Recently I was trying to make a point to my students highlighting the fact that any rotation should be done rather on the heel part of the foot instead of the ball of the foot (except special cases where it has to be done this way). This discussion can lead us to a very popular and often misuinterpreted subjcet, the hip rotation. In this artile I am going to omit an explanation why do we use hip roatation for now and stop on the relation foot.
Let's start with a posture. What is a "good karate posture"? As you can see on the image below in general good posture for humans has a couple of major points. Here are the tips:
- Head should not be hanging forward or backward. In order to get the correct position of the head one should drop his chin and lift the top of the head so as if it was connected with a tiny thread to the sky. By doing so the six vertebrai would stretch up helping to hodl the head (which is quite a heavy object on its own) and thuse protecting the necj and the shouldress from the overstressed position when they have to work hard balancing the head (6-7 kg).
- Shoulders should be relaxed but kept straight. Do not try to "carry" them with connected shouldre baldes and also do not let them completely roll forward. I personally do the following when I want to put my shouldrees in the correct position. I lift them up and drop completely relaxed. It works for me - it might work for others. The main point is do not add stress to your shoulders as except negative impact on your posture and health in general it will also slow down your hand moves drammatically.
- Lower back should be narly straight (GAMAKU). IN order to achieve it the best thing to do is to life your pelvis, same way as a dog for example hides his tale when feels guilty or scared. The motion of the pelvis should be circular: from the lower back down and up in front. If you wear a belt (OBI) the knot of the belt should pop-up when the pelvis is lifted. Try!
- Once the pelvis is in "good" position your body sinks between hips so that the center of gravity drops. It allows to use hips without looosing the structure.
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- Do not bend knees but also do not lock them. Knees should act as ammortisation devices. Imagine a car without ammortisation driving over a bump. Something is going to break. Ammortisators are absorbing impact. So the knees should do. Hence relax them, do not bend and do not lock.
- And the last point, actually the one we are discussig here is position of the foot. Look at the image below. Do you see where the straight line points? Yes, under the heel! When we use a phrase "push from the heel" we should understand that we mean actually this part of the foot nd not the heel bone itself!
Now, wh yis it so important? It is imprtant because the hip aligned with teh foot. Always! Where the foot is pointing the hip is pointed. This greeen line above is a pivot line, the pivot axis. So, any hip roatiation should be done using this line its axis. And this is why the spot under the heel is so important.
If I need to raotate my hip I need to roatate my foot using that point as a pivot point for the rotation. I hope it makes sense. Let me know otherwise.
