Today’s topic is how to kick a football better using your hips on a field goal or a punt. We’ll cover the good and the bad of using your hips and how that applies to field goals and punts. So, let’s dive in.
The first thing that we’re going to talk about in terms of kicking a football better using your hips is more or less the bad way to use them. There are people that make this work, like professional kickers Billy Cundiff and Stephen Hauschka. They’re very accurate in a lot of instances, but the problem is if they do happen to hit the ball in the wrong way and over rotate too much, they’re oftentimes going to shank the ball pretty hard. Their technique is one that’s very hard to replicate because there’s a lot of moving parts that go into it.
What we want to try to do is keep our ‘train tracks’ in line and make sure that we’re keeping everything consistent on our approach. We don’t need to think any harder than we need to and make it harder on our body. We want everything to be very simple for our body to work in the most efficient way possible.
How to kick a football better using your hips: Pushing vs. Swinging
The next part that we’re going to touch on is the difference between swinging your hips and pushing your hips. The difference is miniscule but plays a huge role in getting more out of your field goals. When talking about kicking a football better using your hips, timing is everything. Instead of trying to time it up, let’s focus on keeping everything where it needs to be from the beginning. A very simple trick or tip to use or utilize is thinking of keeping everything locked in and engaged. It’s a very slight difference, but it’s going to allow you to engage your entire body, your glutes, your hamstrings, and your quads all at the same time so that everything is ready, and you just simply maintain that the whole way through.
The last little thing we’re going to touch on today is why you’re getting so much height on your field goals but not enough distance. It’s very likely that your right hip (or for lefties, your left hip) is not pushing through the ball enough as you make contact. Instead, we want to keep everything on its ‘train tracks‘ the whole way through. Let’s say the ball is just inside of your body, your plant foot should be about 1 foot away. The middle of your body should be in between the plant foot and the ball. That’s the line of direction that we want our hips to be in.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the cool thing is you don’t have to think too much about this because you could realistically just have your the mental note that you want to keep your nose over your toes and then you just engage your hips just a tiny bit.
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