What is the best athletic foundation or athletic stance for sports like golf, baseball, softball, and tennis? It has:
How can we be so certain that this is the best athletic foundation (or athletic stance)? Because it’s provable by the laws of physics. Let’s start with definitions: biomechanics is the study of the body in motion regardless of how it got into motion and physics is the study of the forces and frictions that put the body into motion.
To hit a golf ball, baseball, softball, or tennis ball, we need power. As explained in our blog entitled, “Ground-Body Connection is Your Power Source”, our power comes from the ground pushing a force back on our bodies. This is called “ground reaction force”. The more ground reaction force, the more power we can generate and the harder we can hit a ball.
From a physics perspective, a force only exists as a result of interaction between two objects (e.g., our body and the ground). Also, a force is a vector quantity, meaning it has magnitude and direction. Based on these principles, we can see how to create more ground reaction force and thus create more power.
When our feet engage the ground in a perpendicular manner (e.g., our weight is equally distributed on the balls of our feet), the ground reaction force (GRF) is perpendicular to the ground. Magnitude of GRF is a function of the force exerted through the legs into the ground and the angle (Ø) between the force of our legs and the ground reaction force. When the ground pushes back, the opposite ground reaction force (-GRF) is applied to our legs, which, due to the angle between GRF and our legs is converted into an athletic force and a leakage force. The athletic force is what the body uses to create power and the leakage force is wasted.
Due to the angle between our legs and the ground reaction force, the athletic force is less than the ground reaction force. In addition, we produce a leakage force that, for an athletic movement, is wasted force. So, to increase our athletic force, which creates our power, we can increase our body force (e.g., get stronger), decrease the angle between our legs and the ground reaction force, or both.
A simple solution for decreasing the angle between our legs and the ground reaction force is to bring our feet in. While this does decrease the angle, for sports such as golf, baseball, softball, and tennis, it severely hampers the biomechanical movement of the body. It does so by restricting the conversion of linear forces of the legs to rotational forces of the upper body. We will discuss this in future blog or paper.
Thus, the best way to decrease the angle and improve ground reaction force (and the corresponding athletic force), is to change the way our feet engage the ground. In particular, by having the forefoot of the feet engage the ground at an angle (sloping downward from lateral side [outside edge] to medial side [inside edge]), decreases the angle between our legs and the ground reaction force. Thus, for the same body force, our ground reaction force is increased without compromising the biomechanical movement of the body, which makes this the best athletic foundation or athletic stance.
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Today was a good bit of climbing. A little over 2,000 feet of elevation gain. Not as much as day 1 or day 2, but not trivial. I am really enjoying traveling through the small towns. The people have been friendly, the service has been good, and the food has been excellent.
