everything wrote:thanks for those videos. the topic brings up a tangent in my mind that a lot of threads make me think about. maybe it's another thread topic. we seem to talk mostly about taijiquan if we talk IMA here. but it doesn't seem like "blending" and "soft" and "rotational" within those templates"is the only "IMA".
xingyiquan and "kao" come to mind. sometimes in futbol i accidentally or on purpose "kao" someone. there isn't necessarily "rotation". there can just be the right angle, nevermind "internal" anything. a guy tried to go around me but his dead angle just hit my strong angle so he fell. i suppose we can argue that one's body might go orthogonal to the "line of force" and so there is the tiniest of "rotations" as a shoulder bump goes one way but there is a tiny rotation to move some of that horizontal direction of force downward as well as the footwork adjustments happen. i tend to think it's more of a counter-example, with more "linearity" and less "circularity". but we could say it's all using little bits of circularity. this example seems concrete, but the concept is still abstract to me. i could argue either way. or maybe we just say it's always angles AND rotations (and "qi" but we can leave that out for the moment).
I’m not sure if there is a question in there. Concerning
kao, you may be thinking in only one plane. There are three major planes, but techincally and infinite number of plane through which one may rotate.
Would it make you feel better if I said, “It’s mostly rotation"? Or if I said, “One needs to find the straight within the curve,” or “There is a circle within the square”?
We spend all our lives approximating what we think are linear movements. That is something with which we are very familiar, so it is no surprise that we need to focus on the unfamiliar rotational movements. Perhaps most importantly, most opponents have no capacity to defend against rotational movements, unless they previously trained to do so.
Don’t be so rigid in your assumptions. When I say rotation is “key", that does not mean that there is only rotation, or that linear movements cannot exist. Of what are angle composed? Two straight lines. If you rotated a compass to inscribe every possible angle meeting at a center point, your rotation would inscribe a circle.
If you wish, watch the videos again looking for the angles and straight lines.
