I-mon wrote:Why is the taiji form a waste of time for most people? because they have no foundation, weak legs, poor posture, tension everywhere, and can't fight,
johnwang wrote:jonathan.bluestein wrote:My teacher was very keen on working basics the first year.
My only concern is "how much basic is enough?" I like to teach application first and then enhance the basic later. Even today, I'm still working on my own basic enhancement. I don't see anything wrong to reverse the order.
onyomi wrote: some people will never develop strong basics if you don't force them to, ...
I-mon wrote:for young practitioners, from what i've seen (obviously there is infinitely more that i haven't seen than what i have seen), judo would be excellent; gymnastics with a good teacher. swimming + track and field; wrestling in america or europe or india (not much going round in new zealand when i grew up); certainly gjj or bjj if there's a good teacher; capoeira's tops if it's available (combination of music, singing, dancing, rhythm, play, relaxation, spontaneity etc)...feldenkrais stuff is the best I've seen for understanding how posture and movement should naturally develop during infancy and childhood so really if the parent's were doing that and had a good idea of how it works then they could get out of the way and let their children develop into naturally mobile and strong humans without all these messy developmental postural imbalances that most of us have and unknowingly teach our kids to have.
The other day when we were talking, you said that if you talked about ki, nobody would publish it, that they wouldn't want to hear about it. Right, you said that?
Mmmmm.
So my feeling is that I would like to talk about it anyway and …
It's not that I don't want to talk about it, but for me this starts with the organization of the body. To me, ki is not a thing and not a spirit and not an anything, but the way a body is organized to function and that way in which it functions best. It means that a body can produce with it's weight, with the muscles that it has, with the brain it has, the greatest amount of work possible with a particular organization of that body and that particular organization turns out to be central to the thing we are talking about. It's a complex appreciation of how a human body is made, how it functions: That it has a head that must not be involved in the movement but which must be free, whatever the movement is, to move anywhere and that the lower abdomen must be in such a state that it can do all the things that it needs to do without disturbing the head. The rest of the body and the arms are not to be used to produce strength. And that is the truth. Once you get that, if you do, you can do Judo throws, the most difficult ones; the heaviest person, you can throw him if you get that. But to the people who are keen on mysterious things of ki and chi, this is a complete come-down, and they are not interested. They don't want to listen to it. They don't want it to be like that.
It sounds like F. M. Alexander's concept of “use” would be a more useful concept than that of ki.
Oh no, that's not true because his “use” is a limited “use.” With his use you can't throw anybody, you can't even throw yourself, you can't roll with that. So that's “use.” Movement, motility, you can see and my way of presenting chi was acceptable to Koizumi, a man whose movement was superb and effective until the age of 80, being able to throw anybody, even if it was someone five times his own weight. He was pleased to think that chi's not a mysterious thing
Bhassler wrote:I invite anyone to unambiguously define internal and external movements and then show a video of either one happening totally independent of the other.
johnwang wrote:Bhassler wrote:I invite anyone to unambiguously define internal and external movements and then show a video of either one happening totally independent of the other.
It will be great if we can find internal clip and external clip side by side so we can clear see the difference. I'll suggest the following 4 pairs different clips for both "internal" and "external".
1. punch to the head.
2. kick to the chest.
3. lock on the elbow.
4. hip throw.
People may ask about, sticky, yield, follow, ... To me, those are "defense" and not "offense". So let's start from those 4 major offense tools. Let's start from a "punch to the head".
brennanos wrote:to punch using only the muscles of the shoulder and arm with no movement anywhere else in the body (which I would consider a purely "external" punch).
johnwang wrote:brennanos wrote:to punch using only the muscles of the shoulder and arm with no movement anywhere else in the body (which I would consider a purely "external" punch).
This statement truly put down all "external" styles big time as if their IQ is below 20.
...
If longfist, mantis, Baji, Lohan, WC, Zimen, and white ape are all "using only the muscles of the shoulder and arm with no movement anywhere else in the body", I would study boxing long time ago.
brennanos wrote:I think anyone wanting to learn one of the internal styles should start by learning tan tui.
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