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What are your hips?
It sounds simple enough, but most of us probably have a somewhat inaccurate picture in our heads about what our hips look like and how they work. In actual fact, when we talk about using our hips, most of us actually mean our pelvis. Very approximately speaking, your pelvis is a bony cage formed by two circles of bone that connect to each other in the front, and to the bottom of your spine. Your spine is comprised of lots of individual blocks of bones called vertebrae, most of which can twist and bend relative to each other. However, the part of the spine where the hips connect (called the sacrum) is a big strong bony plate made up of five permanently fused vertebrae. Beneath this, the coccyx (or tailbone) is made up of four fused vertebrae. Biologically speaking, the primary purpose of your pelvis is to provide a connection between your legs and your spine. The pelvis itself is connected to the spine via the sacroliliac joints (a frequent location for back pain). By twisting, bending and rolling the vertebra in the lower half of the spine, or by modifying the hip locations using your legs, you can move the pelvic cage in any direction. The hips proper, are little more than dimples (sockets) at the sides of the pelvis, and these connect to the ball joints of the upper leg. It is these ball joints that are changed during a hip replacement operation. When we refer to hip movement, we could pedantically be isolating just the edges of the pelvis, or we could more usefully be referring to the entire pelvic structure. For the purpose of this article, I use them interchangeably. When we strike using our arms, hip movement is translated into arm movement via the spine and the torso. Obviously, the torso is filled wth squishy organs, and these do not form good conduits for the tranmission of energy. Therefore it's crucially important that you develop and condition the muscles of your torso so that they form a solid mass which both transmits the motion from the pelvis, and protects the organs within from jarring as you do so. The pelvis is moved by the muscles of the upper leg, and the abdominal and lower spinal muscles. Why use your hips? The first question you need to answer is a simple one – why do your hips matter at all? You hear it at every class you go to – “Use your hips”, “Put your hips into it”, “More hips”, but I think that it’s an under-explained expression. You should use your hips whilst striking or blocking because it adds more power to your moves. That's because it does one of two things – it adds body weight to a technique, or it adds acceleration.
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