You have to use your hips – 12/8/11 – Thursday Karate class

Sensei Cieplik has been telling us for many years, “from hip!”  Today, we had another taste of the type of power we can make when we use our  hips when we do our techniques.  Making power with a minimum of body movement is easy if we use our lower body instead of our shoulders and chest.  More about this below….

Start out with many kicks…

We started with front leg front snap and  rear leg front snap kick.  Moving forward with double front snap kick.  Moving forward with double front snap kick and then with double roundhouse kick.

We followed up with step across in a horse stance then with side snap kick, side thrust kick and both with one step.

We moved in to basics next with inward block, elbow strike and back fist and did this a number of times.

For the next drill, one of my favorites, we started in a front stance, loaded up our weight to the back leg and then reverse punched.  This movement always feels so strong because you have to use the hips and the entire body to do it.

The next drill was, from front stance, stationary jab and then step in with front punch.  Doing the jab first makes us throw our entire body into the front punch.  I am not sure how it looks but I would guess it is one of the strong moves in Shotokan.

Get a partner and hit them with your hip….

The the next drill, we partnered up.  We stood in a front stance and put one fist on a pad.  We pulled the hip back, same side as the fist, and used the hip and leg to push our arm forward.  We followed that drill with the same move but using a reverse punch instead.  The idea with both of these drills is to get under your partner by dropping your hips and using the salad bowl motion that Sensei often talks about.  We are using our locked arm as a push bar and our hips and lower body to move our partner.  We didn’t have to throw a single punch to move our partner back just by using our hips.  This is a concept that always sounds easy to do but is hard to actually perform.

Sensei always says this type of movement is like pushing a car in the snow.  You cannot push the car from your upper body, you need to drop your hips and get under it to push it forward.