This paper presents a control algorithm for push recovery, which particularly focuses on the hip strategy when an exteal disturbance is applied on the body of a standing under-actuated biped. By analyzing a simplified dynamic model of a bipedal robot in the stance phase, it is found that horizontal stability can be maintained with a suitably controlled torque applied at the hip. However, errors in the angle or angular velocity of body posture may appear, due to the dynamic coupling of the transla-tional and rotational motions. To solve this problem, different hip strategies are discussed for two cases when (1) exteal dis-turbance is applied on the center of mass (CoM) and (2) exteal torque is acting around the CoM, and a universal hip strategy is derived for most disturbances. Moreover, three torque primitives for the hip, depending on the type of disturbance, are designed to achieve translational and rotational balance recovery simultaneously. Compared with closed-loop control, the advantage of the open-loop methods of torque primitives lies in rapid response and reasonable performance. Finally, simulation studies of the push recovery of a bipedal robot are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.