by AJG on Fri May 21, 2021 7:06 pm
To be open and honest strange no he didn't, he actually went off for a smoke. The cultural mentality was "I will show you and you need to practice without question then i may show you something else"
While I appreciate my late teacher always reminded us to work hard and focus on a few things (XYLH was enough, no need to do all 3 internals) I didn't always agree with the teaching method.
On the other hand you can have a teacher spending massive amounts of time spewing lots of information the student is not ready for and that conversely adversely impacts their development. Ultimately a student needs to listen to their own body and continuously make small corrections, that's really how you learn.
Now to chicken stepping in XYLH and why its so important. Its the key development exercise and my late teacher would harp on about it all the time. Chicken and dragon, chicken and dragon, chicken and dragon. In other words legs and waist. But he didn't tell us everything, we had to figure it out through feel and when we asked him he would "yes" and then "practice more".
* As was mentioned the toes grip the ground. That helps alignment of the musculature of the legs and the gripping of the toes is done as the weight transfers to the front leg so the weight is not on both legs. Don't use too much tension gripping with the toes.
* In terms of practice the hips face forward and the upper body through the waist turns with the intent of the upper body being 90 degrees to the hips. You need to learn to move the waist, not the hips. I commonly refer to this as not swinging your arse all over the place, or worse the knees. The teacher in the clip is sticking his arse out a bit rather than sinking the pelvis and stretching through the hip flexors. This happens when you haven't practiced this enough. A common thing that happens when people teach more than train themselves.
* Speaking of sticking your arse out this is not ideal, again its about relaxing the movement and sinking so that your pelvis hangs. Tucking is wrong, that's forced and leads to overall stiffness.
* Chicken stepping drives cross body coordination. The grabbing of the front foot coordinates with the opposite hand with the same happening with the knee to elbow and hip to shoulder. This is the basic to develop the 3 external harmonies but in a simple way though chicken stepping.
* Yao san ba is the opposite. You are still doing the same cross body coordination but its an opening movement following by a closing movement. Its the next step.
* In all the above tension must be let go as much as possible so that only the muscles required for the movement are doing the work.
Doing the above in a class environment is a bit silly imo. This is a development exercise best done on one's own so you can focus on all the above carefully. And most of all finding somewhere really long to do it is best. This morning I did 10 lengths of 50m reasonably slowly as I'm just getting back into it. If you feel pain in the front of the knee its because the pelvis isn't hanging, you are sticking your arse out. You should feel it in the quads. When your body alignment is right you can even added weighted vests to make it more difficult.
What i have explained above is an exercise used in XYLH but the coordination is the same in all the arts. Even in Hsing-I Santi you are practicing cross body coordination and you need to relax to feel the connection. If you do circle walking in bagua its the same, in fact I do it using some of the Tien Kan (heavenly stem) exercises I was taught. I don't really know bagua but I enjoyed just walking the circle. Once I was circling walking for half an hour then I suddenly felt this tension drop away in my hips and all of a sudden started walking twice as fast.
No magic, just practice. Practice, think about your practice, practice some more.
I do think some really smart people thought this shit up. It's not always airy fairy shit.