tight and exact vs loose and free (bagua quesiton)

[mixjourneyman]

Big and open is for improving circulation and health, small and closed is for fighting. Practice both to be balanced.

-Steve

Cool.

And Chris, thanks for the elucidation!

[Bhassler]

It kind of depends on if you're drilling or learning when you do your form. Drilling-- as in forming a habit-- is best done with precision. Learning means that you deconstruct one or more aspects of a movement so you can differentiate what works and what doesn't, or understand why multiple ways of doing the same thing all work in different contexts or for different reasons. In the context of doing a form (or any movement) to learn, there needs to be both precision at times and at times more freedom. Or to say it another way, when learning you might do something precisely as taught, precisely almost as taught but slightly different, or just mess around and notice where what you've been taught as "precise" shows up in habitual or novel ways of doing things.

To me, the biggest error occurs when people try to do it "right" all or even most of the time. We don't learn anything from doing it right, we learn from making and correcting our mistakes. The more mistakes you can make in practice, the better you can understand the underlying principles and operate from the context of functional understanding when things are a little more serious. Or so I'm told. Mostly I just read about this stuff on the internet.

[everything]

Big and open is for improving circulation and health, small and closed is for fighting. Practice both to be balanced.

I'm starting to think there is no difference. I might practice "big and open" as a solo form. In fighting, my posture may seem big and open but the application movement could be very small. My posture is like a large circle, the degree it turns is small. Or, my posture is a small circle, the degree it turns is still small. I'd rather practice for health but in sparring (don't want to know about fighting) it seems to just depend on distance, timing, size of opponent, what kind of "posture" you were in during that second, etc. I don't think small and closed all the time is aways true. For example in mma (though it's not ima), there seems to be a lot of variation. Fedor seems mostly big and open in standup, his arms and legs are far apart from each other and his center - the one exception being a tight hand at his temple against Crocop. Other fighters are far more small and closed with a boxing guard. Someone else can probably analyze it better...