marvin8 wrote:You may have misunderstood him. The OP video is saying not to line up your guard on the centerline, because punches come from different angles. Rasmus says the same thing about wing chun's centerline:
No. I understood what he said. He just doesn’t understand the centerline. His understanding is not only rudimentary, but he gets it wrong. As Wayne said: "It is more than just where you line up your hands." And sorry to say, Rasmus has some good skills, but I prefer to just watch what he is doing and try to listen to what he says as little as possible. I couldn't care less if he agrees with the OP or not.
The importance of centerline in Chinese arts has very little to do with guarding it in the way that is said in the vid. In general, in all types of arts of body movement, you need a center to organize your movements. You need to organize your body, as well as each individual body parts, into its own centers and arrange movement using those points. Any type of professional dancer would understand exactly what I mean. They need to organize their movement to move smoothly and be able to change smoothly through all of the choreography.
In my personal view, in all of CMA, the centerline has at least 3 very important types of use. You use the centerline to:
1. have a central space as starting point and returning point for your movements. Imagine "Guarding the centerline" as like playing tennis, badminton or squash. You always need to go back to the center of the court, whenever you have returned a ball. If you stay too far away from the middle of the field or is forced to stay in the corner, you have no chance to catch up with a ball smashed to the other side of the fields. So in defense, the centerline is the neutral place from where you can always reach through the four gates (and four corners) of the body with ease.
2. align you body in such way so you will have better control over your own movement. When you establish your centerline, through the whole body, you can move easily in all of the four directions.
3. align with your attack so you have whole body support through the alignment of the body. What irritated me the most, not only from a Chinese martial arts perspective, but from all martial arts perspective, was when he pointed on his shoulder tips and said that you punch from the shoulder. It's just ridiculous. No good puncher, regardless art, including western boxing, just use their shoulders to punch with.
In the Chinese arts, you really align the punch with the centerline. You use the whole center of the body to punch with. And the power should, preferably, come from the back through the spine. If you support the impact of a punch using the centerline of the body, the punch will be strong as it has whole body support.
And BTW, in Chinese martial arts, the arm starts from where the scapula connects with the spine, not at the shoulder.