2025-12-15

Teaching my regular classes at the Ross Farnsworth - East Valley YMCA.

Tonight we focused on hip position. As a rule of thumb, we have our hips oriented forward when attacking and back when blocking. Once beginners have memorized their first kata, this is where I ask them to concentrate their effort. Moving the hips, to include rotation, rising, and dropping, is the primary source of power in karate, so it’s important that they learn this from the beginning. To that end, we practiced the following drills:

Starting in front stance, I have students alternate between a head-height jab with the lead arm and a body-height reverse punch, making sure the hips rotate back on the jab and forward on the reverse punch. The tricky bit here is always getting the rear knee to bend to allow the hip to come back and then straighten to drive it forward. If students have trouble holding the front knee still, I split them into pairs and have the partner sit down and hold the front knee still.

Once we’ve cultivated the skill of always rotating the hip one way or the other, then it’s time to complicate things by only selectively rotating it …

Next we perform Taikyoku Shodan but follow every arm technique by a reverse punch before returning to the original technique. So, for example, the first step is followed by downward block, reverse punch, and then back to downward block (with the hip rotating for each technique). But the second step is followed by lunge punch, then reverse punch, and then another straight punch (with the hip not rotating in between). So it’s always either block-punch-block with hip rotation, or punch-punch-punch without.