middleway wrote:
These are some similar exercises I have been doing. I am not getting all the details correct yet and am still very much working Out the body problems.
Cheers
Iskendar wrote:Errm...bizarre. In dragon stepping and spiraling, he kept saying "90 degrees" all the time in the past 2 seminars.
Iskendar wrote: One of the interesting things of this IP thing: there's more than one way to do it
GrahamB wrote:Iskendar wrote: One of the interesting things of this IP thing: there's more than one way to do it
And is that, right there, not the reason for all the disagreements and arguments? (Aside from arguing over wether or not to describe/show it in the first place).
If there's more than one way to do it then definitions are instantly very difficult, 'rules' for exercises are instantly very problematic to talk about in a general sense.
Perhaps it's just like religion. In a general sense, they're all the same, but people go to war over the details.
Exercises that lead to the exact same physical result, must then be the same at the core with only superficial differences.
Chris McKinley wrote:Interloper wrote: Exercises that lead to the exact same physical result, must then be the same at the core with only superficial differences.
Nuh uh. Not always. If the goal is to simply walk across the street, there are hundreds of variations of ways in which someone could do it, all of them successful, and some of them radically different from one another.
There are only limited ways to manipulate the human body to create "IP." However, there are many ways to incompletely create it, that do not result in the optimal product.
And there also are many ways to express ""IP" once it has been generated.
Chris McKinley wrote:lazyboxer,
Thank you as well for taking the time to provide insight into the matter. This thread has been the single most useful on the entire forum for me in terms of providing insight into the kind of thing Dan is teaching. Further, it has shed some light on some of the crucial similarities that all truly high quality internal arts practices include. I, too, was taught and still practice/teach a number of methods like the one jjy has shown, including one that is more or less the very same practice. The way I was taught, even basic circle walking is a continuous exercise in manifesting the Yin/Yang pump, heavy/light, empty/full, kou/bai, up/down, left/right, etc. Done strictly, I get more internal work out of one trip around the circle than a lot of guys get in an hour of what is typically shown as circle walking. In fact, I can work up a sweat after just one trip each way.
Bagua certainly doesn't teach or promote a strict squaring of the hips and shoulders in a single plane, and such would violate the Cross the Great River principle for the art whenever kou or bai are being employed, but perhaps I have misunderstood or misread what you meant. For reasons I outlined previously, I'm certainly not a fan of extreme spinal rotation regardless, nor extreme hip pronation or supination for similar reasons. Beside the potential risk of injury in some cases, the biomechanics are such that compound movements are almost always at their structurally strongest when the involved joints are kept within the middle of their ranges of motion, and thus maintaining the principle of keeping to the middle way.
Thanks again for the very specific technical discussion. We may be enjoying a moment of unusually close agreement here, but even when we disagree we may still find some very fascinating and useful exchanges of perspectives and information.
For the moment, I'll simply say that my comments about the square hip/ shoulder configuration were highly contextualized (!), and as such easily misinterpreted.
Return to Xingyiquan - Baguazhang - Taijiquan
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 123 guests