A few points of clarification are in order.
Virtually all who teach and practice Sanchin place emphasis on a "pelvic tilt." I've heard a number of different descriptions of this, and how it is done. But I've tweaked thousands of Sanchins through the years, and have a pretty good idea what this is. A proper pelvic tilt in Sanchin removes some (or all) of the lumbar lordosis (curve in small of back) without affecting other parts of the spine (bending forwards or backwards). In doing so, a person naturally bends the knees. I find it isn't necessary for me to have students make any additional effort to bend their knees if they do this tilt properly. The body will naturally bend at the knees to accomodate this tilt. This then gives the practitioner that natural "athletic" look of a bent-knee posture.
Accompanying this tilt is a need to turn the heels out. I know a lot of people like to talk about turning the feet in, but that bugs me. It implies one rotates on the heels, which absolutely is not the case. If instead one puts the feet at shoulder width, steps one foot a foot's length forwards, and then turns the heels out, the body will naturally "find" that magic twist of the femurs in the hip sockets that amounts to a trigger-cocking action.
The real question before going any farther then is "to what end?" Do we get in this posture so we can stand like the Rock of Gibraltar and dish it out? Do we consider this a "median" posture about which we vary? Is this a "cocked spring" position used to explode in any number of different ways? Depending upon the individual, how they are built, how they use their karate, and how they fight, I find a range of different answers to these questions. And these then lead to a bit of a dichotomy for some.
Do we move the hips, or do we keep them solid?
For years I was of the school of keeping those Sanchin hips rock solid and moving about like a waterbug. It works... I can do it... What I found over time however is a counter point of view that can be developed from any number of sources.
Let's start with a familiar character. Go to any number of films of Kanei Uechi doing kata.
Kanei Uechi Seisan
If you watch him do one of his patented sokusen kicks such as the one before the knee strike, you will see that his whole body is "alive." For years I would view that way of doing a kick as a bit of a Kanei abberation. Maybe nobody wanted to tell the master that he had a funny way of moving his body. But the more I study human kinesiology, the more I realize that the man was practicing our style on another level.
What we see in Kanei's front kicks is classic SSM (sequential summation of movement). The action starts with core muscles. I find I can exaggerate the heel-out motion and throw my arse back to set that kick up, and then pop the hips under while rotating the legs back out again. In doing so, I find that my body "finds' that motion that Kanei does so well. My legs over time are doing less and less of the work. My core muscles are getting the leg going, and my legs work more on placement of the kick. I find as I get better at this that I need less and less "room" to get that kick out. I even work my class on throwing the kick from a crane posture so there's no way they can do anything BUT drive it with core muscles. It highlights the importance of it all.
If you take basic motions such as the knee thrust before groin hits and do a different "spin" on it, you'll also see how "live" hips can come into play. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to convert a Uechi front knee thrust into a Muay Thai roundhouse knee drive into the floating ribs. Suddenly we find we can do more with less.
IF we let those hips go.
Interesting...
It gets more complicated than that though.
Nakamatsu has his whole line of students doing "live hip" thrusts in Sanchin kata. Bob Kaiser's dojo was the first place I saw it done. I tried learning this from Frank Gorman, but he wasn't quite able to transfer the information to me. I have to thank Dana for finally explaining it all in a way that I could really understand. Her ability to break the whole motion down into extreme phases (taught BTW by Nakamatsu himself) helped me realize that this was another classic example of SSM. It's a body wave that starts with the core muscles, and radiates out to the periphery. The more you can tap into the core, the less your arms work.
I have repeatedly shown pictures of pitchers throwing balls and home-run hitters swinging bats to illustrate extreme examples of this principle. The more a home run hitter is able to do this, the greater the power and the greater the precision of the swing. If you're doing the entire swing with the arms, you'll miss and you won't hit it anywhere if you do manage to connect wood to leather.
IMO we can do the exact same thing in Sanchin. We just happen to do it much, much smaller.
Simple motions such as the circles after "groin attacks" also yield well to hip movement, albeit in a different way. Making the navel swing from left to right will turn a "wauke" into a "lights out" attack on a bent-over opponent. Hmm... THAT'S why we hit them in the nuts before "blocking." Blocking my arse!
But the dichotomy continues. There is a school of Uechi that teaches locked hips. Not to name names, but... You will find camps where teachers are adamant about keeping those Sanchin hips still. Move the hips? That's not Uechi!!! That's not the way they do it in Okinawa!!!
Hmm...
- Bill
Ask Raffi how important all his sai work was in the development of his Filipino knife skills.
