Theme of the Week: Footwork

Are your feet helping you?  Are they helping you generate more power?  Are they setting you up in a better position?

Are your feet hurting you?  Are they taking away your ability to turn your hips?  Are they limiting your mobility?

One advantage to have a prescribed set of moves (forms) is that we can examine all these questions and (hopefully) keep everything else the same – like a well structured experiment.  We can examine if our feet are helping us throw a specific punch from a specific stance in a more powerful way.  The drawback is (like in an experiment), it can be difficult to generalize this information into the realm of application where there are so many confounding variables.

Thus we did both.  We examined our footwork in forms.  We examined our footwork when trying to push each other over.  Ideally, the combination of the two will bring about a greater awareness of what our feet are doing – and help us begin to answer some of those initial questions.