chousi jin and chansi jin

[Bodywork]

Depends on what I'm doing. Nine times out of ten if I'm fighting I am not going to keep my shoulders in line with the hips. For power and throw resistence that's a disaster and sure to lead to too much foot work or muscle use. But many times at the completion / follow through of a throw they meet or line up. But the follow through or completion is when it's all over. It's what precedes that -that is the real jewel of the martial arts-preventing unbalancing and fit-ins and strikes or kicks. and all of those are best done without the hips and shoulder in line IMO...YMMV.

The real million dollar question is WHHHHYYYY we turn the waist and what affect that HAS on the hips. Hell even that isn't accurate either. Its more like what is the waist drawing on...through the hips.
Example: most anyone who isn't a blithering idiot knows how much trouble you get into in firing the shoulders- if you are trying for internal power right?
IMHO the hips are the shoulders of the lower body! They prevent / cause just as much -if not more- trouble than all the bad habits in the shoulders.
Dan

[C.J.Wang]

Seperating waist and hips, and moving from the waist are actually some of the important concepts that my Bagua teacher emphasizes from day one. It was never "hips first, waist later" for me. I learned it painfully by trying to twist from the waist as much as I could while he held on to my hips firmly to make sure that they didn't move an inch.

However, there are also Bagua people who don't move this way and are perfectly happy with utilizing waist and hips as a unit. (Most of them also practice other systems and simply use those body methods in their Bagua.)

Just a question, when you say twisting the waist without moving the hips, do the shoulders stay aligned with the hips, or do they follow the turning waist. In our taiji, breaking shoulder-hip alignment is a big no-no, and I seem to remember the same from Park Bok Nam's book on bagua. Now, we do work with a lot of hip movement, so maybe there's the difference, though I've been working on driving the hip movement by turning the waist (dantian rotation), which gives quite nice results. Allows for much smaller hip movement (to the point of nearly none) for the same amount of power. Still, when I do this, I don't break hip-shoulder alignment. Interesting stuff.

The shoulders do not stay aligned with the hips in the Bagua method my teacher teaches. He refers to it as "seperation of hips and waist" and emphasizes that in Bagua, you must learn how to use them seperately AND together. Of course, shoulders and hips sometimes line-up momentarilly as transitions while you move, but that's about it.

I am also aware that the majority of Taji and Bagua schools focus on maintaining the shoulder-hip alignment and move hips-waist as a unit, which is what I pointed out in my pervious post.

Read what Bodywork and D_Glenn have posted. Both provide excellent insights.