Fall Training

Continuing with yesterdays post:

There is a Chinese saying: Open up to new practices in the Spring, avoid sweating in the Summer, Develop Power in the Fall, and Store Qi in the Winter.

Fall: What is power training? For the most part, power training is the process of improving efficiency. Of the hundreds of different power training techniques one can think of, most, if not all, can be understood as efficiency training. Power training is a process of refining technique. It is the harvest season.
Here is a short list:
Compress (shrink), expand (explode),
Move the whole body as one unit.
Coordinate every part of your body simultaneously.
Focus all 400 muscles on one task.
Use all of your body weight when issuing force.
If you use waves to generate power from one part of your body to another, make sure none of the wave ‘action’ is dispersed before hitting it’s target.
Make all waves smaller and more refined (hidden), so that there is no delay when issuing force.

The process of refining technique can include lots of other aspect of training besides power training. The big question I have for my readers is: How much power does a martial artist need? Isn’t there some point at which more power training is just silly. Isn’t that the point of a lot of Kungfu movies? If my punches can break bones, and knock a man 50 pounds heavier than me to the ground, do I need more?
Isn’t it true that after I have developed a certain amount of power my curve will start to level off, meaning I have to work a lot harder to get a much smaller improvement? I have heard people say that a martial artist's power can keep doubling every few years, isn’t this just a fantasy?

Spring and Summer Training

There is a Chinese saying:  Open up to new practices in the Spring, avoid sweating in the Summer,  Develop Power in the Fall, and Store Qi in the Winter.
Why not practice everything all year round?  If gongfu/neijia(inner arts) is not a processional religious tradition why would we practice this way?  Is there any good reason?
Let’s talk about what the saying means first.

Spring:  Opening up to new practices, of course means learning new routines and new techniques, but it also means stretching more, increasing your range of motion, and breaking up any stagnation leftover from Winter.  Usually Spring is associated with the Liver organ, which "stagnates" from too much fried or greasy food.  The liver is "tonified" by vigorous movement.  Spring is a good time to sweat a little.

Summer:  Not sweating is a form of endurance training.  This season is associated with the heart, which is the Emporor of the Organs.  The country is well run when the Emporor has nothing to do.  Of course we know the heart is a pump that needs to keep pumping, but does it need to pump fast?  To understand how not sweating can be endurance training consider running 100 yards as fast as you can and timing it.  Immediately take your  pulse.  Now try to run the same distance in the same amount of time, and try to do it with a slower heart rate.
The Chinese idea works just the opposite, try to move as much as you can with out increasing your heart rate enough to break a sweat.  Over time you will be able to move faster and more vigorously without increasing your heart rate.
Running through a few Shaolin forms at performance speeds still gets me breathing hard.  It feels good, but I don’t do it everyday, and I actually think it would be counter productive if I did. When I go backpacking with a heavy pack, everyone else seems to get tired first, so it must be working.
I would argue that we really don’t need what many people call "cardio-conditioning." What do my 100 a day readers think?

Matched Fighting vs. Real Fighting

The issue of whether or not a particular martial art is effective or not comes up all the time. What is realistic?

1.  Actual hand to hand combat in war.

2.  Surprise attacks,
-muggings
-kidnappings.

3.  Fights for honor
-the school yard
-the bar
-arguments (petty and otherwise)

4.  Crazy people, drunk or on drugs.

5.  Intervening on behalf of someone being bullied or mugged

6.  Intimidation (including turf defense and "hating out")
-by an individual
-by a group.

7.  Professional encounters
bouncers
body guards
police.

A matched fight has several things these above fights don’t. The first is parameters. The fight happens right here, when they ring the bell. And there are rules, no weapons, certain blows likely to maim or kill are usually forbidden. The fight will be stopped if one person concedes defeat. In addition the only surprises are likely to be techniques or strategies. The opponents are roughly the same size and wear the same types of gear. There is likely some advantage gained by conditioning or numbing one’s body to take a hit (of little use in a knife fight for instance.)
If you are training for a matched fight you train specifically for the constraints of that fight, even down to studying the previous fights of your competitor.
Matched fighting and real fighting are completely different animals.

Rough and Tumble

The first four American Colonies, starting in the 1600's, had some pretty serious barehanded fighting that still influences how we think about fights today.

The first type of fighting was called a "Fair Fight" or sometimes "Queens Rules." It later became known as Kid-glove Boxing because of the soft goat skin gloves they wore.

The second was Wrestling, but it was pronounced "Wrasslin or "Russlin." Actually there were two types of wrestling practiced in early America. I quote from one of my favorite books Albian's Seed, Four British Folkways in America, by David Hackett Fischer:

One was carefully regulated and elaborately staged in annual tournaments. The burly contestants commonly dressed in sleeveless vests, long tights tucked into stockings, and velvet trunks incongruously embroidered with delicate flowers.

It was a throwing game. If any part of your body besides your feet touched the ground you lost the bout.

Then there was another type of 'wrestling' which would begin with "bragging and boasting" and usually a bit of heavy drinking beforehand:

The...sport of bragging and fighting was also introduced to the American backcountry, where it came to be called "rough and tumble." ....it was a savage combat between two or more males (occasionally females), which sometimes left the contestants permanently blinded or maimed. A graphic description of "rough and tumble" came from the Irish traveler Thomas Ashe, who described a fight between a West Virginian and a Kentuckian. A crowd gathered and arranged itself into an impromptu ring. The contestants were asked if they wished to "fight fair" or "rough and tumble." When the chose "rough and tumble," a roar of approval rose from the multitude. the two men entered the ring, and a few ordinary blows were exchanged in a tentative manner. Then suddenly the Virginian "contracted his whole form, drew his arms to his face," and "pitched himself into the bosom of his opponent," sinking his sharpened fingernails into the Kentuckian's head. "The Virinian," we are told, "never lost his hold...fixing his claws in his hair and his thumbs on his eyes, [he] have them a start from the sockets. The sufferer roared aloud, but uttered no complaint." Even after the eyes were gouged out, the struggle continued. The Virginian fastened his teeth on the Kentuckian's nose and bit it in two pieces. Then he tore off the Kentuckian's ears. At last, the "Kentuckian, deprived or eyes, ears, and nose, gave in." The victor, himself maimed and bleeding, was "chaired round the grounds," to the cheers of the crowd.(p. 737)

Mixed Martial Arts..."is humanity itself compared with the Virginian mode of fighting," with its "biting, gouging and...you get the idea.

Tuishou vs. Roushou (push-hands vs. soft-hands)

Tuishou and roushou are what we might call martial arts parlor games. They are gentrified, limited two person fighting games.
For me, and many martial artists, tuishou and roushou are the arts of not becoming defensive.

How does this work?
On the emotional level one must train how to lose well before developing skill. The pride of winning is totally addictive. Because the parameters of both arts are strict limitations on actual fighting, someone who wants to win will keep trying to change the rules, or the parameters of the game. They will up the ante by, for instance, resetting their foot in a game of fixed foot tuishou. I often have a student handicap them selves so that they can practice losing to someone who is less skillful than they are. I tell beginners, the goal is to make your partner happy. To do this you have to really try to get to know your partner. If you practice correctly, an experience of intimacy replaces the desire to win.

How is this done?
There are many steps so I'm just going to cover a few of the ones that deal with undoing defensive responses.

First you must make and feel a ring shape with your arms (later it becomes a ball). Practicing very slowly at first, have your partner use their arms to make contact with your arms on the outside of your ring. Keeping contact your partner then slowly moves their hands toward your neck. A small increase in the size of your ring will arrest their progress (once they are stopped they should not keep trying but instead break contact and start again). This un-trains the defensive response often called against the wall, meaning using your back muscles to pull your arms apart (a reflex we use to protect our head and neck when falling backwards).

Second, you make the same ring but have your partner use their arms to make contact with the inside of your ring. Again they should proceed to attack your neck. Arrest the attack by making the ring smaller. This time you may have to also turn at the hip socket so that they don't touch your body, but shrinking the ring will stop their progress toward your neck. This un-trains the defensive response often called pincering, in which one uses chest and pectoral muscles to force the forearms together making a narrowing corridor shape with the arms.
Do not respond to these attacks by moving your arms up or down, just change the size of the ring. Then try the same thing with one arm inside the ring and one arm outside the ring. Repeat the exercise daily until it is second nature.

Once you have basic tuishou skills and you know how to keep your frame, you can try roushou. The big difference between the two is that roushou allows slapping with a soft hand. The basic rule is that I can only slap with as much force as I can get sliding off of my partner's defense. The harder or more actively my partner defends, the harder and more often they get hit. And of course, the same goes for me. So first you learn to defend lightly, than not to defend at all. Very cool.

Since both practices train sensitivity, it's fair to say that the muscularly stronger opponent has the disadvantage. Still it would be a mistake to say that we cultivate weakness because it gives us an advantage. The real reason for cultivating weakness is that it reveals our true nature. It's not that our true nature ever actually goes away, it's just that strength and the fears or fantasies that produce strength tend to obscure, or one might even say numb, our true nature.

Just a note: Searching google video for 'push-hands' gets lots of interesting results, but searching for 'roushou' gets nothing I would actually call roushou.  Time to make a video.

Walking #3 (Story)

In the religious Daoist tradition stories are considered qi transmissions. To study personally with a great bagua or qigong teacher is of immeasurable value but we can receive qi transmissions in many different ways.

Once during the Qing dynasty in China the Emperor and his courtiers decided to make a sport out of all the outrageous claims martial artist were making. They had many martial artists brought one by one to the palace and asked them to perform many feats, after which they were usually put to death.

The Emperor heard about a bagua master who people claimed could move any stone. So the Emperor had a huge stone brought into the courtyard using long levers and pulleys. He then had the famed martial artist brought to the palace. Upon seeing the challenge he asked to be given 24 hours and some torches to see by. Amused, the Emperor granted the request. The martial artist began crawling all over the of the stone, looking and feeling everywhere. 24 hours later the Emperor and his courtiers returned and demanded to see the stone moved. The martial artist then put one finger on one particular spot and using just that finger succeeded in pushing the huge stone all around the courtyard. The Emperor and his courtiers were so impressed that they granted him his life.

It seems that even stones have acupuncture meridians.

It is said that a bagua practitioner who has reached the height of mastery can step on a solid cobble stone and turn it to dust. I imagine that such steps are extremely light.
The adepts experience of the world is recreated in each step or gesture we make. Qi gong practitioners don't just re-learn how to walk, we are continuously re-learning how to walk. We are demonstrating true openness to the possibilities. The fruit of practice is that walking itself becomes unconditioned.

Walking #2 (Toddlers')

Watching toddlers' movement can be really instructive.  Toddlers are unstable and actually rely not on strength or righting reactions (both of which develop and integrate with time) but on the softness of their bones and the fluidity of their joints.  They can make great errors in stepping and stumbling because they have a large range of motion in their joints.  They easily recover from falls.  Their bodies are buoyant and adaptable.  Their joints acutually pulse, or open and close, as they walk or reach out for something they want and draw it back toward their center (or their mouth.)

"...it's bones are soft, it's muscles are weak, and yet it's grip is very strong,"

(Daode jing Chapter 55, Liu ming)

Qi gong and internal martial arts combine these two approaches to movement, that of the very young and that of the very old. Both approaches can be considered weak.

From doing these practices, as we age, our joints have more space and we use the space that we have more efficiently. We return to balance without much strain or effort.

Somewhere I picked up the saying:  "Walk with your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds."

Walking #1 (Older people)

What is it like watching most older people move? Is it a source of pity or sympathy, or perhaps a foreboding omen of what we can some day expect ourselves? If we were to study older peoples' movements with respectful inquisitiveness what might we learn?

Young people walk by falling slightly forward to create momentum and continuously catching themselves with their front foot as they stride forward. This type of movement requires:

1. The ability to suddenly contract muscles should we mis-step or slip.

2. Well integrated reflexes, righting reactions, and equilibrium responses so we can stop abruptly.

3. Buoyancy in the joints(space/fluidity) and a fairly wide range of motion to account for sudden variation.

As people age it becomes more difficult to maintain the muscle tissue sufficient to catch oneself, right oneself and return to balance. As people age they often develop a reduced range of motion do to repeated injuries, including what we tend to call normal wear and tear. Even small injuries often leave scar tissue which reduces pliancy and range of motion. This along with a general loss of fluids in the joints leaves less space in the joints for movement. This not only makes large steps difficult or painful, but the righting reactions needed to re-balance are often out of ones range of motion or would themselves cause re-injury in the joints.

Big steps, or any type of reckless movement, brings the risk of falling and breaking already deficient bones. Thus how do older people walk? Hesitant little steps. They test the ground with each step and find their balance with each weight shift, doing their best to maintain their balance all the time.

Eventually, everyone's muscles and reactions degenerate and we are all, in a sense, forced to except the sensitivity that comes with weakness (in Daoism this process is called return).

When older people walk they draw on all the resources they have, (they'll take your arm if you offer it.)

Those in the past, who cultivated the Way,
Were subtle,mysterious, abstruse, penetrating,
Unfathomable, and so too deep to describe.
Because of this,
I can only tell you how they seemed.
They were cautious, as if crossing a river in winter.
Always watchful of danger on all four sides.
They were ceremonious and polite, like being a guest.
Yielding, like ice beginning to melt.
Plain and unconditioned, like an uncarved block of wood.
As open, as a valley.
Murky, like turbid water.
Who among you can be so murky and yet know
Quiet and Clarity within?
Which of you can enter stillness only to return to movement?
Those who keep this Dao,
Avoid fullness.
Because they are not full,
they can renew themselves and not be worn out.
Daode jing Chapter 15 (Liu ming)

This quality of movement, testing the ground before a weight shift, avoiding muscle contractions, essentially seeking depth and ease, are all things we do when we practice qi gong, taiji, or bagua. Aging may actually make them easier to do!

The Chinese Calendar/Almanac

Some guy named Jerome Weng in Singapore responded to my Youtube video African Bagua #1 with the following comment:

Bagua is a sequence of pairs to form 64 possible comination. That is related to I -Ching. SO what is it that all these matters swayed to African dance or Chinese Music. Please read and find out more of Ganzhi system found in Bagua. Basically the Ganzhi system, composing of the Ten Celestial Stems and Twelve Terrestrial Branches. The truth is the China has a strong link to Middle East, not Africa.

Ganzhi is part of the Chinese Calendar-Almanac which is the oldest continuously published book on earth. I have followed it closely for about 10 years. A closer look at the Tongshu (another of the many names for the whole calendar) will strongly support my case. One way to understand it is as a composite/synchronization of all the calendars used by all the different ethnic and regional religous cults of China and it's neighbors. It is a collection of all religions perceptions of time, (really!). So baguazhang is in a sense like the Calendar, a collection of all the different physiologies of trance practiced in China.
Within the Tongshu there are two time cycles that follow the Yijing (I-Ching). One takes a different hexagram each six days and goes through each line in sequence with the moon. Because the moon “math� doesn’t quite add up, some of the hexagrams are only five lines/days instead of six- the top line gets dropped.
The second cycle is not actually a 64 day cycle, it is a 72 day cycle which is tied to the sun and thus reverses the counting sequence on the solstices. It is a 72 day cycle because every eighth day is a divination day, 64+8=72.
For years I used my baguazhang practice to embody the hexagram for that day. If you know eight palm changes which correspond to the eight trigrams, you can practice each hexagram too. Think of each hexagram as a transition between two trigrams and practice that transition. (So for example, hexagram 63 is li [fire] transitioning into kan [water].) On divination days, improvise!

And I wasn't going to point to a direct African or Middle-Eastern connection but Julie Lee Wei will! Correspondences Between the Chinese Calendar Signs and the Phoenecian Alphabet.

The Kinesthetic nature of Internal Arts

There is a convention of dividing gongfu into internal and external, and following that logic qigong is also sometimes divided this way. When we refer to qi, we often mean the animation of the interior world, the felt world. This is meant to be distinct from the seen world, how our bodies look, our form, the external shell. The traditional way to learn something is to begin with the external, and gradually become more internal. As the internal develops there is a movement outward toward refining the external, and then back toward the internal again; a circular process. The real distinction is that ‘internal arts’ put more emphasis on the internal, and do it sooner, almost from the beginning.

Taijiquan is the most well know internal art, but baguazhang and xingyiquan along with hundreds of qigong exercises (many of them abstracted from one of those three arts) have been steadily gaining in popularity. The following is meant to be helpful in understanding the term, 'internal.'
If you move your tongue around in your mouth and then do the same thing looking in the mirror it will appear that your tongue is moving differently than it feels. The tongue tends to exaggerate the size of objects it touches. This becomes really obvious when you have a cut on your tongue. Similarly, the back of the palms and the front of the wrists perceive heat and moisture quite differently. (You can try it right now.)
The internal organs move around like the tongue and each has it's own very specialized sensory and motor nerves, as well as its own intelligence. The feeling of lifting up your right kidney feels very different than the feeling of lifting up your right shoulder, but both can be felt. Rotating your liver feels very different than rotating your head, but both move independently. Our internal organs move around semi-consciously most of the time, completing specialized functions automatically.
This 'internal' movement necessarily supports all our other movements. This is experience is the basis for Structure school of Chinese medicine. The premise of which is that chronic illness, injury, "deficiency" or "excess" will have a physical impact on the underlying structure of our bodies. It will eventually reshape even our bones.
All our 'external' movements like waving our hands or wiggling our toes are interdependent with internal movements for support. This is part of the function of our organs, our vessels, glands etc…, form is inseparable from more obvious function( their form shape and movement have a function in addition there systemic functions). When that support is partial, inhibited or too abrupt we say qi flow is inhibited or restricted. Over time these qi restrictions may become imbalances, stiffness, collapsing, or pain, in both 'internal' and 'external' movement.
Qi gong teachers have many devices for developing students' sense of the internal. Remember that the concept that qi itself is not restricted to or limited by ideas of internal or external personal space, it's bigger than that. Working with the concept of qi means not restricting our view to just organs, or even the limits of the physical body, it would suggest an expansive view, and a softened focus. [Where you practice matters!]
Thus it follows that this seemingly infinite movement inwards also continues as our gestures, movements, and our senses move out into space. Tying the internal to our conduct and to the shape of the environment we live in.
Imagination is a necessary component of feeling. Most people feel their liver moving, they just haven’t named it and thus, in not naming it, they have not differentiated it. (is it still part of undifferentiated chaos?) Feeling is a type of distinction which requires some imagination and some practice.

Therefore I’m dubious of distinctions between mental and physical.