Daniel Bove

The hip turn is a sequence, and in this example it starts with the arms.

The arms move first. The trunk and pelvis follow into rotation. Then the arms quickly counteract — driving the opposite direction — and the trunk stabilizes while the pelvis and lower half keep rotating faster than the upper half.

As the foot plants, the pelvis opens toward the new direction of travel. The trunk and arms follow, creating a whipping motion that pulls the athlete out of the turn and into a sprint.

One note: here the athlete is responding to an auditory cue. When the stimulus is visual, the sequence often starts higher up — the head and cervical spine may rotate first to locate the target, then the arms and the rest of the chain follow.

The hip turn is the sequence an athlete uses to abruptly reorient into a sprint — initiated by the upper body, driven by the pelvis rotating faster than a stabilized trunk, and finished by a whip that squares the body into the new line of travel.

This has always been one of the more fascinatingly beautiful multi-directional speed patterns.

The Hip Turn: How an athlete aggressively rotates the hips and trunk to redirect motion

No single camera angle tells the whole story. So I broke it down into kinograms — frame-by-frame stills — from four different viewpoints, each revealing something unique.

Here’s what each angle shows 🧵

At full speed, the moments that influence performance are invisible to the eye.

The kinogram fixes that — it stops time, stretches it out, and makes the invisible obvious. It’s the most underrated tool in not only multi-directional speed development, but athletic performance coaching as a whole.

Thank you @DHMov for your contribution to not only this project, but also the field 🤝🫡