the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

Have you considered putting in some sort of structure testing with a partner to help people understand the concept of "root"?

I-mon wrote:Have you considered putting in some sort of structure testing with a partner to help people understand the concept of "root"?

Well, that's an interesting question. If we unpack it a bit it assumes there is a concept called "Root" which we can agree on and we can test it with "structure testing".

Hmm...One of the things I've noticed and come to understand about martial arts over the years is that a lot of people substitute "structure" instead of creating a proper connection to the ground. These are two different things in my opinion.

What I'm trying to show in week 6 was how to work on developing that connection to the ground - basic jin - from an incoming force without using "structure" or a "frame" to support it. Obviously there needs to be some substance to the body (Qi) for this to work - you can't be just a sloppy bean bag (weak qi!) but the usual reaction is to try to do too much with the structure - creating a frame to support weight, rather than letting it drop to the feet (ground). This is working with gravity, not against it.

Sure, there are lots more exercises that could be done to support this, but it gets too far away from the basic course I'm trying to present.

Good question.

Sounds good man. Language is difficult, we could say "developing peng", or any number of other things, and we'd still struggle to agree on what we were even talking about a lot of the time I'm sure.

edit

I think you're pretty far off the mark Bao, but I don't want to get into a fruitless discussion of what rooting means. It's hard to get a discussion out of that wormhole once it's gone down there, so here's something else - part 7 of the course. Let's get back on track.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7Dw0pDADkA



This week we look at the negative circle, and experiment with different sizes of circle.

Speaking about my own personal experience only... things you appearently don't share.

... Not in the mood to quarrell...

Watched your vid, the new and others again. Your legs and knees are not very stable. ... So appearently you don't understand what I am speaking about ...

And here's the last part. Looking at the back bow, which takes us full circle.

https://youtu.be/LFhv5ZiIRD8