, pointing your knee out
3. Internally rotate the femur, pointing your knee in
4. Maintain activation in your hip as you lower to the start and perform on the other side
5. For the second set, find an athletic stance – as you externally rotate, your foot comes in towards midline and as you internally rotate, your foot moves out

For each stance, perform 2 sets of 2 reps each, holding for 5-10 seconds at end range.

Exercise 2: Closed Chain Hip Rotation

Next we’ll progress to a closed chain movement pattern. Instead of rotating the limb that’s hovering off the ground, you rotate the whole body around the stationary leg, increasing the dynamic balance challenge.

For this exercise, it’s important to find an active arch in your standing leg by utilizing the short and skinny foot. If you’re not sure how to do that, check out this article to learn.

Just like the previous move, we’ll perform this exercise in both a neutral and an athletic stance.

1. Stand on one leg, hovering your other leg off the floor
2. Activate your external rotators, so that you’re facing away from the standing leg
3. Activate your internal rotators, rotating your pelvis and trunk toward the standing leg
4. Maintain activation in your hip as you lower to the start and perform on the other side
5. For the second set, perform in an athletic stance

Perform 2 sets of 2 reps in each stance, holding for 5-10 seconds at end range and really firing up your hip musculature.

Exercise 3: Ground Up Rotation

The last exercise carries forward all this activation work into a movement pattern that’s a great core strength exercise and is highly applicable to both life and sport.

Training this movement pattern in a slow, controlled manner helps create the neuromuscular pathways that will later allow you to perform it at high speed.

Here we’ll focus on sequencing, loading up the hip and lower body first to then transfer power to the upper body for a swing – just like swinging a golf club, tennis racket, or a hook in boxing.

1. Grab a cable set up around belly height with both hands and take an athletic stance
2. Find the end position of a rotation, with your torso rotated away from the band
3. Uncoil by leading with your upper body, then your lower body to rotate back toward the band
4. Drive through the hip, initiating rotation away from the band, keeping your eyes on cable before rotating through the upper body

Perform 2-4 sets of 4-8 reps, holding at the end for 5 seconds.

Start incorporating these rotational exercises into your routine and you’ll find more powerful performance in sport and increased stability in daily life.

If you find your hip rotation mobility is limited by pain, stiffness, or an injury, check out our Hip Pain Solution to build resilience, improve activation, and comprehensively address hip performance.