The hip muscles act on three mutually perpendicular main
axes, all of which pass through the center of the femoral head, resulting in three degrees of freedom and three pair of
principal directions: Flexion and extension around a transverse
axis (left - right); lateral
rotation and medial
rotation around a longitudinal
axis (along the thigh); and abduction and adduction around a sagittal
axis (forward - backward); [29] and a combination of these movements (i.e. circumduction, a compound movement in which the leg describes the surface of an irregular cone).
Principal Component Analysis is a translation of the data so the new origin is the mean and then a
rotation so that the first
axis is in the direction which explains the largest amount of variance, the second
axis is the
axis orthogonal to the first that explains the largest amount of the remaining variance, the third is the
axis orthogonal to the first two that explains the largest amount of what remains and so on.