Observation

As martial technicians, we focus so much on the idea of rotating the hips that often we neglect the much more basic idea of moving forward to generate power.

Here then is a simple tool for students to help remind one another to move into a strike as well as rotate the hips. The student holding the stick lines it up vertically with the centerline of the student who is waiting to punch. Then, when the punch is delivered, the observing student should see the punchers center line move forward from the stick.

Amusingly, when students (including myself) do this drill, they often lose the rotation of their hips. If we truly want to generate power for a strike, we need to both twist our hips and move forward. There are, of course, countless other pieces we could add to the notion of how to put power into a strike but moving forward and putting the hips into the shot are a couple of the bigger pieces to the puzzle.