gongfu

 There is one area of tension in gong fu, that even the begining student knows about and that is the hip. The hip can either be “open” or closed. If you were to stand in a position as if you were fencing, or lunging forward with one leg and leaving the other foot planted, placing most of your weight on the forward leg, you might notice that based on training the motions of gong fu, you can only really do a five things in variations. If you were to move, but not move your feet you can only do three things, with only one of them having possible leg variations. If you remove the third thing, which is transfering weight, you can only do two things, which is what we are talking about. Namely, you can twist the hips. If you twist the hips to the right, and your left leg is forward, you are opening the left hip. This extends the reach of the left arm, and torques the pulling in of the right. It also forces you to use the rear leg firmly to drive the left arm/side of the body into whatever technique you’re employing. If you still have the left leg forward, and twist to the left, there is a little fold at the left hip. With this little fold, you are rooted below the waist, and can present left and right side techniques in virtually all of their myriad ways. This is called, squaring the hips. And it is made firm by a slight tension in the “closed” side of the hip, in this case the left one, where the thigh meets the pelvis. That area, is called “storing energy” or having that feeling of slight tension there is called “kua”, which means “hip” but implies power, firmness or stored energy in the hip in this sense I think.

 I don’t mean to be confusing. Well, maybe a litte, but only so that you reread it. Anyway, there isn’t just kua. There are other folds that are needed to effectively “store jin” or act as areas where you can coil the body to suddenly open up and emit a forceful blow. The knees can be pressed inward slightly, following the lead of the feet for example, and when you pull the elbows in, you create the same sort of tension point at the shoulders, where the arm meets the torso. If you were to carefully examine non-performance wu shu or “gong fu” videos of “masters” you would see that all of those places are very tightly folded, and that they open in an exact sequence.

 This is quintessential to the whole theory of gong fu. If there weren’t places that the body could collapse into itself, and then thrust out of, no matter how small the collapse, we wouldn’t be able to suddenly explode and create force. We would thus have to pull telegraph our techniques like bad Karatekas. This, I think, is really what is essentially meant by the sayings like “a needle wrapped in cotton” or “effortless power” and many, many more. It may look like small movements, but they are able to generate and deliver force beyond the perception of anyone unaware of that portion of biomechanics if used in proper sequence and with intent.

 Just realize, that there are several points on the body, where there exists a tension point, other than the hips. If you really realize that, you can strength train those areas of the body to achieve maximum force. Also, by doing your systems qigong sets, and really doing them, you can improve the mind-muscle connection at those points. This is what I am thinking about today on account of being in tai chi class tonight, so that is my blog content. Peace out girlscouts.

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