the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

C.J.W. wrote:IMO, all good CMAists, regardless of style, possess Peng Jin. Different styles have different names for it, and many don't even talk about it; they simply consider it as one of the results of correct regular training. It is the physical quality that makes one immovable and able to bounce away incoming forces that come into contact with them.

In the arts I have practiced, this physical quality is -- at the most fundamental level -- developed through mindfully expanding and opening the joints in multiple directions.

That's pretty much my take on it, although I think the " mindfully" aspect is more complex than it sounds. I believe in Chen style they refer to moving the chi from Chao to Chao, the hollow points in the joints which are also entry and exit points. Moving the chi is more like using Yi to guide the mind along pathways of connection ensuring that more of the body's elasticity is involved than only opening and closing joints. I find that the metaphor of the 5 bows works well as a training aid to developing Peng as a completeness.
At a still mor local level, working outside to in, the exercise of always allowing a yin moment before a yang projection also creates the quality of peng in the limbs. I think that this often mistaken for the complete result. People that do a lot of push ( apologies to John Wang) get good at this but do not necessarily have full body Peng. My experience is that folk who have it can hit harder than folk who appear to have it in their hands and arms.

Itten wrote:

C.J.W. wrote:IMO, all good CMAists, regardless of style, possess Peng Jin. Different styles have different names for it, and many don't even talk about it; they simply consider it as one of the results of correct regular training. It is the physical quality that makes one immovable and able to bounce away incoming forces that come into contact with them.

In the arts I have practiced, this physical quality is -- at the most fundamental level -- developed through mindfully expanding and opening the joints in multiple directions.

... I think that this often mistaken for the complete result. People that do a lot of push ( apologies to John Wang) get good at this but do not necessarily have full body Peng. My experience is that folk who have it can hit harder than folk who appear to have it in their hands and arms.

I am not sure that I agree on this.... Most Tai Chi practitioners as well as rest of CMA practitioners work with their arms disconnected and uncoordinated from their bodies and do not have any idea about any open-close/Kai-he kind of movement or about coordinating opening and closing of joints. If you are going to develop pengjin, IMO, you really need a good teacher who can show as well as explain verbally what is pengjin and how to express it in physical movement. Some people develop it naturally and instinctively, but that is IME still a minority.

Bao wrote:

Itten wrote:

C.J.W. wrote:IMO, all good CMAists, regardless of style, possess Peng Jin. Different styles have different names for it, and many don't even talk about it; they simply consider it as one of the results of correct regular training. It is the physical quality that makes one immovable and able to bounce away incoming forces that come into contact with them.

In the arts I have practiced, this physical quality is -- at the most fundamental level -- developed through mindfully expanding and opening the joints in multiple directions.

... I think that this often mistaken for the complete result. People that do a lot of push ( apologies to John Wang) get good at this but do not necessarily have full body Peng. My experience is that folk who have it can hit harder than folk who appear to have it in their hands and arms.

I am not sure that I agree on this.... Most Tai Chi practitioners as well as rest of CMA practitioners work with their arms disconnected and uncoordinated from their bodies and do not have any idea about any open-close/Kai-he kind of movement or about coordinating opening and closing of joints. If you are going to develop pengjin, IMO, you really need a good teacher who can show as well as explain verbally what is pengjin and how to express it in physical movement. Some people develop it naturally and instinctively, but that is IME still a minority.

Hello Bao,
I'm not sure who you are disagreeing with. My statement was more or less indicating what you say. The only thing I have experienced that differs is that some people get good at a kind of sticky sensitivity in their arms that can be the end point of their progress. In my time with Chen I had great difficulty really understanding Kai/He. I saw too many people doing stomach rolls and pull ins and telling me it was Dantien work. It wasn't until I got hands on time with Sam Chin that I began to really have some handle on condense/ expand as separate to open and close. I know that terminology differs from one system to another, hands on usually ends the problem.

how would you all characterize a good tennis volley or a soccer/football volley? definitely not "brute force" but trained force producing a very accurate (if done correctly) movement. definitely not "li" from bones. definitely "connected" through all the various tissues. Personally I think it's very similar if not completely the same thing. You cannot "muscle" either of these techniques or the effect will be completely wrong; you just kind of put your body (and possibly a tool/"weapon") into a bouncy/pengjin sort of position with the right angle/timing and that is 99% of the work.

I don't think good tennis or soccer players have peng jin. The type of connection is different. In taiji connection is global, one part of the body moves, the whole body moves; tennis players don't have that. In tennis players the connection is local and it is an add on to muscular strength. There are degrees of relaxation. From what I've seen of Chinese IMAs in taiji and bagua they are nearly impossibly relaxed. If you take some one who is a master in bagua and show them a couple taiji exercises they will do it correctly very quickly and likewise a taiji master can learn basic bagua exercises very qucikly, but that won't be true of tennis players that haven't been exposed to good IMA. My opinion.

You might be right. But there is quite a lot of whole body connection to do these volleys correctly. Certainly the whole body moves and coordinates together. Probably much more so in the soccer volley. It's a very difficult technique and if you muscle it using "li" as happens at times, it goes all wrong. It's hard to say it could be any kind of force but peng jin, even though the concept does not exist in the sport. Athletes usually produce more well trained force than MA hobbyists/nerds. Soccer players use kao, split, pull down, ward off (peng in the arm), elbow, push, rollback pretty much all the time in the incidental grappling contests happening around the ball and in corner kicks.

Would be interesting to hear from the tennis players here.

everything wrote:You might be right. But there is quite a lot of whole body connection to do these volleys correctly. Certainly the whole body moves and coordinates together. Probably much more so in the soccer volley. It's a very difficult technique and if you muscle it using "li" as happens at times, it goes all wrong. It's hard to say it could be any kind of force but peng jin, even though the concept does not exist in the sport. Athletes usually produce more well trained force than MA hobbyists/nerds. Soccer players use kao, split, pull down, ward off (peng in the arm), elbow, push, rollback pretty much all the time in the incidental grappling contests happening around the ball and in corner kicks.

Would be interesting to hear from the tennis players here.

I understand there's this school of thought out there that good athletes are also "internal" in their movements. Personally, I beg to differ.

True internal movements, based on what I've seen and been taught, are abnormal and counter-intuitive to the ways that normal people (including athletes) move. They are also very specialized and style-specific.

What athletic training does, IMO, is enhancing natural human movements. IMA training, in contrast, is about re-wiring the body to move in ways that rely on a different set of body mechanics to produce power, stability, and speed.

I guess I agree or disagree depending on definitions.

If we think "internal" is whole body, the examples I mentioned qualify.

If we think it is something more, they do not.

If we think there is a continuum, maybe partially.

everything wrote:You might be right. But there is quite a lot of whole body connection to do these volleys correctly. Certainly the whole body moves and coordinates together. Probably much more so in the soccer volley. It's a very difficult technique and if you muscle it using "li" as happens at times, it goes all wrong. It's hard to say it could be any kind of force but peng jin, even though the concept does not exist in the sport. Athletes usually produce more well trained force than MA hobbyists/nerds. Soccer players use kao, split, pull down, ward off (peng in the arm), elbow, push, rollback pretty much all the time in the incidental grappling contests happening around the ball and in corner kicks.

Would be interesting to hear from the tennis players here.

In boxing, tennis and other sports, some use the term "kinetic chain" (a type of whole body power) to describe generating power. Some Tai Chi people use this term, too.

Here are a few examples:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVTI2xhT10w


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOOzIhAaxt4


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Lq7Io2nHh8


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD0tVuVisU8

marvin8 wrote:In boxing, tennis and other sports, some use the term "kinetic chain" (a type of whole body power) to describe generating power. Some Tai Chi people use this term, too.

Some but not all, those I know including my self use a different idea.

A batter is able to transport energy from her to the softball by means of a bat. The batter applies a force to the bat, thus imparting energy to the bat in the form of kinetic energy. The bat then carries this energy to the softball and transports the energy to the softball upon collision. In this example, a bat is used to transport energy from the player to the softball. However, unlike wave phenomena, this phenomenon involves the transport of matter.

The bat must move from its starting location to the contact location in order to transport energy. In a wave phenomenon, energy can move from one location to another, yet the particles of matter in the medium return to their fixed position. A wave transports its energy without transporting matter.

http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/w ... -is-a-Wave

How to train the body to do this is very counter intuitive as some have mentioned.

marvin8 wrote:In boxing, tennis and other sports, some use the term "kinetic chain" (a type of whole body power) to describe generating power. Some Tai Chi people use this term, too.

I haven't heard taiji people use the term until now. I like the videos and I like the description of the physics of motion for sports. I think, to some extent, the tennis videos describe part of jin. It is said about jin: It is rooted in the feet, issues through the legs, is governed by the waist, and is expressed through the fingers. Clearly there is a linkage or chain, but that is not all there is to it.

In the tennis videos the guys are clearly using shoulder, elbow, and wrist. In the first two videos they say as much, something about the sum of the parts. In the last video what they say sounds good, about the energy traveling thru the arm, but if you watch what they do, they are using the arm to generate some power. It's clearly external. If you think about the tennis racket it doesn't add much power, maybe some elasticity from the webbing, but for the most part it just tansfers force. That's what the arms should be doing in IMAs.

When I use the term connection I tend to put it in italics to indicate that it is a technical term. In the common usage we all connected. If we throw something our arms don't pull off or if we kick a ball our legs don't fly off. Is that really what some people consider being connected? The tennis players all clearly disconnect at the hip, waist, and chest. They are not connected. They're clearly external.

A couple observations.

It occurs to me that a lot of people look at "connection" and "linkages" as sequential processes of discrete body parts. In conventional athleticism -- such as the traditional way in which a baseball is pitched -- that is the case. But in IMA, in my experience, there is no start or finish, no sequence or chain of events; rather, it's cyclical and every aspect of the process (including the particular muscle groups, connective tissues, and their manipulations) is in play throughout... just in different stages of the cycle.

So, "rooted in the feet, issued through the legs, governed by the waist, expressed through the fingers" has a baseline state of being -- the state of peng is established and maintained, with all those aspects being expressed -- and then special effects are achieved by tweaking the amplitude, frequency, and vector of the existing conditions.

Connection (as in connecting the upper and lower body, and the quadrants) is in the connective tissues themselves -- iliopsoas, thoracolumbar fascia, upper-back fascia. teres major and teres minor muscles, trapezius, etc. -- tying the body together, both on the vertical axis/line and cross-body. We move as a coordinated unit by willfully manipulating and managing these tissues so that rather than using discrete limbs to generate and to deliver force from the ground, we are using the entire body to do so, and also to receive and neutralize force by taking it to the ground. No one part of the body receives or generates force. It's a unified effort, making the abilities of the sum of the parts superior to that of individual parts and quadrants of the body.

robert wrote:

marvin8 wrote:In boxing, tennis and other sports, some use the term "kinetic chain" (a type of whole body power) to describe generating power. Some Tai Chi people use this term, too.

I haven't heard taiji people use the term until now. I like the videos and I like the description of the physics of motion for sports. I think, to some extent, the tennis videos describe part of jin. It is said about jin: It is rooted in the feet, issues through the legs, is governed by the waist, and is expressed through the fingers. Clearly there is a linkage or chain, but that is not all there is to it.

In the tennis videos the guys are clearly using shoulder, elbow, and wrist. In the first two videos they say as much, something about the sum of the parts. In the last video what they say sounds good, about the energy traveling thru the arm, but if you watch what they do, they are using the arm to generate some power. It's clearly external. If you think about the tennis racket it doesn't add much power, maybe some elasticity from the webbing, but for the most part it just tansfers force. That's what the arms should be doing in IMAs.

When I use the term connection I tend to put it in italics to indicate that it is a technical term. In the common usage we all connected. If we throw something our arms don't pull off or if we kick a ball our legs don't fly off. Is that really what some people consider being connected? The tennis players all clearly disconnect at the hip, waist, and chest. They are not connected. They're clearly external.

A couple observations.

There is hardly any "sequence" really in a volley, either. The movement is because you kind of put your body into the right position so the angle of the ball and the angle of the racket is correct, and you sort of put "jin" into the racket. If you have never done this, it's not anything like a baseball swing or golf swing or tennis serve or tennis forehand (which are all well connected through the waist).

Perhaps this is just bracing/connecting all your tendons and other strong elastic tissues together as one unit to "bounce" something. Some people might think of that as "internal" or part of "internal".

If you have never done this, it's not anything like a baseball swing or golf swing or tennis serve or tennis forehand (which are all well connected through the waist).

you are describing a "feeling" in tennis, alluding that it's some how different then the other sports you've mentioned. Can you show or point to some thing that shows the differences between the 3. tennis, baseball, golf

for example

"A batter is able to transport energy from her to the softball by means of a bat. The batter applies a force to the bat, thus imparting energy to the bat in the form of kinetic energy. The bat then carries this energy to the softball and transports the energy to the softball upon collision."

How is tennis so different?