These are not straight forward questions, or rather they're a bit vague, if you'll allow me.
What body mechanics...?/
The second question is easy to answer - it's nerves and muscles - but that doesn't help you at all.
The third question's answer I don't think will help much either.
Tomorrow I'm free and I'm going to have a pop at producing something coherent, but I'll do it in the main forum - if there's any interest that is. My approach is to try to explain to whoever is willing to listen, but also to let them ask questions, since this forum does not allow just anyone to question what's being said.
I'm not sure that Dan is bothered much about explanations of fundamental concepts, so much as he is interested in talking to people who have a similar level of knowledge and skill to his own. And why not?
Me, I like to think I can help people achieve enough knowledge to provide longer term goals for their practice. I view IP or skilled force as essential to all MA and hope that I can contribute to people's understanding to improve their practice.
Wuyizidi wrote:Ian wrote:A spin on an old question - how do you, the reader, create internal strength? How do you train it?
The good first step for us would be to stop using incomplete, inaccurate translations like internal strength. The Chinese word used here is jin, which means trained force. So the correct translation is internal trained force. As the name suggests, it's not the kind of force you can produce or do very well naturally without special training. People can naturally have a lot of strength, but no one naturally has a lot of jin.
Martial art is fundamentally about how to use force (to cause incapacitation, injury, or death). We make use of many types of trained forces (in Taiji Quan we talk about 36 types, actually there are more), each has its advantages and disadvantages. For example, with external jins, the advantage is you can produce the biggest, fastest accelerating forces this way, but the disadvantage is once it's launched, it's very hard to stop and change course midway (it's ballistic), also, store and release are separate, distinct processes. With internal jin, just the opposite it true.
The quantitative aspects - speed, acceleration, duration, etc, are but part of the whole picture. Using a bigger force is not always the solution. Hence the objection to the word strength here, not only is it incorrect, it gives the false impression that with internal jin, "bigger is automatically better". It's not. With internal jin we're seeking a different type of quality.
Classic examples of activities involving a lot of jin are pool and golf: sometimes you need to use big external force to hit the ball very hard, sometimes you need to use very refined internal force to control the ball. As martial art students we want to have as complete an understanding on use of force (in all its aspects) as possible.
Here's a good intro on jin: http://www.ycgf.org/Articles/TJ_Jin/TJ_Jin1.html
Wuyizidi
Is it really possible to talk about body mechanics? You can only go by your subjective feelings, which do have effects outside of your imagination, but the subject of body mechanics will always be plagued by the fact that basically no one is trained to actually talk about it, including me, and I apparently have a degree in Kinesiology.
Not trying to poop on the thread idea, Chris, but in a way it might exclude all the 'fuzzy' (vs 'techy') stuff that is involved when doing things like meditation, qigong, listening, etc.
[/quote]But perhaps if we can create some sort of jargon that most of us can agree on, that'd be the place to start, before we all start arguing over what is more likely to be a difference in the way we express things in words.
Body mechanics while being a broad term has the advantage that it suggests a physical process. It was n't that long ago that the conversation was purely about qi and how to circulate it.
Fasciae are normally thought of as passive structures that transmit mechanical tension generated by muscular activities or external forces throughout the body. Some research suggest that fasciae might be able to contract independently and thus actively influence muscle dynamics.[6]
The function of muscle fasciae is to reduce friction to minimize the reduction of muscular force. In doing so, fasciae:
1.Provide a sliding and gliding environment for muscles.
2.Suspend organs in their proper place.
3.Transmit movement from muscle to the bones they are attached to.
4.Provide a supportive and movable wrapping for nerves and blood vessels as they pass through and between muscles
I agree with you that it doesn't seem anyone here is qualified to really get into the nitty grippy of what specific structural mechanics are in use in IMA's.
middleway wrote:In the mean time ...
How does Fascia feature in your model of simultaneous Muscle recruitment through conscious input?
Is this Independent of the process your talking about, part of the system or irrelevant to the system?
There has been talk of Fascia here a fair bit. I wonder what level of relevance it holds for people in terms of IMA mechanics?
Regards
Chris
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