the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

Hello!
Noob question here.

How "tight" do you make your whips?
For example one extreme - foot pushes at the same time as the hand moves forward.
Other extreme - long delays with the body moving a lot.

What do you mean by “make your whips”? Not sure that I understood the question though I suspect you mean body method in general.

Sorry
Yes as a body method.
For example in xingyi, zuan - left foot pushes back, right fist pushes forward.
There is a kind of whip/wave/vomiting feeling starting from the feet and ending in the fist.

In Xingyi, shoulder - hip, elbow - knee, Fist - hand are coordinated together without any delay between them.

Personally, I’ve never liked the “whip” analogy. In my view, everything should be coordinated together in one movement: When striking for example, then the Dantian, foot, kua, spine, should all support the fist together in one single movement on impact, imo. But there are also methods where one part can drive the rest of the body which follows up on impact. The fist can also seemingly start to move by itself and the body place itself in a supportive posture and angle just upon impact. So there are different philosophies. Whatever you can make work for you is ok.

Shiny, shiny, boots of leather,

Thank you for the very good points.

GrahamB the two disciplines have too many points in common )

I like how you called it a vomiting feeling.

It very much depends on what aspects of single whip you are training
Single whip contains ward off,roll back press,withdraw and push
Whereas grasp sparrows tail works on push and pull type energy
Single whip works on developing flapping type energy